Remembering can keep us going in challenging times.

Scott and Julia Spears sent me.

Who sent you?

I opened a workshop recently with three questions.

Who sent you? Whose shoulders are you standing on? Whose work makes your work possible?

The room got quiet as people were looking inside of themselves for the answer.

We get asked about our goals, our metrics, our five-year plan. Nobody asks who made us possible. Seldom do we look back at those who came before us to remember that the answers we seek are often found in our remembrances.

My answer to this question would require me to name a number of people. If I had to chose one, I would say…

My grandmother sent me.

She kept chickens. And some mornings she'd fill a basket with eggs, or wrap up a plate of whatever she'd cooked that day and send me around the neighborhood to deliver it.

I was a child and I didn't understand that I was being taught anything. I thought I was running errands.

She taught me how to clean the way you do when you believe a home should receive people. She let me mix cakes and then lick the batter off the mixer, which obviously is the reason I agreed to help. When she made pralines, I peeled the pecans and she let me butter the table where the candy would cool. That was my job, and she trusted me with it.

She ushered at church. She showed people to their seats and made sure they were settled, week after week, year after year.

She did so much more and was respected in the community. She never called it leadership, but people knew they could count on her.

Nobody gave her a title. There was no strategic plan for the eggs. She didn't have a platform, a budget, or a line item. She had chickens, a kitchen, a pair of hands, and a clear sense of who was hungry, who was lonely and who needed to be seen on a Sunday morning.

She led without making noise about it. And forty years later, I'm still working from what she built.

What Sankofa asks of us.

There's an Akan proverb from Ghana: Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.

The symbol is at the top of this email; a bird with its head turned backward, an egg held in its beak. What it retrieves from behind, it carries forward.

Sankofa is retrieval: going back to get the thing you need for where you're going.

When I go back I often realize that not every person who taught us how to lead usually was called a leader. They could have been cooks. Schoolteachers. Ushers. Women who kept chickens and knew exactly which house on the block needed a plate.

Sometimes we take simple, intentional acts for granted, but I hope caring for and strengthening community sounds like a leadership strategy, because it is one.

Take five minutes today and answer the question. Who sent you?

Then go find out how they did it. Whatever they built with almost nothing, the strategy is still in there and it's still good.

Go back and fetch it.