I lived in San Diego from 2017 to 2021. Then a job at Johns Hopkins University took me to Baltimore, and later a role at NIH took me to Washington, and a few years after that, I got to come back. I thought it would feel like coming home right away. Instead it felt like moving to a city I used to know. My old routines were gone, my network had scattered, and I had to learn how to belong here all over again.
LEAD San Diego is what made that click. By the end of the program, I’d put it this way: it was my homecoming. It helped me move from living in San Diego to truly belonging here, and it shaped me as a leader by reminding me that you cannot fully serve a place until you’re rooted enough to know it.
I didn’t expect a leadership program to be the thing that did that. I expected content: sessions on civic systems, maybe a few useful contacts. What I got instead was so much better. A cohort of people I barely knew who, week after week on a shared project, became people I genuinely looked forward to seeing. And then a project that pulled the relationship somewhere a networking event never could have taken it.
My Leadership Action Team, the service learning component of the program, was matched with MANA de San Diego, a nearly 40-year-old organization that supports Latinas through mentorship, leadership development and scholarships, with roughly 3,000 members and supporters across the region. Our team was a wonderfully unlikely mix: a bakery owner, a bank vice president, a hospital philanthropy officer, a hotel sales director, a few others and me.
None of us worked in the same industry, and while we’d all been in the same cohort, I didn’t really get to know any of them until we started working together on this project. It was, honestly, one of the more fun rooms I’ve been in.
We split into three tracks: one on revenue systems and the technology behind how MANA collects and manages money, one on rebuilding the membership model itself, and one on marketing and community partnerships. What struck me was how much sharper the diagnosis got the moment people who don’t work in the nonprofit sector were in the room. A banker looks at a payment system differently than a program officer does.
None of us were experts in MANA’s mission, and that turned out to be exactly the point. We asked the basic questions a longtime insider stops thinking to ask, and MANA’s staff, generous with their time throughout, had answers that reframed the problem more than once.
That’s my favorite thing about LEAD San Diego. It isn’t just a leadership curriculum. It’s a structured, joyful way of putting down roots in a city, by handing you a real problem and real people who are counting on you to help solve it. You can’t stay a stranger to a place once you’ve sat across the table from its nonprofits, genuinely trying to help them thrive.
I’m a Teach For America alum. I taught in Los Angeles years ago, long before any of this, and I now chair the San Diego committee for TFA’s Southern California advisory board as the organization expands into the city. LEAD San Diego gave me a wonderful, concrete way to get involved again in the city I’d just moved back to, at a moment when I genuinely needed it.
This spring, I got to sit on the other side of the table, interviewing candidates for next year’s LEAD cohort. It’s a strange, good feeling, being trusted to help find the next round of people who need exactly what I needed last year.
If you’ve moved back to a place, or moved to a new one, and you’re still waiting to feel like you belong there, my honest advice is this: don’t wait for it to happen on its own, go find it. Somewhere, a program like Impact, offered by LEAD San Diego, is trying to match people like you with organizations that need exactly what you have to offer. The belonging comes from doing the work together.
I’ve come to think that’s what actually makes a city a city, the relationships you build inside it. Without those, it’s just buildings and concrete.
Charles Lu is a nonprofit board leader based in San Diego. He is a graduate of LEAD San Diego and chairs the San Diego committee for Teach For America Southern California‘s advisory board.
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