Joe Nail // Lead for America
Building a generation of young civic leaders.
Lead for America (LFA) is building a bench of distributed civic leadership by helping America’s most dynamic and diverse young leaders find high-impact civic roles in both their hometown communities and the country’s highest-need cities and towns.
In its first year, LFA helped more than 100 young leaders enter high-impact public service roles. 50 of these young leaders went through LFA’s premier local government Fellowship program. LFA received applications from nearly 300 colleges and universities and over 65% of the leaders it serves are people of color, while nearly half are first-generation college students and Pell-Grant eligible. LFA’s student leaders include Truman and Udall Scholars, Marine Corps Veterans, and Division 1 Athletes. Lead for America aims to identify, train, and support one million leaders by 2040.
Joe Nail is an experienced social entrepreneur, having co-founded a micro-finance fund in Sierra Leone and two education nonprofits that have helped more than 4,000 underserved students navigate the college admissions process, learn about global issues, and find their place in the world. Joe previously served as a Congress Bundestag Scholar — working on initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels of the German government, while volunteering as a firefighter and English & German teacher for Syrian refugees. Joe graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2.5 years as a Morehead-Cain, National Merit, and Coca-Cola Scholar.
