Leadership Lafayette marks 2021 graduation
Miller Among Team Members Supporting Oxford Community Market
When the 2020 Leadership Lafayette program kicked off last January, participants expected to dig into the Oxford community, meet with leaders from a variety of backgrounds and celebrate their graduation that August.
The COVID-19 pandemic soon put a pause on in-person meetings and pushed the calendar back, but—over a year later—the program’s latest cohort just celebrated a successful year at their graduation last month.
Started by the Oxford Chamber of Commerce in 1989, Leadership Lafayette is a program focused on identifying and training emerging leaders through education, networking and community service.
The latest class of the Oxford-Lafayette County Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Lafayette program stared in early 2020 and expected to finish that August. After the pandemic pushed back their plans, the group completed their work in 2021 and recently celebrated their graduation. Photo by Joey Brent
The chamber’s senior vice president, Pam Swain, said young professionals learn how to invest back into their community and get the chance to meet a variety of people throughout Oxford.
“We train leaders within our community with better leadership skills and teach them about our community,” Swain said. “It takes our professionals into different facets of our community that they don’t get into during their day-to-day work.”
ONE OF THIS YEAR’S GRADUATES WAS RED WINDOW COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGIST CAITLYN MILLER.
As a Leadership Lafayette participant, Miller was able to gain new perspective about Oxford, work with others to support the community and refine her capabilities as a leader in and out of the office.
“Caitlyn is an extraordinary leader and we were lucky to have her join our 2020 program and come back in 2021,” said Swain. “We are grateful that she was able to share her expertise and grow her leadership skills through the Leadership Lafayette program.”
Red Windows Communications strategist Caitlyn Miller listens to a presentation as part of Leadership Lafayette.
Miller said that when she first started Leadership Lafayette, she hoped she would be able to connect with Oxford and its people in a different way than she did in her time as a student at the University of Mississippi.
“Working at Red Window for almost two years in a professional context coupled with Leadership Lafayette gave me a different perspective,” she said. “I have a more well-rounded view of Oxford now—a better, bigger picture of who we are and where we’re going. I see how the different parts that I knew about before are pushing everything forward.”
The program also exposed Miller to some of the challenges that Oxford faces, including the lack of affordable housing and food insecurity.
For Miller in particular, learning about the housing crisis in Oxford and connecting with people working to solve the problem led her to become the chair of marketing and communications for LOU-HOME, Inc., a nonprofit working to advance affordable housing opportunities.
“Knowing the areas where we need to improve and how you can improve them is helpful,” Miller said. “It makes the challenges seem a little bit less daunting and makes it feel more manageable.”
As part of the Leadership Lafayette experience, participants are organized into groups and tasked with working on projects supporting community partners. Miller’s group worked with the Oxford Community Market (OXCM). Other members of Miller’s team included Emily Echols of the McLean Institute, David Rogers of mTrade, Kim Mathis of FNB Oxford and Drew Mauldin of Mayo Mallette.
When they first met with Betsy Chapman, the market’s director, in February 2020, the group hoped to organize a large-scale, in-person fundraising event. However, the emerging COVID-19 pandemic meant such an event would be unsafe. The project came to a halt until the late spring of 2021.
Miller’s group reconvened and adapted, moving their fundraising efforts to a virtual auction platform. They worked together to contact sponsors for items to auction and raffle, send out a press release, create a social media campaign and facilitate the online fundraiser. Their efforts raised about $1,200 over just three months, all of which went to sustain the day-to-day operating cost of the farmer’s market.
In addition to Miller’s team’s work with the Community Market, one team worked with F.R.E.S.H., a Junior Auxiliary of Oxford program dedicated to collecting and distributing donations of hygiene items and clothing for students in Oxford schools. Another group supported the Lafayette Oxford Foundation for Tomorrow by assisting with marketing and fundraising efforts for their Night for Nonprofits event in August.
The hands-on service projects aren’t the only way that Leadership Lafayette educates its cohort and connects them to the community.
In a typical year, participants would have ample opportunity to visit different places in Oxford and tour various businesses and organizations. This year, after the months-long hiatus, these educational opportunities were lecture-style sessions organized to keep safety in mind. For example, rather than visiting Wildrose Kennels, reps from the company joined a meeting with one of their carefully trained gun dogs.
Swain said that—despite all the challenges—the latest class of Leadership Lafayette graduates had a unique and worthwhile experience.
“I think that, for this particular group, they created a bond that’s really different. They were there when things were normal, then got shook up,” Swain said. “They’re community leaders that saw something major happening in our community and then came back together to reassess the community’s needs.”
