As executive director of the Napa-based nonprofit On the Move, Leslie Medine is an authority figure who isn’t afraid of challenging the status quo.
Through On the Move and its affiliates — On the Verge, VOICES, the McPherson Neighborhood Initiative and the Reach Institute for School Leadership — Medine and her team are all about empowering young people and their support systems.
Collectively, the organizations specialize in fostering youth leadership, assisting transitioning foster youths, strengthening communities and supporting educators.
Medine — who co-founded On the Move in 2003 with Diana Gordon, the organization’s chief operating officer — said her passion for creating positive change can be traced to a monumental task she took on as a teen.
The year was 1968 and Medine was attending public high school in Great Neck, Long Island, N.Y., where a district official was calling for big changes.
“They decided that maybe high school education wasn’t going so well,” she said. “A very forward-thinking superintendent had wanted us to create an alternative school that was going to be youth-led.”
One of 48 students charged with creating the school from scratch, Medine joined her peers spending hours hashing out curriculum and other changes with a handful of teachers. They debated about whether to grade students at all and considered abandoning schedules altogether. The group was bent on shaking up the curriculum while still meeting the state’s education guidelines — and Medine, said that’s when she had an epiphony.
“Rules can be changed, they can be gotten around,” she said. “They’re not fixed. It’s just that somebody made up a policy and policies can be changed.”
After countless hours of brainstorming and discussion, Medine and her fellow students laid the foundation for Village School, which still exists today in Long Island, N.Y. Medine said the maddening and exhilarating ordeal opened her eyes to a new world of possibilities.
“That experience changed my life,” she said. “I was part of designing that school and that school is now 40 years old.”
In helping to create Village School, Medine discovered her calling. In 1982, she founded Beacon Day School and Beacon High School in Oakland. In 1994, Medine and Gordon co-founded an Alameda nonprofit organization called Alternatives in Action.
The agency, which prepares teens for college and the workforce by teaching them to tap into their leadership potential, led to the creation of On the Move. This happened, Medine said, when agency officials discovered that the teens lost invaluable adult mentorships after aging out of the organization.
Answering this call to action, Medine and Gordon jump-started the On the Verge and On the Move programs in 2003 to serve young people in their 20s and 30s. To date, these organizations and their affiliate agencies have touched the lives of an estimated 10,000 adults and young people.
Medine was also instrumental in launching Napa’s River School, which today shares its Old Sonoma Road campus with Harvest Middle School. During the same time frame, she helped to found Moving Forward, a separate, local residential program for young adults living with developmental disabilities.
These days, however, Medine’s focus is with On the Move and its sister agencies, which boast several sites throughout the North Bay.
Medine is knee-deep in an array of missions and projects.
Organizers are making tentative plans for a national VOICES training institute, and a “new VOICES-like center” in San Jose — called The Hub — recently opened its doors, Medine said. Meanwhile, McPherson Neighborhood Initiative leaders have a large storytelling project in the works. The undertaking will involve interviewing the McPherson neighborhood about its history and priorities. The project’s results, Medine said, will be showcased on a 180-foot mural at the McPherson neighborhood center within two or three years.
Other works in progress include developing a youth-led legal clinic for the McPherson neighborhood and continuing a project to determine what services Napa’s non-heterosexual community is lacking.
An adept multitasker, Medine — who lives in central Napa with her partner of 23 years, Steve Carlson — said her typical 10- or 11-hour weekday starts at 8 a.m. You can find her doing everything from reviewing grants for funders and coaching youths to meeting with partner agency leaders.
A sculptor who no longer practices her craft because of time constraints, Medine doesn’t mind the long hours. She said a hectic pace and a steady stream of challenges keep things exciting.
“As an artist, it never occurs to me that something is impossible,” she said. “I think what I get most excited about is possibility.”
