I am writing to humbly ask for your support.

It has been six wonderful months since we received the news that The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership, Inc. had been approved as a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit organization. As a recognized public charity, we are now eligible to receive contributions, grants, bequests, and other kinds of financial support. Financial donations to the Spears Center are now tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the tax laws.

Over the past two decades, I have devoted myself to the joyful task of encouraging a better world through expanding our understanding and practices of servant-leadership. Much of my work has focused on communicating these ideas through a series of books, journals, articles, newsletters, essays, interviews, the internet, radio and television appearances, and hundreds of public presentations around the world. Slowly-but-surely, public awareness and practice of servant-leadership has grown.

The Spears Center board and I are working hard to put into place the basic building blocks for growing The Spears Center as a long-term resource for servant-leadership information and inspiration. Evidence of the fruit of our work may be found throughout this newsletter.

As a young start-up organization, we are running a very tight ship. Indeed, I continue to do this work without being paid a salary, while also making significant personal financial contributions myself to The Spears Center. While this has enabled us, as an organization, to get off to a quick and extraordinarily productive start, it has also taken its toll on our personal savings. Long-term realities require the ongoing development of various financial sources, including the possibility of your own support.

As chief steward of our precious resources, I have recently and reluctantly decided not to attend the upcoming Greenleaf Center conference after eighteen years of close involvement with it. While I will miss being there in the flesh, my heart and spirit will most certainly be there.

My primary concern at this time involves doing what I can to begin to reach out to those of you who value my work, and to ask for your support of The Spears Center’s ongoing initiatives in servant-leadership.

If you are willing-and-able to do so, I would be most grateful at this time to receive your support in one of the two following ways—

1. By sending a check with your financial contribution to The Spears Center, 329 Garden Grace Drive, Indianapolis, IN 46239. Any and all amounts will truly be helpful and deeply appreciated.

2. By donating some of your unused air miles to The Spears Center. This can also be a big help by allowing for the possibility of increased travel, while simultaneously freeing up limited funds for other important uses.

Foresight is a characteristic of servant-leadership. Robert Greenleaf called foresight the central ethic of leadership. He went on to say that the lack of foresight is, “sometimes the failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events, and to take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act.” I would add that the smallest of absences in life can sometimes create the largest of losses, in unexpected and unpredictable ways. I am inspired by Bob Greenleaf, and by my own sense of foresight, to take the right action at this early date, and to ask for your financial support.

With sincerity, and humility, I hope that you may be willing to accept this call. Together, we are truly making a difference in the world.

Warm regards,
Larry
Larry C. Spears, President & CEO
The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership