~TOM CALLOS
(From his blog post at http://ubbt.squarespace.com/our-blog-read-it/2009/8/12/ubbt-graduate-gary-engels-and-students-document-100-communit.html)

Gary Engels is an Extraordinary Student and Teacher of the Martial Arts.

He’s one of those rare individuals who takes action, who follows through on ideas, and who isn’t afraid to proceed, even when “how to proceed” is uncertain. The video above features Gary praising his students for successfully documenting their first 100 community projects.

This is, as far as I know, the very first martial arts school in the world that has purposely set out to achieve 100 community-based projects –and documented their efforts.

This effort came about due to a single conversation Gary and I had several years ago. I explained a concept I had envisioned for teaching young people authentic leadership programs in martial arts schools. I called the idea, “Project-Based Leadership Training.” Gary, like many of us in the martial arts “industry,” were concerned about the trend among unscrupulous and/or inexperienced teachers/school owners to market leadership training courses without any genuine, practical, or intelligently conceived curriculum to do so.

Gary asked me if he could take the ideas we had discussed and experiment with them. As a result, Gary conceived and designed http://www.leadershipstudents.com.

Gary’s school, appropriately called LEADERSHIP ACADEMY, may be seen here.

Congratulations to Gary and Nikki Engels –and to their students – for achieving 100 documented projects. Gary has not only deeply affected the thinking, goals, and abilities of his students (and I would say, his entire community), but he has left a trail for the international martial arts community to follow.

It’s our collective goal that 1000′s of martial arts schools adopt this simple and intelligent approach to teaching young people how to be leaders, by doing things that actually require them to practice leadership skills.

We hope this idea weaves itself into the fabric of martial arts education –and that someday the martial arts world will have documented hundreds of thousands of projects that take the martial arts “out of the dojo and into the world.”

If you know of any teacher or school owner like Gary Engels, would you be so kind as to point them my way. —Tom Callos

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