Ruth Shack showed Miami how to build community courageously | Opinion

One of the great challenges of our generation is the gap between the leaders we need and the ones we too often get. As our children look toward those that we champion as worthy of attention and power, I wonder what values they will come to understand as worth imitating.

Will they aspire to be brave? Compassionate? Generous? Or will they be distracted by the bullying, self-serving and divisive figureheads they so often see celebrated in the public eye?

It is our job to spot the great ones — and to lift up their stories boldly. Not to honor them, but indeed to shape our own future as a society and to reclaim the narrative about what true leadership looks like.

Join me today in remembering Ruth Shack. She stood for things that mattered, even when it came with great personal sacrifice. She built things that will outlive her and left the world better than she found it.

As a newly elected county commissioner in the late 1970s, Ruth brought forth a measure to make Miami-Dade the first major urban area in the country to protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination. She faced the kind of personal attacks that would have sent most leaders quietly back to safer ground. She did not retreat even after the ordinance was voted down, and ultimately it did pass decades later.

She saw Miami not for what it was, but for what it could be. In the decades when Miami experienced unprecedented crime, corruption and civil unrest, Ruth Shack focused on building a leadership pipeline for our future. On making us a serious arts destination. On prioritizing civil rights. And ultimately after decades as the president of The Miami Foundation (then the Dade Community Foundation), Ruth helped build the greatest possible gift for our future: a serious permanent philanthropic endowment.

Every single year, The Miami Foundation runs our region’s largest open-call grant process for bold community nonprofits addressing our most pressing challenges. The money that fuels that program? Ruth raised it. Tens of millions of dollars in endowment resources, which has grown into a serious community asset over decades and will live in perpetuity for Miami.

Decades after retiring, Ruth met regularly with our team members, and with the alumni of the Miami Fellows leadership program that she built, offering mentorship to ensure that our community has a strong pipeline of future leadership.

Here is what I have come to understand about Ruth’s kind of leadership: it was not about her. It was about us.

Ruth Shack invested in things that would outlive her. A leadership pipeline for the future of Miami through the Miami Fellows program. An endowment for our community’s greatest needs. Policies that would live on to protect our community’s rights. And a community-wide commitment to arts and culture.

Great leaders like Ruth Shack are exactly what I want my kids to see when they flip open a newspaper. (And yes, kids, you should flip open a newspaper!) Bravery, generosity and values-based leadership are not things of the past. They are passed down through the stories we choose to tell and the lives we choose to live.

If our heroes set the tone for the kind of future we want to build, then join me in celebrating one of Miami’s best heroes: Ruth Shack. She dedicated her life to strengthen the place we call home. Now it’s our turn.

Rebecca Fishman Lipsey is the president and CEO of The Miami Foundation.