Dr. Donnette P. Green
Here’s the thing about life — it keeps asking us to grow — to let one version of ourselves come to an end so a truer one can begin. Endings and beginnings are not opposites; they are partners. And one week ago, standing in the middle of Newark Pride, I watched that truth move through a crowd of thousands and land, quietly, in my own chest.
For some time now, I have had the honor of walking alongside the board of Newark Pride as their leadership-development partner. I have sat with them, coached them, challenged them, and — most of all — watched them grow. Not grow the way a résumé grows, but the way a person grows: through emotional intelligence, through the slow and brave work of understanding themselves before they try to lead anyone else.
To watch leaders come into their own is one of the great privileges of my life.
One week ago, I got to watch it out loud.
A Movement, Not Just a Festival
Because Newark Pride is not simply a festival. It is a movement — one born, in part, from grief. Just steps from where we gathered, at the corner of Broad and Market Street, is the ground where fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn was killed in 2003 for the simple, sacred act of saying who she was. A Black teenager, a young lesbian, waiting for a bus home with her friends, who refused to be anyone but herself. Her death became a turning point — the moment Newark’s queer community turned mourning into mobilization. To stand at Broad and Market today is to stand on holy, hard-won ground. Newark Pride carries her name forward, commemorating her life and making a promise with every gathering: that no young person should ever again have to choose between their truth and their safety. The theme said everything: Our Bodies, Our Stories, Our Power. Three phrases that read like a celebration — and, if you listen closely, like a leadership curriculum.
Our Bodies
To lead well, you first have to be willing to be seen. Our bodies are where we show up, where we carry our history and our courage at the same time. Pride is a radical act of presence — a room full of people refusing to shrink. That is self-awareness in its most human form: knowing who you are, taking up your rightful space, and letting yourself be fully here. You cannot lead from hiding. Leadership begins the moment you decide to stop apologizing for existing.
Our Stories
Every person in that crowd was carrying a story — some joyful, some hard-won, many both. Emotional intelligence starts there, with the willingness to own your narrative instead of being run by it. The leaders I work with are learning that their stories are not liabilities to manage but sources of power to steward. When you understand your own story, you stop bleeding it onto other people and start leading from it on purpose. That is the difference between a wound and a well.
Our Power
And then there is power — the word people are most afraid to claim. But power, rightly held, is simply influence in service of dignity. Watching the Newark Pride board step into their leadership that day, I saw exactly what I hope for in every room I enter: people using their voice not to be the loudest, but to make sure someone else finally feels safe to speak. That is the highest form of emotional influence. It leaves people better than it found them.
Pride is a declaration that everyone in the room is somebody — worthy of being seen, worthy of being safe, worthy of taking up space.
This is the throughline of everything I teach through SEI MORE™: that impact begins on the inside. Before we can protect anyone else’s dignity, we have to understand and honor our own. Before we can lead a movement, we have to meet ourselves. What Newark Pride models on a public stage is the very same work I get to guide in private rooms — the work of becoming someone whole enough to hold power gently.
And then life did the thing it does — it closed a circle I did not know was still open. Among the crowd was a young man, now in his thirties, whom I had worked with twenty years ago, in an earlier chapter of my career. He found me, looked me in the eye, and told me that I had saved his life. Twenty years, and I had no idea. We so rarely get to see where our work lands; most of the seeds we plant, we never watch grow. But that day, one of them walked up to me — fully grown, still here, thriving — and said thank you. It brought tears to my eyes, and I let them come. I felt it, all of it, in the deepest part of me. That is the thing about the work we do quietly:it outlives the moment. It keeps living inside someone long after we have moved on to the next chapter. And feeling that fully — letting it move me — is not a break from the work. It is the work. It is part of who I am.
I left that day changed, the way the best classrooms change you. I came to support the leaders I serve, and I left having been taught by them. That is the thing about life — it never stops offering us the chance to become. The endings we fear are so often the doorways we needed. And when a community gathers to say, without flinching, we are here, we are whole, and we are somebody, it does not only celebrate. It teaches. It heals. It leads. Our bodies. Our stories. Our power. May we each have the courage to claim all three — and the wisdom to help someone else claim theirs.
