When Horses and Leadership Collide with Dr. Letita Mason

Dr. Letitia Mason has spent over two decades living in two worlds most people assume don't touch: elite academic admissions leadership and a horse program she and her mother ran out of High Point, North Carolina for 25 years. In this conversation, she traces it all the way back to a conversation with her grandfather about "a horse of a different color," through the founding of the HUD-funded Eagle Mounted Scholars Inner City Youth Initiative in 1982, into her PhD research on leadership self-efficacy, and finally back to the barn where she's now applying the very model she built in academia to youth equine work at Green Pastures Still Waters Barn. In this episode we cover why she kept her horse life separate from her career for decades, the outcomes her program produced (zero dropouts, zero teen pregnancies, 25 years of kids going on to college or a trade), the story behind the Mason Leadership Self-Efficacy Model, and a real conversation about wild horse roundups, BLM policy, and why the internet's outrage cycle rarely tells the whole story. Dr. Mason is speaking at the Kinship Conference this November. In this episode: The origin story behind Eagle Mounted Scholars and its 25-year run Building the Mason Leadership Self-Efficacy Model from lived observation, not a lab Why she hid her horse work from her academic colleagues for most of her career What she's looking forward to sharing at the Kinship Conference