The Leadership Institute (LI), based in Arlington, Virginia, celebrates its 45th anniversary this month. What began as a passion birthed in part-time work has morphed into the premier practical training ground where conservative leaders are made.
LI has trained, as of mid-May, over 306,200 conservative activists, leaders, and students.
The Leadership Institute was founded by Morton Blackwell in 1979, at the end of a decade that saw the birth of many conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Focus on the Family, Eagle Forum, and the Moral Majority.
Part of the vision of the Leadership Institute was Morton Blackwell not wishing to build an empire by making a name for himself but instead to build a movement, and it is from there that the Leadership Institute makes such a large impact.
One of the strengths of the Leadership Institute is in providing a dual-track approach to conservative victories, seen in the long term and the short term.
The first track leads to the long-term victories that come with training conservatives for careers that will be decades such as Capitol Hill staff training, journalism, speechwriting, foreign service, civil service, and other vocations.
Leadership Institute schools also teach campaign management and candidate training, as well as school board advocacy and elections, providing a more immediate impact than career training but still part of a larger grassroots movement that bears fruit over the course of decades. Further, the Leadership Institute also not only trains its activists for work but helps them find jobs through www.conservativejobs.com.
Graduates of the Leadership Institute include television personalities Lawrence Jones, Mollie Hemingway, Kat Timpf, and Ainsley Earhardt as well as conservative Reps. Jim Jordan and Byron Donalds. Solid conservative activists Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, Mark Mix of National Right to Work, and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform also are LI alumni.
The second track of the Leadership Institute is seen through the nearly instantaneous victories brought about through Campus Reform and other campus programs.
Campus Reform is a project of the Leadership Institute with student correspondents in an ever-increasing number of college campuses — places of higher education that, due to the nature of much of current American academia, are largely leftist and antisemitic in nature. Campus Reform exposes racial, religious, political, and other forms of bigotry that professors are currently teaching America's youth.
The exposed professors are often disciplined for the indoctrination and bigotry, up to being fired from both private and public campuses. Some donors to these academic institutions have withheld funding after seeing what their alma maters have become.
In a twist of fate, some alumni of the exposed campuses have even switched their donations from their former institutions to the Leadership Institute.
Leadership Institute's campus network numbers over 2,300 conservative campus newspapers and groups. The long-term victories are important as are the short-term gains that, while contributing to the long-term, almost immediately show supporters that their time and treasure are making a tangible difference.
The Leadership Institute has long had an interest in America's youth with founder Morton Blackwell heading up the successful Reagan national youth effort in 1980; and the LI Youth Leadership School is, in effect, the flagship school of the Leadership Institute.
Blackwell cared so much about the vision of LI and its commitment to training the next generation of conservatives that he would, instead of taking vacation, often use his personal time off as a staffer during the first term of the Reagan White House to continue the Youth Leadership Schools that were the foundation of the Leadership Institute.
Today LI continues to impact the youth of America through Campus Reform and through school board training, where parents and other interested parties learn how to combat the leftist ideology that has overtaken much of America's academy at even the grade-school level.
Swimming star and conservative activist Riley Gaines picked LI to be the home for the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute, from where she travels to dozens of campuses to highlight the radical leftist agenda that is attacking young ladies, while the Center facilitates getting young people to step up and take LI training to become leaders.
Making the Institute about a movement and not a person, coupled with the dual track approach to victory, as well as solid communications with its base of supporters, have boded extremely well for the Institute. Other organizations within the broader conservative movement may well continue to take note of why the Leadership Institute not only has done so well but continues to grow as it celebrates its 45th birthday.
*Views expressed in this article are those of the author and not any government agency.
Larry Provost has written for Townhall, Fox News, The Baltic Times and InFocus (Jewish Policy Center) and has appeared on several television outlets, including "FOX News @Night with Shannon Bream." He holds degrees from several colleges, and is a veteran of the World Trade Center search and rescue, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He and his wife are adoptive parents. Read more Larry Provost reports — Here.