Thrive Dispatches Season 2 Episode 5: Love As An Operational Strategy (with Shawn Hardnett)

Today, Dr. Matt Biel’s conversation with Shawn Hardness, Founder and CEO of Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys in Washington, DC.

Shawn built a school that challenges everything we think we know about supporting students from high-need communities. At Statesman, 90% of students come from families engaged with public support systems, and the school serves three times the typical rate of students needing special education services. Yet these boys are thriving.

At the heart of Statesman’s approach is a radical reframing: love and compassion aren’t soft additions to “real” interventions. They are the intervention. This isn’t about adding more services at the edges while leaving the daily lived experience of children unchanged. It’s about building love and trust and relationships into the architecture of every day, protecting it in budgets and schedules with the same fierce commitment schools typically reserve for academic outcomes.

For questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, please email us at: thrivecenter@georgetown.edu.

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Summary:

In this excerpt, Shawn explains an often noticed but rarely understood aspect of the Statesmen experience, the red carpet and DJ.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“They said, boys across the country were going into schools, and they didn’t feel welcome, right?

They talked about what it felt like walking into the building in the eyes of the people who saw them, and what those eyes seem to suggest. And so I started looking at that…okay, they don’t feel good. Well, we’re going to get a DJ. We’re going to have a DJ every morning. You’re going to dance over the red carpet and dance your way into the building.

You have to understand that the red carpet came out of a deep and resonant belief that we want our boys to feel good. Any idea that comes out of that is going to work. If you’re just here and you see it and you take it, it’s probably not going to work, it’s superficial. But if it’s coming out of a deep and resonant desire for the boys to feel good when they come to school, then it’s probably going to work.”

Listen to the full episode