Name: Marilyn Lee
Cohort: 1
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Title: Beekeeper and Owner of Honeybee Sustainability
"The Collective Leadership Institute (CLI) inaugural cohort was an experience I will cherish forever. Cheryl and Kathy are my 'sheroes' and put together a curriculum that was an exceptional life experience.
CLI prepared our entire cohort to become leaders, and leadership became a tangible thing for us. It permeates your spirit, you can hear it, you begin to walk it and more importantly perhaps, others feel it when you speak.
The greatest gift of learning leadership is the ability to build it afterwards. The project I'm currently working on is dependent upon my ability to build leadership in the Carceral/Formerly Incarcerated communities.
People should know that formerly incarcerated women possess a unique ability to conform to situations and circumstances, that someone who hasn't experienced incarceration may not successfully endure. Those of us who endured are now like water, mutable, and like water we can conform to situations that may even be uncomfortable, knowing that this too shall pass, we stand in there to get to the finish line.
Formerly incarcerated women who have a vision to Free Her will never give up. I will continue to be part of an effort to abolish mass incarceration in America."
