For the latest Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) “On Leadership” blog post and newsletter column, Daryn David, PhD, PCC, reflects on a recent Grand Rounds talk entitled “LET(s)Lead: Leading with Authenticity- Developing Leaders by Developing Ourselves.” This talk was presented by Chyrell Bellamy, PhD, and Maria Restrepo-Toro, MSN, BSN, representing the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH), within the Department of Psychiatry.
By the time we wrapped up the Q & A portion of our last YCSC “On Leadership” Grand Rounds on February 4, 2025, I felt like I had been gifted a huge dose of inspiration.
It was wonderful to learn about LET(s)Lead Academy, a transformational leadership training program pioneered by Dr. Bellamy and Ms. Restrepo-Toro of Yale PRCH to nurture and unleash the leadership potential of individuals with lived experience of mental illness, homelessness, recovery, and other challenges. With cohorts spanning from New Zealand to Canada to Iceland—and with graduates spearheading a range of self-created social justice projects around the world, LET(s)Lead has proven itself to be a generative and ground-breaking global leadership initiative.
However, what most electrified me was not these admirable outcomes per se, but rather how these two women are fully walking the walk, not just talking the talk, of transformational leadership.
Dr. Bellamy and Ms. Restrepo-Toro spent a good deal of their presentation sharing steps they have taken to intentionally build and sustain their own partnership. With an eye toward bringing out complementary strengths in one another while seeking to dismantle any vestiges of the faculty-staff hierarchy between them, they have nurtured a long-standing relationship that is both supportive and open to change and discord as needed.
They also shared how they continuously lean into the techniques of appreciative inquiry in their larger project meetings, encouraging their team to surface issues and work constructively together in solving them. Dr. Bellamy demonstrated for us how she literally will “step into” herself each day, and Ms. Restrepo-Toro spoke movingly about coming to know, embrace, and utilize many gifts she can bring to this work as a Latina woman.
Bringing things even closer to home, I felt grateful for both speakers’ reflections on the culture of academic medicine. Might it be possible to more fully inform our work in academic medicine through the lived experiences and life challenges of faculty and practitioners? What would it really mean to create greater space for compassion and the holding of one another’s vulnerabilities amongst faculty and staff within academic medicine? How might we as an enterprise embrace this complementary ethos at the same time that our definition of success remains squarely nested within individual accomplishment and productivity?
While my answers to these questions are still in their infancy, what is clear is how much inspiration, potential, and role modeling are to be found in Dr. Bellamy and Ms. Restrepo-Toro's evolving and shared leadership journey.
The “On Leadership” blog was launched in 2022 to address the importance of connection, collaboration, and embodying a service leadership mindset in professional and personal contexts. YCSC Assistant Professor Daryn H. David, PhD directs the column and serves as director for leadership development and coaching initiatives in the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) Offices of Academic and Professional Development and Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion. Any opinions or views expressed in this blog are those of the author and are not intended to represent Yale University.