Students Obtaining Leadership by Innovative Developmental Styles

Mission Statement S.O.L.I.D.S. will expand the growth of young minority leaders within the S.T.E.M. realm by providing a self-developing curriculum and real life experiences to teach leadership through the structure of S.T.E.M. disciplines. Vision S.O.L.I.D.S. aims to invest in young minority S.T.E.M. students so that they learn to mentally invest in their own talents and abilities; producing a fearlessness in them, that they may be able to obtain their goals and achieve their aspirations. Our Story Students Obtaining Leadership by Innovative Developmental Styles Inc (S.O.L.I.D.S.), started off as a series of social test experiments in 2010 by the founder Dante’ Freeland amongst his college peers to pull out the leadership qualities needed to maximize the growth of young professionals on campus. Being an engineering major, Mr. Freeland used many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (S.T.E.M), concepts and platforms to run the experiments. The experiments had very startling results. There appeared to be a large disconnect in the beliefs of where an individual’s confidence and vision for themselves can take them through their lives. Students were running from opportunities to make a change because of lack of confidence within themselves, shortsighted vision of their goals, and an overall sense that their voice was not big enough to be heard. This was an alarming discovery to find in our leaders of tomorrow and needed to be addressed. Soon afterwards Mr. Freeland would start to develop a curriculum based off these social test experiments to truly tap into the mind of these individuals, with the end goal being to have each individual leave with a new sense of pride and leadership within themselves. Mr. Freeland believed that “leadership is 50% understanding yourself and 50% understanding others.” The thought behind this was, the more you can understand and embrace your own flaws in order to grow the more you can do it for others as well to help them in their growth. From these concepts and experiments grew S.O.L.I.D.S. An organization built to help the youth of tomorrow embrace themselves and leadership through the guidance of S.T.E.M.

Volunteers help with community service projects that bring together the community and help educate children through STEM. Our major community service activities range from building STEM based toys and donating to children in need, updating gardens, and helping pack and pass out STEM book bags.