Please allow us to jump right in. We have yet to find anyone who doesn’t support the idea of helping students learn to work hard, prepare to enter the job market and make significant contributions to society - and then turn around and help other students do the same. We develop young leaders in Nashville and surrounding areas and then help them do that. Our students come from many different cultural backgrounds. That’s what we do.

Our method comes with two surprising twists that make all the difference in the world. First, we us music mentors to bring out the best in our students and develop their work ethic. Then, we skip right over “just” training leaders and go straight to training students to train the next generation of students. This creates a sustainable, ever expanding leader development movement. In essence, it creates a larger “return on investment” compared to traditional models.

Nashville’s cultural demographic is rapidly changing and will soon be a “minority-majority,” a term that describes an area or jurisdiction with a population composed of less than 50% non-Hispanic whites. Success in business and government will depend, in large part, with individual and group ability to work effectively with intercultural groups with effective “cross-cultural competence,” - which can be defined as an individual’s or organization’s “ability to understand people from different cultures and engage with them effectively. . .not just people from the one culture that (has been) studied for years. Having cross-cultural competence means you can be effective in your interactions with people from most any culture.”* (Cross-cultural, multi-cultural and intercultural are sometimes used interchangeably and, for our purposes, that works.) One Stage develops leaders who have high levels of cross-cultural competence. 

Graduates from the One Stage Leadership School are on the short path to making a profound positive difference in business, education, government, the nonprofit arena, the entertainment industry, healthcare, the insurance industry-in every major segment of Nashville life.

We start with music. The chief reasons we start there are: (1) music’s natural power to create and nurture  mentoring relationships when compared to other industries (2) live music’s very definition of occurring in front of groups of people-a ready-made platform for marketing purposes (3) the music performance business segment can, perhaps better than any other, involve people from most aspects of Nashville business, from financing a performance to providing health and wellness support during rehearsals, hospitality services and marketing, and on and on.