Preparing leaders for 25 years
Graduates say Leadership New Mexico provides invaluable knowledge
For a snapshot of the value of Leadership New Mexico, look at its graduates. To start, there’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, recently confirmed as the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, and New Mexico’s own Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
On the business side, consider Michael Crossey, CEO and chief medical officer at TriCore Reference Laboratories; Phil Casaus, president and CEO at Brycon Corp.; and Steve Griego, president and CEO at DMC Logistics.
These are the state’s elite from nonprofit organizations, education, health care, business and politics. Scientists are part of the fabric; so are city officials and business owners from all over the state.
“The only thing that I think needs to be pointed out, that is not pointed out enough, is what a huge success
Leadership New Mexico has been, how it expanded and stayed relevant and how many successful people have gone through it,” said Michael Stanford, president at Payday HCM and a graduate. “I just don’t think it gets the recognition it should.”
Stanford is a former chairman of Leadership New Mexico and presently serves on the board.
25 years
Now in its 25th year, the nonprofit Leadership New Mexico was the brainchild of Patty Komko and Ron Zee, then the executive director of the Multicultural Leadership Institute at Santa Fe Community College.
Even now, when Komko talks about it, her passion is almost tangible. Graduates seem to be equally passionate, many staying on after they graduate as volunteers or speakers.
Since its inception, Leadership New Mexico has graduated more than 1,000 New Mexicans and had more than 1,800 participants from 88 communities across the state.
It is, Komko and graduates say, the top educational opportunity for professionals in New Mexico.
“I think the benefit for me is the same as the benefit for New Mexicans statewide,” said Carole Jaramillo, director of financial services for the City of Rio Rancho. “It’s knowledge.”
Jaramillo graduated from two programs, and served on and chaired the Local Government Leadership Program Committee and Core Program Curriculum Committee. She served on the board of directors and has been involved with the organization since 2014.
Much of what graduates like is the diversity of the program and its statewide reach. It’s a way to connect leaders from rural to urban, big city to tiny town. They also love the interaction between participants and the experiential piece of the program that places them in some of the state’s most important sites such as Trinity Site at White Sands.
“I think the greatest value of Leadership New Mexico revolves around people getting out of their comfort zone and going around and seeing all of the state,” Stanford said. “When you go to Hobbs and other places, you really experience the people of that place and listen to issues brought forth by the program — water rights, education, health care, everything that confronts this state. It opens the dialogue and people aren’t so divisive around issues.”
Stanford has been a Leadership mainstay since 1999.
The program even helps with the longstanding divide between northern New Mexico and southern New Mexico, he added.
“I’ve seen over the years huge advancements around compromise and understanding because you have the rural and the urban, and the northern and southern people coming together and discussing issues,” Stanford said.
That’s one of the program’s strong points for Becky Rowley, president of Santa Fe Community College. A Core graduate in 2009, Rowley has remained
a speaker for the program on higher education.
“Patty has always done a very good job creating a diverse class of representation from around the state,” Rowley said. “There have always been people from rural areas of the state who are part of the program. They try to have people with different industry backgrounds, all kinds of things.”
Massive growth
From its tiny start-up $8,000 budget in 1995, Leadership New Mexico has evolved into a $1.6 million organization that touches the lives of virtually all New Mexicans one way or another.
Today it has almost 300 life members and about $700,000 in its endowment fund.
Key to its success are the graduates who stick around, volunteering to help the program, Komko said.
“We typically have over 200 volunteers who participate on one of our committees, the board, or as a speaker each year,” she said. “We would not be the organization we are today without dedicated volunteers who give an
enormous amount of their time and expertise.”
Jaramillo graduated from the Local Government program in 2014, and the Core program in 2017. She has volunteered on the curriculum committees for both of those programs.
The curriculum committees, she said, “arrange speakers and activities for the programs and relevant, timely issues. It also can include hauling stuff, making sure the speakers have their needs (met), putting together a happy hour, to dealing with events and picking up foods. It’s a mixed bag and it’s fun.”
To Jacquelyn Reeve, an Albuquerque family nurse practitioner, program graduate and owner of Jacquelyn Reeve Medical, volunteering for Leadership New Mexico is a matter of sharing time, experience, “all of those things.”
“It’s a different type of volunteerism because we all have different levels of experience that we share with each other,” she said. “We’d be nowhere without it.”