Leading Without a Safety Net: Jesa Townsend on Nonprofit Leadership and the Power of the Liberal Arts
Tristan Cabello
When Jesa Townsend was looking for her next academic step, she wanted a program that demanded bigger questions, deeper thinking, and a different kind of leadership.
“The MLA offered more than a course of study,” Jesa reflects. “It offered a call to action.”
Already immersed in nonprofit and civic leadership, Jesa knew the future belonged to those willing to lead without certainty — to build frameworks where others only saw fractures. Real change, she understood, doesn’t come from technical solutions alone. It demands the courage to stay curious, the patience to sit with complexity, and the ethical discipline to lead without a script.
Building New Frameworks for Leadership
When Jesa entered the MLA, she came with clear professional goals. But the program widened her ambitions. “Initially, I wanted to sharpen a defined skillset,” she explains. “But true transformation meant stepping into what I didn’t already know.”
Instead of mastering the familiar, Jesa embraced leadership as an evolving practice: one rooted in humility, critical inquiry, and a lifelong commitment to rethink and rebuild. The liberal arts became, for her, not a supplement to leadership — but its foundation.
“Leadership isn’t about commanding answers," Jesa says. "It’s about nurturing better questions.”
The Arts as Civic Power
For her capstone, Jesa challenged traditional ideas about public leadership. She argued that the arts — too often dismissed as ornamental — are critical civic tools. Cultural expression, she believes, builds emotional frameworks where legislation and rhetoric often fail. In moments of fracture, it offers communities a way to reimagine public life.
Leadership, in Jesa’s vision, is fiduciary stewardship: safeguarding collective memory, emotional agency, and public hope.
Today, every organization Jesa leads carries this philosophy. She ensures that equity, storytelling, and community voice are not side projects — they are central to mission and policy impact.
Learning in Community
One of the most unexpected gifts of the MLA was its community of thinkers.
"Learning didn’t feel transactional,” Jesa recalls. “It felt conspiratorial — in the best way."
Professors treated students as thought partners. Seminars spilled into long conversations, late-night debates, and lasting friendships. This community modeled what Jesa believes leadership must become: rigorous, relational, and rooted in shared inquiry.
The intellectual patience she developed — the willingness to navigate ambiguity without rushing to closure — has become one of her greatest leadership strengths.
The Future of Leadership
For Jesa, the value of the liberal arts today is not abstract. “In a world that demands both urgency and wisdom," she says, "the liberal arts dare us to imagine boldly, lead wisely, and create futures more just than the ones we inherited.”
If she could return for one more course, it would explore the philosophy of stewardship: leading not through dominance, but through devotion to community.
At a time when leadership is too often reduced to spectacle, certainty, or control, Jesa Townsend reminds us: “The future will belong to those who know how to build — and rebuild — with care, creativity, and courage.”