20 Years of the Fellows Experience: Building leaders and strengthening the St. Louis business community

Photos by Church Productions

On Sept. 10, families, colleagues, and friends gathered to celebrate the newest graduates of the Greater St. Louis, Inc. Fellows Experience.

But the room held more than the program’s 20th cohort. Alumni from across two decades returned to celebrate alongside leaders who had nominated. Former classmates reconnected and watched the next class graduate from the audience. And as the newest Fellows walked across the stage, they joined a network that now numbers more than 1,200 alumni.

For the Fellows Experience, the evening marked a milestone: 20 years of developing leaders across the St. Louis region. For those who have experienced the program, though, the significance of the anniversary goes deeper than a number. It is about what happens when people are given the opportunity to grow together, and then carry that growth back to their organizations, their communities, and out into the region.

“The 20th year is special because we honor the legacy of the Fellows Experience while boldly imagining what the next generation of leadership development should look like,” says Trezette Dixon, Senior Director at Greater St. Louis, Inc., who leads the program today.

From the beginning, the Fellows Experience was designed to be different from a traditional leadership development course. It brought mid-career and senior-level professionals together around three interconnected areas: professional development, relationship building, and civic engagement.

The program first began in 2006, when Valerie Patton founded the St. Louis Business Diversity Initiative, which established a broader regional focus on attracting, retaining, advancing, and connecting diverse talent. Two decades later, those three ideas remain at the heart of the experience.

“One of the things that stuck with me that came from one of the founding partners of the Fellows Experience was, ‘Be open to the possibilities’ Valerie Patton would say that over and over again,” says Alishea Johnson, Senior Director of Inclusive Business Practices at Centene Corporation, and member of cohort eight.

More than Another Leadership Program

When Kevin Buie was approached about participating, his first reaction was not exactly enthusiastic. “Oh no, not another leadership program,” he recalls thinking with a laugh.

Buie, now Chief of Staff in the Managing Partner’s office at Edward Jones, had participated in multiple leadership programs over his three-decade career, and he was skeptical that this one would be different.

“But what I found out very quickly was that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill leadership program. There was something special about this program,” Buie says. “It really helped me to truly see who I am as a leader.”

He went through the Fellows Experience virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet even still, said he quickly realized there was something distinctive about the program.

“The Fellows program is important in the lives of mid-career professionals because it helps those professionals to make that leap to much higher leadership positions,” Buie says. “It really gives the insight that we need to really help ourselves to move from one level to the next. So not only does it give us the education of ‘this is what a leader is, these are some of the characteristics of leaders,’ but it also helped us to see ourselves and how we fit into those higher levels of leadership and how our capabilities are needed at those higher levels of leadership.”

His experience is common among Fellows alums. The program is not simply about acquiring another set of leadership techniques; instead, it asks participants to examine how they lead, how others experience their leadership, and what they want their leadership to accomplish.

For Patrick E. Smith, Chairman and President of Ameren Illinois, who participated in the second cohort of the program, that process created a shift in perspective.

“I have had opportunity to go from the street to the C-suite, as some call it; I came in as a meter reader. I had the opportunity to be promoted once or twice, but what the Fellows did for me, I saw opportunity that I could even do more,” Smith says.

He continues: “It’s hard to be what you can’t see. And in the Fellows program, you saw some brilliant folks who were moving and doing things. It just shortened the distance that you thought was between you and someone successful.”

The experience put him in a room with leaders from across the region, including those outside of his own industry.

“It gave me the courage to think beyond my immediate circumstances and motivated me to invest in myself more,” Patrick E. Smith says. “I saw folks who were really doing strong things and that gave me some inspiration.”

For Crystal Smith, Director of Inclusive Engagement and Impact at Ameren, another lesson came from an early session about what happens when people talk about you behind closed doors. Most people, Smith says, instinctively worry about what is being said about them. Yet the Fellows Experience gave her a different way to think about it: If people are discussing your work and your leadership, perhaps that is an opportunity rather than something to fear.

“I learned to relax, settle down, and appreciate the fact that people were looking at me and speaking about me,” Smith says. “If they’re talking about you, it’s usually about a good thing.”

For her, the lessons didn’t just remain in the classroom. Smith says she could take what she learned and apply it at work the very next day.

That is part of what makes the Fellows Experience consequential: the development is designed to stay with you long after the program ends.

The Power of Growing Together

The Fellows Experience has always emphasized relationships alongside professional development. That distinction becomes especially important over the nine-month program, when participants move beyond networking and begin to know one another more deeply.

Dixon describes the program as a place where fellows can be vulnerable with one another without viewing vulnerability as weakness. Instead, it becomes part of the growth process.

“You really get a chance to get to know one another over the nine months that we’re together,” Dixon says. “And then growing together, we call it ‘triumph bonding’ because you’re growing together and you’re rising together.”

That sense of shared growth is reinforced throughout the program. Fellows celebrate birthdays, professional accomplishments, and family milestones together over the course of the nine months. They encourage one another and recognize that leadership doesn’t begin and end with someone’s job title.

“You’re in this together,” Dixon adds.

For many alumni, that togetherness is what remains long after the final session.

Dawn Higgins, a member of the inaugural cohort, and Director of Employee Engagement at Nestle Purina Pet Care Co., has spent the past two decades watching her network grow. She continues to participate in alumni activities, host fellows at Nestlé Purina, and stay connected to the program’s ongoing leadership development efforts.

Some of her greatest satisfaction comes from watching people she knows move through the experience and grow in their careers. She describes it as a “proud family moment.”

“Why would I want to keep this to myself?” Higgins says. “This needs to be shared with anyone I can share it with.”

“Val Patton always says, ‘To whom much is given, much is required,’ and I carry that with me everywhere I go,” Higgins adds. “And whatever I can do to share that with others, to reach back, bring them up, bring them along, that, for me, is what leadership is really about.”

An Investment in People and in the Region

For the organizations that send employees through the Fellows Experience, the investment is about more than individual professional development.

Crystal Smith at Ameren has seen the effects within her own organization. Fellows return with greater confidence, stronger collaboration skills, and relationships that extend beyond their own company, she says.

Alumni can reach across organizations to ask peers how they approached a challenge, solved a problem or navigated a difficult situation. Those connections create value for the companies involved — but they also create something larger.

“What companies get out of the Fellows Experience is, you get dedicated coworkers who are committed to stay because Ameren has afforded us this opportunity to participate,” Crystal Smith says. “You get growth, development, upward ascension in the organization from many of the leaders. I can think about a lot of the Fellows alumni that we have here at Ameren who’ve all stayed here and have been promoted in the organization. You get stronger employees, you get more knowledgeable, collaborative employees.”

The same dynamic can be seen at Edward Jones.

Buie says the program produces more polished leaders who understand themselves more deeply and are better prepared to lead.

“What the Fellows Experience at Greater St. Louis, Inc. provides Edward Jones is professionals who know themselves more intimately,” Buie says. “Edward Jones benefits from this because now, in my leadership, I’m able to perform my role more effectively, which allows me to help our Managing Partner to perform her role more effectively. This program helped with that.”

Patrick Smith at Ameren Illinois puts it this way: “We’ve all heard this: What if you invest in your people and then they leave, and then the second half of that is, what if you don’t invest in them and they stay?”

Companies also benefit from the relationships fellows build throughout the St. Louis business community. That cross-sector connectivity is central to the program’s larger purpose. A leader at one organization may be working through the same challenge as a leader somewhere else in the region. The Fellows network creates a trusted avenue to pick up the phone and ask, “How did you handle this?”

“So, when we have something that comes up, we can reach out to some of our peers who were in our cohort to ask how they’re working through things or handling things or just to check in because regionally we become stronger,” Crystal Smith says.

Over time, those individual relationships become part of the region’s connective tissue. And the impact compounds. Eventually, many of those fellows become the people who nominate the next generation.

Twenty Years of Leaders

Over 20 years and as many cohorts, thousands of professional relationships and countless conversations have extended beyond the program itself. And a growing number of alumni are now in positions to open the door for someone else.

For Higgins, that cycle is one of the most meaningful parts of being an alum. She entered the program after a leader at Purina encouraged her to participate. At the time, she was drawn to the opportunity to develop as a leader and to the reputation of Valerie Patton and Rosalind Reese. Twenty years later, Higgins remains invested in helping others have the same opportunity.

The continuity also matters to alumni like Buie, who experienced the program under Patton and Reese and now sees Dixon carrying that work forward. At one point, Buie says, he wondered whether anyone could replace the leadership and energy Patton and Reese brought to the program.

Then Dixon took the helm.

“She has truly taken the mantle,” he says, praising Dixon and her team for continuing to build the program. “She’s continuing to produce an amazing program for amazing leaders. Hopefully in the next 20 years, the program will continue to thrive, because this region needs it.”

For Dixon, stewardship means honoring what came before while never standing still.

“What it really means to me to steward this program forward is moving with more purpose and passion,” Dixon says. “Passion for our leaders, passion for those leaders that we grow within the program and really being the conduit for them to have success, not only professionally, but personally, and really take the Fellows Experience forward.”

The 20th anniversary is therefore both a celebration and a reset of sorts. The Fellows Experience has evolved with the region and is entering its next chapter with an intentional focus on strengthening the program for today’s leaders.

The program has been shaped around three pillars, with a deeper role for each Fellow’s organizational leader and a more intentional nine-month journey designed to move participants from participation to activation, carrying what they learn into their careers, relationships, and communities.

The next phase will also focus on expanding the reach of the Fellows Experience and strengthening the connection between current Fellows and the alumni network.

The goal remains the same: develop leaders who strengthen their organizations, their communities, and the St. Louis region.

A Celebration 20 Years in the Making

That is what made the Sept. 10 graduation especially meaningful.

Dixon sees the ceremony as a celebration of the current cohort, but also of the foundation built over two decades.

Families arrive to proudly watch Fellows walk across the stage. Alumni participate and meet members of the new cohort. Former Fellows, some now leaders in their own organizations, help welcome the newest class into the network. There is a particular joy in being celebrated this way as an adult, Dixon says, a chance they don’t always get.

It’s also a chance for Fellows to see their own growth reflected back at them by their families, colleagues, and peers, and to recognize that the people standing beside them have shared the same journey.

“If I could leave this graduating cohort with just a few words: This is just the beginning,” says Alishea Johnson at Centene. “You’ve just spent nine months going through sessions together. You’ve spent nine months really self-reflecting about who you are and what you’re doing. You’ve spent nine months building these relationships. You have to continue to pull the thread through, continue to stay connected with the Fellows Experience, continue to look back and see how you can pull people along with you.”

For Cohort 20, graduation marks the end of their nine months in the program, but not the end of their time together. They now become part of a network that stretches back to 2006, one built on the belief that leadership is not an individual pursuit.

For the Fellows Experience, leadership is something that grows through relationships. It is strengthened when people invest in one another. And it matters most when that growth is carried beyond the workplace and into the communities where people live, work, and lead.

Twenty years ago, the Fellows Experience set out to develop leaders. Two decades later, its greatest legacy may be the network those leaders have built, and the leaders they will help build tomorrow.

“I’m excited to see where Trezette and the Greater St. Louis, Inc. team takes this experience for the next 20 years,” Johnson says, “as we continue to drive the work in the community, as we continue to build the community together, and most importantly, as these individuals go out to be the future leaders of these organizations throughout the St. Louis area.”