Nashville; Boston (June 10, 2024) Ten corporate, academic, government, and nonprofit leaders from Middle Tennessee have been chosen by Global Action Platform for a Harvard Business School leadership program convening representatives from fourteen American cities who are working across sectors to help their communities prosper.

Dr. Scott T. Massey, Chairman and CEO, Global Action Platform, and Mitch Weiss, Co-Director of the Young American Leaders Program and Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurial Management, Harvard Business School announced the 2024 Class of Nashville Young American Leaders today at an Alumni Leadership Reception and 2024 class induction held at Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown.  

Global Action Platform is the local strategic partner of the Harvard Business School Young American Leaders Program for Nashville and the regional affiliate of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School.

The ten Nashville leaders were selected to be a task force to build a biomedical cluster strategy for the region, using Michael Porter’s cluster and competitiveness models developed at HBS.  The leaders are

YALP 2024 Class

Isaac  Addae    

Manager of Entrepreneurship & Economic Development

Office of  the Mayor, Metropolitan Government of Nashville & Davidson County

Corinne  Bergeron

CEO    

The Frist  Foundation

Lindsey  Cox

CEO

LaunchTN

Laurel  Graefe

Regional  Executive & Senior Officer

Nashville  Branch, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Donna  Ingles

Director  of Operations, Technology transfer and Commercialization

Vanderbilt  University

Shanna  Jackson

President

Nashville  Community State College

Lindsey  Paola

COO

Nashville Soccer Club

Jim  Stefansic

Senior  Director of Corporate Development

 Cumberland  Emerging Technologies

Adam  Sansiveri

Senior  Managing Director

Alliance  Bernstein

Robert  Turner

Director  of Technology Transfer and Innovation

Tennessee  State University

The Young American Leaders Program grows out of a deep concern and a great hope shared by Global Action Platform and the Harvard Business School’s ongoing project on U.S. competitiveness. The concern is that the local, shared resources which drive American prosperity are not keeping pace with global standards. U.S. workforce skills, schools, and infrastructure, for instance, are not improving fast enough or, in too many cases, are deteriorating.

As our research shows, these trends are causing an unsustainable divergence in the U.S. economy: working- and middle-class Americans are struggling, even as firms and individuals who can tap global opportunities are thriving. Prosperity is being generated but not shared as broadly as desired.  The COVID pandemic has underscored these challenges and reinforced the need for collaboration and inclusive prosperity, The Young American Leaders Program is designed to prepare local leaders in Nashville and across the country to address and reverse these trends.

The hope of YALP springs from the local level. In cities and regions across the country, local policymakers, business people, nonprofit leaders, educators, clergy, and others coming together across sectors to build skills, improve schools, restore infrastructure to build a foundation for economic growth and shared prosperity.

Ten leaders from fourteen cities across the U.S. are selected by senior community leaders in those cities to participate each June in an intensive case study workshop on urban and rural regional collaborations and strategies for economic resilience.  Other participating cities include Austin, Boston, Columbus, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Salt Lake City, and Seattle, among others.  The program was launched to develop leaders who understand cross-sector collaborations for shared prosperity and can implement them more effectively and spread them more rapidly than in the past.

“Global Action Platform is committed to supporting the creation of a globally competitive innovation hub for shared prosperity in Nashville and across Tennessee,” notes Dr. Massey.  “We are pleased to be the regional affiliate of Porter’s Institute at Harvard and to be collaborating with them on the Young American Leaders Program and other projects.  Through this collaboration, we hope to help enable emerging and established local leaders to work together for the shared growth and prosperity of our region in today’s global economy.”  Linda Peek Schacht, executive coach and Founding Director, Andrews Institute for Civic Leadership, Lipscomb University, is an advisor for the Nashville program, which receives ongoing local program support from Global Action Platform and its 2024 sponsors, which include

Gold Sponsors:  

HCA Healthcare

Ingram

Vanderbilt University;

Silver Sponsors:  

Barge Design Solutions

JumpstartNova

Scarlett Family Foundation

Along with a number of individual donors.