The Leadership Speaker Series (LSS) will be an annual series of events that will each year bring four prominent speakers who represent strong leadership and motivational qualities to Burlington for an event to be held on the beautiful waterfront of Lake Champlain.
The LSS is based on the successful model that brought Pulitzer Prize recipient and Foreign Affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, to Burlington, where he engaged over 3000 community members. The original model created through a consortium of local academic, community, and business groups, known as the Vermont Global Symposium, has been enhanced to provide even greater opportunities and benefits to our community.
Each leadership event will be followed with opportunities for community discussions and workshops on the topics discussed, bringing members of the local business, political, and non-profit community together.
These events will be followed with numerous opportunities for our community members to both reflect on and discuss their ideas. To encourage such communication, we will augment this series with a website that will provide a forum for both information and community discussion. We believe this helps create a small town atmosphere in our growing city by encouraging local schools, businesses, and non-profits to take a break in their morning routine to discuss the previous evening's event.