Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Meyer.
Daniel, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
People always say, “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” But when a person loves being a classroom teacher, the actual lesson becomes clear… “You better learn to love finance or management consulting instead.” I left teaching in search of greater financial security and frustrated by the proliferation of education “reformy” privatization and high-stakes testing. I still felt powerless, alone. But ten years removed from the formal classroom, I still identify as a teacher more than anything else. Whatever financial security and professional success I was able to achieve, I was never able to find the same sense of purpose, passion, and personal meaning than I did when I was working with students. I still felt powerless, alone.
So I started Under A Tree in my spare time to reconnect with my core values and also as a way to retain the financial benefits of my day job (I mean, come on, six inches of extra legroom on a plane is not trivial!) without feeling like such a damn fraud or sellout. What started as a hobby at first developed into my second full-time job, and two years ago, I decided to quit my corporate job and focus on Under A Tree full-time. I haven’t looked back.
Has it been a smooth road?
I quit drinking almost eight years ago, and that fundamentally altered the course of my life. It’s probably the only reason I still have a life at all. Before that, I felt passionate about enacting social change but also felt angry and alone, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to translate my hope for a better world into an actionable blueprint for achieving that vision. Drinking allowed me to disconnect, withdraw, and anesthetize. With that option no longer available, I needed an outlet–a healthy and sustainable one–for dealing with the world as it is without compromising the promise of what it might yet become.
My work became the source of that sustenance and purpose, fueling me in times where I’d previously been exhausted and reinvigorating me at moments where I would have preferred to retreat into the bottle. The work I was doing with others mirrored the work I needed to do in my own life: figuring out how to live both ethically and pragmatically, authentic to my convictions but still amenable to compromise, open to seeking personal happiness but not ignorant to the pain of others, knowing when I needed to kick myself in the butt for not doing more and when I needed to forgive myself for doing all that I could with whatever I had.
Please tell us about your organization.
Under a Tree, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded upon the notion that all people—not just elected officials or billionaire tech CEOs—are capable of inspiring and leading profound social and political change. Just as Socrates sat with Plato under a tree in Ancient Greece examining the characteristics of the “good life,” we believe that today’s 21st-century global citizens also require guidance and support when it comes to achieving both personal fulfillment and professional success without abandoning the values and ideals needed to safeguard a better world.
To that end, we design and implement dynamic learning experiences for students, community leaders, and business professionals interested in leading lives of significance. Our cornerstone offering is a 38-week and 200-hour intensive leadership program that provides high school civic leaders and social activists with the strategies and tools needed to explore their convictions and aspirations, weigh the needs of others, and translate their core values into a personalized roadmap for practicing, achieving and sustaining a life of self-actualization and lasting social impact.
The program is available both in-person and online and allows students from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints to engage in meaningful dialogue about major social problems and work together to design and implement solutions to those issues in their local communities. To our knowledge, there is no other civic leadership program that comes close to providing as robust and rigorous of an apprenticeship in ethical leadership, participatory citizenship, and social change organizing.
As of June 2020, we will have graduated 125 students from our program and disbursed $45,000.00 in college scholarship money to support their future development. Our graduates have gone on to elite universities such as Harvard University, Yale University, West Point Military Academy, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
When we opened our doors in 2015, it wasn’t very easy to explain what we do and why it’s so essential. We were clinging to an anachronistic model, a belief that young people would be willing–just as we were– to keep quiet and wait for their turns to lead. We condescended to them, referring to them as “future leaders” when the truth was that they were already hungry and ready to lead in the here and now, if only we supported them and then got out of their way.
Five years later, Emma Gonzalez and Greta Thunberg are household names, champions of youth-driven social change leadership. At the same time, most of us as adults can’t do more than engage in social media meme reposting. In this current political climate, I find that people immediately understand why our work is so needed and the adults are not only reaching out to share how much they wish they had a program like this available to them when they were younger but how much they want to be a part of this program now.
The “Leadership Industrial Complex” has become bloated and ineffectual. Billions of dollars are spent to develop transformational leaders. But the problems we face as a society are not a result of a dearth of effective leadership, but a failure of active citizenship. People are tired, indeed, of waiting around for diva tech CEOs and Forbes billionaires to fix our world. And we’re finally starting to awaken to the fact that we are the ones–mostly nameless and faceless but far more powerful– that we’ve been waiting for all along.
Contact Info:
- Address: 3707 SW 165th Ave
- Website: https://www.underatree.org/
- Phone: (312) 576-0678
- Email: daniel@underatree.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/underatreefund/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/underatreefund/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/underatreefund/
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmof_rw_8viTeg3uXcDNoBKBgkIE4ciGx
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