A group of community leaders including former Chief of Public Safety Mike Butler and his wife Carol put together a curriculum to teach individuals how to be better statesmen.
Over the course of two years nearly 30 Longmont leaders have gathered in the Butlers’ home to discuss what it means to be a statesperson. Together they created the School of Statesmanship Stewardship & Service, or SOSSAS.
They have defined it as someone who can harmonize contrasting perspectives, has an approach to communication that appeals to different audiences, can transcend the rhetoric, can view the world through a lens of goodness and believes that “life-giving ideals of community are spawned by love, service and belonging,” according to the group's website.
The school is broken into four modules with a total of 45 courses. The courses can be taken individually or adapted to the organization's goals.
“At the end of it all, they will be able to be the leader in the most beautiful sense that we are all kind of looking for in leadership,” Carol Butler said.
The SOSSAS group envisions creating a standard model in Longmont that can be replicated around the world in order to “activate the potential of the individual to create good in their world,” according to the Butlers.
The courses are designed to for people who desire to be leaders in their communities, careers or even those running for political office. For example, a person looking to enact a small change in their neighborhood would be able to use these skills to make it happen just as well as someone who is considering running for President of the United States.
This curriculum is unique, according to Mike Butler who researched statesmen schools across the country, because it does not focus on any ideology.
“SOSSAS is designed to give people a sense of what is possible,” Mike Butler said. “What we would like to see our statespeople do is figure out how to harmonize those various perspectives to create a different perspective or another perspective that takes into account that there are other viewpoints.”
In the next few weeks, SOSSAS will teach five short courses to the Longmont Chamber Student Network through Front Range Community College. SOSSAS is also teaming up with the St. Vrain School District at the Innovation Center where it will teach these courses to the public. The dates for these offerings are expected to be finalized in the coming weeks.
Mike Butler said that SOSSAS will also be working on a national level with police organizations to teach these courses to mayors, city managers and police chiefs across the nation. The goal for this project is to teach how we can shift the nature of police culture in the U.S.
“We are trying to develop skill sets and introduce characteristics, attributes and qualities of what we think these statespeople can be in a community if they are an elected official or in a business if they are a CEO … that there is a new way to be able to see what you can do differently with your community and/or your business,” Mike Butler said.
