From the Founder’s Desk: Human Infrastructure #1 — My Story
A 12-part journey into Human Infrastructure, beginning at our Founder’s desk and unfolding in his own voice.
Over the years, many people have asked me a simple question: Why Mountaintop?
It is a question I have answered many times. The real answer is not short or neat. It has been shaped by my experiences, the people I have learned from, and the moments that changed how I think about leadership.
Over the next 12 months, throughout 2026, I want to sit with that question more openly. In a 12-part series, I will share why I have chosen to dedicate my career to building the inner capacity, or “human infrastructure,” of leaders worldwide.
Today, I want to start where all of this began and tell you my story. (And at the end of this post, I will also share the focus of the next piece in the series.)
I was born and raised in the state of Oklahoma, a smaller and lower income state north of Texas. I had a privileged background — my father was a physicist and my mother is a veterinarian. I accessed a solid education, got to participate in organized sports, traveled frequently, and never lacked for anything important. I had great friends and was well adjusted at school.
When I was 17, two events shaped who I am today. My father died after a years-long battle with leukemia, and a tornado ripped through the city neighboring my Oklahoma hometown and killed seven elementary school children when their school collapsed on them.
By the time my dad was diagnosed, he was already at Stage 4 and had little chance of survival. And after the tornado, the Oklahoma state government took no action to protect students, meaning more children would likely die from future tornadoes. Whether related to improving cancer screening and preventative health care or building storm shelters in schools, I learned from these events that ethical, effective leadership is literally a life-or-death matter. With better leadership, my father and those children might still be alive today.
Channeling grief into action, I decided to work toward pushing our leaders to do better. I got involved in a statewide ballot initiative to build storm shelters in Oklahoma public schools, organizing volunteers and gathering signatures at Walmarts, malls, and parades. Witnessing the power of policy advocacy, in college I co-founded a lobby day that still runs each semester that brings together 50+ volunteers to the Massachusetts State House to push for forward-thinking legislation.
During my junior year of college, another tragedy struck — I lost a close family friend to suicide. Working alongside his mother and a state legislator, we drafted and advocated for a gun violence prevention bill that was signed into Massachusetts law in 2018.
My outlook changed when, in my senior year, I saw many of my classmates who had come to college wanting to make the world a better place feel pressured to take jobs at the biggest companies in the biggest cities in the world. I wrote an op-ed describing the structural brain drain that, in a world with so many important challenges, was pushing many of the best and brightest to leave behind the communities and causes where they could do the most good. I saw the challenge now as not just pushing leaders to be better, but also ensuring that people were becoming leaders in the first place.
After reading my op-ed, a student at the University of North Carolina whom I had never met contacted me on social media and asked me to join his founding team with Lead For America (LFA). Together with a team of recent college graduates from smaller U.S. communities, our vision was to reverse youth brain drain in underserved communities and support a new generation of transformational local leaders. We later moved our headquarters to Dodge City, Kansas (between where our CEO and I grew up) to better live our mission.
After LFA grew to a $9m/year budget that has so far created more than 700 full-time fellowships across 47 states funded by the federal government’s AmeriCorps program, I began thinking more critically about how community development happens in practice. My thinking was most influenced by three observations.
First, living in Dodge City I had seen how just three or four local government and business leaders had driven strong job growth and effective public service provision. What’s more, I learned from locals that a community of similar size, demographics, and opportunities just an hour away was struggling because of a lack of strong leadership.
Second, after learning that thousands of people die waiting for an organ transplant each year, I decided to anonymously donate part of my liver to a six year old boy. After a successful transplant, I began working part-time with advocates in the organ donation reform space, pushing for policies that would improve the system and save thousands of lives per year. My bosses Greg Segal and Jennifer Erickson were just two people, but they might as well have been an army — in just a few years, their advocacy directly contributed to congressional hearings, executive orders, federal regulations, and a federal law reforming the organ donation contractor system. These reforms have already likely saved thousands of lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. And it’s very possible without just these two people, none of this would have happened.
Third, during my organ transplant recovery, I began reading all five books written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., along with Taylor Branch’s three-volume history of the American Civil Rights Movement. I was struck by how progress during the Civil Rights Movement did not originate from a few charismatic leaders, but rather from a complex ecosystem of leaders across civil society, government, academia, philanthropy, and everyday life — not to mention the role that teachers, friends, and family played in shaping the character and capacities of these leaders.
It was listening to MLK’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech — the final speech he gave before he was assassinated — that fully changed my paradigm. Because the speech famously includes MLK reflecting on his own death after reaching the “mountaintop,” I had assumed it was mainly a tribute to his personal leadership. But when I listened more carefully, I realized that the speech is actually about the opposite. In MLK’s telling, the arc of justice has never been bent by a handful of heroic figures alone, but by the moral agency of everyday people — those doing essential, often overlooked work — who choose to act with dignity, courage, and responsibility. His message wasn’t a celebration of individual achievement. It was an insistence that leadership is not reserved for the powerful or the prominent, but is exercised wherever ordinary people decide to take responsibility for the world around them.
What if it were possible to help more local leaders become the transformational systems changing leaders who I met in Dodge City and in the organ donation reform space, and read about in the Civil Rights Movement? What if — like MLK suggested — there was a way to systematically cultivate this sort of leadership so that the world could exponentially increase the number of transformational leaders?
And more boldly yet, what if we lived in a world where every individual reached their full potential — no matter how big or small — to contribute to a more flourishing world? I knew from my research of the Civil Rights Movement that it was possible to rapidly expand the amount of transformational leadership in society. And deep down, I knew that even contributing to this goal in a small way would move us toward the world where I want to live.
While LFA was building an incredible pipeline of emerging local leaders to strengthen small U.S. communities facing Brain Drain, I decided to explore how to take a broader approach to the question of helping leaders around the world reach their full potential. After transitioning to LFA’s Board, I spent nine months living off my savings and researching, traveling, and meeting leaders around the world. I was struck by how many leaders had the passion and courage to take on any challenge, but lacked the skills, relationships, resources, and power to bring their vision to life.
One memorable conversation was with Isata Kabia, a former cabinet minister and Member of Parliament in Sierra Leone, to discuss this gap.
She termed it the problem of “human infrastructure” — that just like an economy needs strong physical infrastructure, a society without the necessary “human infrastructure” will fail to address its own problems and decline.
This concept tied a perfect bow around everything I had been learning. After getting Isata’s permission to use the term, I decided to center my new nonprofit on the cultivation of human infrastructure.
For all of these reasons, I launched Mountaintop International. Like I saw with the tornado in Oklahoma, I believe most communities worldwide do not have the “human infrastructure” to solve their own problems. Just as tens of trillions of dollars are spent each year on building physical infrastructure, we need similar time, money, and effort for building the “human infrastructure” of local leaders worldwide, especially in the most under-resourced communities. Every moment we delay exacts a quiet toll — in lives lost to natural disasters and preventable disease, in jobs that disappear, and in communities pulled further into poverty, conflict, and authoritarianism.
I have decided to dedicate my life to strengthening human infrastructure in the places that need it most so that one day no one — like the Oklahoma children, my family friend, or my father — has to suffer from poor leadership. Through this work, I hope to honor the legacy of those who are no longer with us.
In the posts that follow, I will explore what a world of collective flourishing could look like and why I believe it is possible. I will share how we at Mountaintop believe cultivating human infrastructure makes that vision achievable, outline the six core assets we believe we must develop, and connect this framework to Mountaintop’s long-term strategy. I will also reflect on how human infrastructure relates to broader trends in the development sector and highlight leaders and institutions already doing this work in powerful ways, before bringing the series together in a final reflection.
Thank you for reading. This series is not just a reflection but also an invitation, and I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments and learn more about your own “why!”
Tune in next month when I share my vision for a world of collective flourishing, and why I believe it isn’t just a pipe dream.
 | A guest post by
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Reed, your story moved me profoundly. Seeing how you turned personal loss into a lifelong commitment to human infrastructure reminds me why leadership is not about position or recognition but about enabling others to act with courage and responsibility. As a Mountaintop Fellow, I feel the truth of your insight that real impact comes from cultivating ecosystems of capable, motivated people who can transform their communities.
Your journey challenges me to think beyond programs and initiatives and focus on nurturing the inner capacities, networks, and vision of young leaders in South Sudan so they can create lasting change. This reflection reminds me that investing in human potential is as urgent and essential as any physical infrastructure, and that the measure of leadership is the lives it empowers.
This part stood out deeply to me that many leaders have courage and passion, but lack the skills, resources, and grounding needed to turn vision into real change. I see this often in our communities, where leadership becomes about titles, positions, or money, rather than responsibility and service.
Growing up in a rural community, I watched opportunities repeatedly go to the children of leaders not because they were most committed to the community, but because of who they were connected to. Many of them were self-focused, not rooted in the real challenges of the people they were meant to serve. That experience shaped me.
When I later accessed education and support, one of my friends told me, “Please, when you are done, don’t forget us.” That sentence has stayed with me. It reminded me that leadership is not about climbing alone it is about who you carry with you.
I was also deeply moved by your decision to donate part of your liver to a young boy. That level of humility andselflessness reflects the kind of leadership the world truly needs leadership that gives life, not just direction. You quite literally gave someone a second chance at life, and that speaks louder than any title ever could.
This is why I believe so strongly in investing in grounded leadership in what you describe as human infrastructure: leaders who understand their people, who are driven by vision rather than position, and who have the skills and support to act. Without building this kind of human infrastructure, communities will continue to be led by those who hold power, but not responsibility.
I feel grateful to be part of what you are building, and I’m certain I will learn a great deal from your example as I continue my own journey to become a leader who is grounded and rooted in service. Knowing that someone is alive and smiling today because of such leadership is deeply inspiring. 🌍
Thank you for naming this so clearly. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.