The Rooms Where No One Is Keeping Score

At our two most recent commencements, fellows from Classes 53 and 54 did something that takes real courage: they stood before their families, our board, and the broader alumni community and publicly declared, through a new capstone we call the Impact Portfolio, not just what they’ve learned but where and how they intend to lead going forward. Watching those presentations, I kept encountering something that struck me as quietly profound. These weren’t leaders solely articulating plans to advance agriculture — they were describing lives of deliberate engagement, in their water districts, their school boards, their local service organizations, their county fairs. Taken together, their intentions painted a picture of people who have come to understand, perhaps instinctively, that democracy is not merely an event that happens every couple of years in a voting booth. It is, at its best, a way of life. That phrase belongs to the philosopher John Dewey, and I think it is one of the most important ideas we can offer the leaders we develop through this program.

More Than a System of Government

Dewey’s insight was deceptively simple: democracy, at its best, is not merely a political mechanism. It is a specific form of community life, one built on the daily habits of participation, shared decision-making, and genuine investment in the people around us. For Dewey, democracy called upon every person to help build communities where individuals have the necessary opportunities and resources to realize their potential by participating in political, social, and cultural life (Peters & Jandrić, 2017). That’s not a description of Election Day. That’s a description of every day. This distinction matters enormously for anyone in a leadership role, and especially for those of us connected to agriculture, where our busy lives foster the temptation is to limit civic energy to the arenas that most directly affect our operations: commodity policy, water rights, estate planning law. Certainly, those things matter deeply, but Dewey would push us further. He’d ask: what are you doing in the spaces that don’t obviously benefit you? Where are you showing up simply because your community needs you there?

There is also a practical answer to that question, and it’s one we would do well to take seriously. As we know, the issues that matter most to agriculture, land use, water allocation, rural infrastructure, and food policy are rarely decided solely by the people who understand them best. They are decided by school board members, city council representatives, county supervisors, zoning commissioners, and state legislators whose primary constituents may live nowhere near a farm. If agriculture wants its voice to rise above the fray when it counts, it has to be present in the rooms where trust is built long before any vote is taken. We don’t gain influence on the issues we care about by showing up only for them. Each of us can earn it by being a known and trusted presence in our communities, and that happens in the third place, in the volunteer hours, in the unglamorous committee work that has nothing to do with agriculture at all.

The Third Place and the Trust It Builds

Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who spent much of his career studying community cohesion, gave us a concept that maps remarkably well onto Dewey’s vision. He called it the third place: the social setting that is neither home nor work, where people gather informally, voluntarily, and across the lines that usually separate them (Oldenburg, 1989). The grange hall. The diner on Main Street. The volunteer fire station. The local library board. The church committee that organizes the county food drive. Oldenburg argued that these spaces are not peripheral to civic life. They are civic life. Third places generate social capital by bringing together people with diverse skills and interests who come to know and trust one another, and that trust has measurable effects on community economic health and civic vitality (Oldenburg, 1989). That trust, built incrementally and informally, is the connective tissue of a functioning community. And here is the crucial part: it grows most reliably in activities that carry no obvious personal return.

Research on community trust-building reinforces this. Leaders who show up not just when their interests are on the line, but who meet people where they are, engage in activities alongside them, and make themselves genuinely accessible, build a qualitatively different kind of trust than those whose participation is transactional (Landers et al., 2023). There is something about showing up without an agenda that signals to a community: I am here because I care about this place, not because I need something from it.

What Leadership Theory Tells Us

Leadership scholars have a name for this orientation. James MacGregor Burns, in his foundational work on transformational leadership, described it as moving beyond self-interest toward collective purpose, characterizing it as leaders and followers raising one another to higher levels of morality and motivation beyond self-interest to serve collective interests (Burns, 1978). Robert Greenleaf, who gave us servant leadership theory, framed it differently but pointed the same direction: the leader who serves first, who subordinates the question of personal gain to the question of community need, earns a form of influence that no title or position can manufacture (Greenleaf, 1977).

What is striking is how well this framework describes the agricultural leaders I know at their best. The farmer who chairs the school board though he has no children in the district. The rancher who shows up to city council meetings about trails and parks. The grower who volunteers at the food pantry during the off-season. These are not people who have stopped caring about their operations. They are people who have understood, perhaps intuitively, what Dewey argued philosophically: that the strength of the community in which you live is inseparable from the strength of the life you’re trying to build within it.

What Our Fellows Are Teaching Us

Watching those Impact Portfolio presentations was, for me, one of those quietly hopeful moments in this work. Here were leaders who had spent 17 rigorous months wrestling with what leadership actually means, and what they kept arriving at, again and again, was a version of the same insight: influence expands when it is not hoarded, community grows when you invest in it beyond your immediate needs, and democracy, the real kind, is practiced not in grand gestures but in the accumulation of ordinary, generous acts of participation.

Class 55, who will present their own Impact Portfolios in February, arrived at similar conclusions by a somewhat more direct route. They read Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems before their national seminar, which, to put it charitably, is not a breezy afternoon read. But something happens in the debrief that tends to follow that kind of rigorous engagement: the fog lifts, and what seemed dense and abstract on the page becomes almost self-evident in conversation. Dewey’s core argument, that democracy is not a structure imposed from above but a way of living together built through shared experience and genuine participation in common life (Dewey, 1927), stops feeling like political philosophy and starts feeling like a description of something these fellows have always felt but perhaps weren’t able to name. That a text written nearly a century ago can land that way in a room full of working agricultural leaders is, perhaps, its own kind of testimony to how durable these ideas are.

It is also testimony to what is at stake when we let them erode. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam spent decades documenting precisely that erosion, showing that as Americans withdrew from civic associations, the bowling leagues, the PTA meetings, the Rotary clubs, they didn’t just become lonelier. They became less trusting of their neighbors, less engaged in public life, and less capable of the collective problem-solving that strong communities require (Putnam, 2000). The inverse holds as well: where civic participation remains robust, so does trust, economic vitality, and democratic health. That’s not a partisan observation. It is a description of what communities have always needed to function, and what they need now.

An Invitation

So here is what I’d offer to anyone who has been shaped by, or is simply interested in, the kind of leadership we strive to develop in this program: look at your life and ask where you are showing up beyond the boundaries of your most obvious interests. For our alumni, that question is already baked into your training. For those newer to this work, it is worth sitting with seriously, because the answer has real consequences. Agriculture’s ability to be heard on the issues that matter most, water, land, policy, and the future of rural communities, depends not just on the strength of our arguments but on the depth of our relationships. Those relationships are built over time, in the third place, through the kind of presence that has nothing to do with what we need and everything to do with who we are willing to be for others. That is what earns a seat at the table when the decisions that shape our industry are being made. That is what Dewey meant. And it is what this program’s alumni have been practicing, in communities across this state, for decades. Classes 53, 54, and 55 are the latest proof of that, and watching them carry it forward gives me genuine hope for the communities and the industry they will shape.

The water board meeting. The 4-H committee. The local hospital foundation. The planning commission. The volunteer fire department. These are not distractions from agricultural leadership. They are the arena where agricultural leadership finds its broadest voice and deepest reach. Democracy, as Dewey understood it, is not something that happens to you. It is something you practice, daily, locally, and often in rooms where no one is keeping score.

That, I think, is worth showing up for.

References

Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. Harper & Row.

Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. Henry Holt and Company.

Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Paulist Press.

Landers, A., Omobude, U., Tahir-Thompson, T. P., Collins-Anderson, J. C., Hernandez, C. A., Fasimpaur, J., Liu, F., Dixon, K. A., Strayhorn, C. E., & Pavlicova, M. (2023). Building trust: Leadership reflections on community empowerment and engagement in a large urban initiative. BMC Public Health, 23(1), Article 1190. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-15860-z

Oldenburg, R. (1989). The great good place: Cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. Paragon House.

Peters, M. A., & Jandrić, P. (2017). Dewey’s democracy and education in the age of digital reason: The global, practical and theoretical challenges of education for sustainable development. Policy Futures in Education, 15(7), 847–868. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210317706376

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster.