Leading Through Crisis for Universities & Students

For campus audiences the talk leans into the arc — refugee camp to city hall — and what it asks of students deciding what their work will stand for. Works as a commencement address, a public policy lecture, or a student-government keynote, with time built in for the questions students actually ask.

On April 11, 2021 — ten miles from the courtroom where Derek Chauvin was being tried — a Brooklyn Center police officer killed Daunte Wright. Within hours, Mayor Mike Elliott was managing a national crisis: protests and tear gas in a residential neighborhood, global media on his lawn, a city council at war with itself, and a grieving family.

This is the inside account of those first 72 hours and the year that followed: the decision to take command of the police department, firing the city manager on live television, holding a community's trust while the country watched — and the mistakes and costs that came with all of it.

The talk is built for leaders who make decisions under pressure: what to do in the first hours, how to communicate when every word is parsed, and how to keep an institution standing when the crisis doesn't end on the news cycle's schedule.