Honesty. Integrity. Humility. Perseverance. Empathy.
Nineteen middle school students from across Illinois spent June 21-26 in Springfield immersed in Abraham Lincoln’s five pillars of leadership as part of the LEAD: Spirit of Lincoln Youth Leadership Academy. Learning from Lincoln scholars and reenactors, mentors and each other – and through visits to historic Lincoln sites – the students developed individual plans outlining how they could lead in their own schools and communities.
The Looking for Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area has hosted LEAD since 2016. This year, the program partnered with the Center for Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, which collaborated on the curriculum and provided housing, and the Lincoln Academy of Illinois, which invited its past Lincoln Laureate honorees to serve as mentors to the students.
“We recruit seventh to ninth grade youth to spend a week with us on the UIS campus to learn about personal leadership through the lens of Lincoln as a leader,” said Sarah Watson, CEO of Looking for Lincoln. “We recruit through 4-H and mentoring groups like Frontiers International to invite youth (we call them emerging leaders) who might not otherwise get a leadership academy opportunity. Each emerging leader goes home with their own leadership plan.”
The emerging leaders were divided into small groups, with two mentors working with each group. Throughout the week as they visited historic sites in and around Springfield, they were asked to jot down in their journals evidence of the five pillars of leadership.
LEAD participant Rosalee Davis of Springfield, who will enter the ninth grade at Southeast High School this fall, recognized honesty and perseverance in several Lincoln stories.
“I’ve seen a lot of honesty from Abraham Lincoln, like when he returned a book he had borrowed from a farmer and worked off his debt for ruining the book, and perseverance with him not giving up on the Emancipation Proclamation,” she said. Davis was elected student council president at her school and plans to continue to “help out within my school community.”
Greta Dickison, a rising eighth-grader at Carlinville Middle School, said she learned about the importance of communication and perseverance in leadership. “When Lincoln started out, his family was pretty poor,” she said. “He taught himself the ABCs and to read by age 9, and he just kept pushing. He failed at six jobs, but he eventually made it to be the president of the U.S.”
Dickison said when she is old enough, she would like to become president of her 4-H club and continue to serve her community.
Eight of the 10 mentors in this year’s LEAD program were past Lincoln Laureates. Claire Manning, chair of the Next Generation Leadership Committee that oversees the Lincoln Laureate program, said that each year the program recognizes college-age leaders in the university systems of Illinois.
“We have been looking recently for other opportunities for them in terms of leadership in the style of Abraham Lincoln, so the partnership with the LEAD program was a good marriage,” Manning said.
Jordan Werner of Huntley is a past Lincoln Laureate who served as a LEAD mentor this year. A 2025 graduate of Benedictine University in Lisle, she currently is pursuing a doctorate in physics at the University of California, Berkely. She said she loved the opportunity to learn from the LEAD students.
“I think of myself at 13 or 14 years old, and I’m just blown away with how mature and introspective, how confident and self-assured they are, and how willing they are to jump in with a bunch of people they don’t know and learn,” Werner said.
A lifelong Illinois resident, Werner said she herself learned a lot about Lincoln through the program.
“I’ve never come to Springfield and done the Lincoln home or the Capitol, so I’ve loved being able to learn from Lincoln’s hometown and all of the historical sites,” she said.
Another past Lincoln Laureate, Daniel McLaurin of Chicago is a graduate of the University of St. Francis in Joliet and now is a school social worker. He said mentoring the LEAD students was a great opportunity to gain youth leadership experience.
“I love guiding and having the opportunity to raise up future leaders,” he said. “At the adolescent age, a big conflict is identity versus role confusion, and they battle constantly feeling superior and inferior. But for them to navigate in those five pillars – empathy, integrity, perseverance, humility and honesty – amongst each other while also learning from the mentors is a huge blessing.”
The partnership between Looking for Lincoln and UIS has been in the planning stages for the past two years, according to Jake Friefeld, director of the UIS Center for Lincoln Studies.
“Our mission at the Center is to share and study the legacy of Lincoln’s life, his era and his legacy,” Friefeld said. “We really wanted to get into youth programming, and I think LEAD is going to be a really good program for us and Looking for Lincoln for years to come.”
And what can the students learn from Lincoln that’s relevant to them in today’s world?
“We’re living in Lincoln’s world; he developed the American democracy, a more pluralistic democracy than had existed before,” Friefeld said. “We try to reach the kids through his ideals, such as empathy. It’s important to be able to step into someone else’s experience and try to understand, which Lincoln showed time and time again during his presidency.”
Pat Cain is in his first year as director of LEAD, having worked for several years with Looking for Lincoln on various projects. He serves as archives manager for the Champaign County Historical Archives and is a former history teacher at Riverton High School. Cain said the partnerships LEAD has formed has bolstered the program’s curriculum.
“The Center for Lincoln Studies offers access to top-tier Lincoln scholars and resources while ensuring the program’s long-term sustainability,” he said. “We are also excited to partner with the Lincoln Academy. Their Lincoln Laureates are top young scholars from around the state who serve as mentors and role models for our emerging leaders throughout the week.”
Watson said the group hopes to make the LEAD curriculum available to other groups around state and country, so they can engage emerging leaders in their own areas. She emphasized that the program is focused on leadership skills development – not on placing Lincoln on a pedestal.
“We’re not saying he was this incredible leader, and everyone should follow him,” she said. “We’re saying, here were his pillars of leadership, those foundations he used as a leader, and we ask the students to think about what they are they going to do to become a leader, what’s that first step for them. We talk about all aspects of leadership, the good parts and how hard it is.
“So it’s not civics and government we’re talking about; it’s personal leadership.” ο
This article appears in Parent Fall 2026.
