Leadership & Innovation for Everyone = LIFE
Everyone can benefit from adding leadership and innovation skills to their life toolkit.
At Grinnell College’s Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership, we want to help you understand key traits of leaders and innovators, practice critical skills, recognize your aptitude and embrace challenges, and help reveal common traits between leadership, innovation, and a liberal arts education. To do this, the Wilson Center invites successful leaders and innovators to provide instruction and mentorship to our community at key events in our LIFE Series.
Upcoming Events
Angela Onwuachi-Willig ’94 – November 19, 2026
Angela Onwuachi-Willig ’94 is Dean and Ryan Roth Gallo Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law.
“Up From a Past That’s Rooted in Pain: Rising to the Moment”
Scholar’s Convocation at 11 a.m. in room 101 Joe Rosenfield Center
During the summer of 1955, when Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till, sent her only son down to Mississippi to spend time with family, she had no idea that she would have to endure the excruciating pain of losing her child and that she would be forced to rise, through her pain, to the moment. Neither did Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, in 2012; or Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, in 2020; or any other “Mothers of the Movement.” This presentation examines race, racism, “policing,” trauma, and resiliency through the tradition of the “Talk,” the conversation that many parents of Black children have with their kids about how to interact during a police encounter. It examines how law, or rather the failures of law, produce intergenerational racial harm not only through dramatic acts of exclusion, but also through the ordinary, normalized practices that emerge as ways of surviving racism. In so doing, it asks, “How does the tradition of ‘The Talk’ require parents to become active leaders to prepare their children for navigating everyday systemic, racial bias, and what are the harms of that work? What can we learn from mother-leaders like Till-Mobley, Fulton, and Palmer, who rose (through their pain) to the moment and were drafted into leadership by grief?”
“Finding Your Mentors: The People Who Open Minds and Doors“
Tutorial Address at 8:30 a.m. in Harris Center
When Angela Onwuachi-Willig arrived at Grinnell College as a first-year student, she could not have known that she would one day become a law school dean, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Grinnell trustee, and one of the nation’s most influential legal scholars. Like many Grinnellians, she arrived with questions about her future, her purpose, and her place in the world. Grinnell became one chapter in a journey that led her to reshape national conversations about race, equality, and justice while opening doors for countless others, especially her students and Black women in the legal academy. In her Tutorial Address, Onwuachi-Willig will reflect on what it felt like to be a first-year Grinnell student facing an uncertain future; how the people, ideas, and opportunities she encountered here helped to shape a life of extraordinary impact; why finding the mentors who teach, guide, and sponsor mentees can be critical to the making of a life; and how her mentors throughout her life, including those at Grinnell College, opened not only her mind but also doors to a career she never imagined. Her story is a powerful reminder that Grinnell students are already in the midst of becoming the people they will be one day, that the questions they are asking today may be the first steps toward achievements they cannot yet imagine, and that there are many within the Grinnell community who can help guide them to and through new pathways and experiences.
Past Events
Look back on all past LIFE talk titles and workshop topics.