Serve the City: How Small Acts of Service Transform Leaders and Teams

Have you ever had one of those weekends you know you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life?

Recently, Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring traveled to Brussels, Belgium, to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of Serve the City International. What began two decades ago with a handful of ideas about serving the city has grown into a global movement spanning 35 countries and 6 continents—logging 3.5 million volunteer hours in 2024 alone and impacting an estimated 10 million lives.

At the heart of this gathering was a simple but transformative conviction:

Many people doing small things together can make a big difference.

Linda and Brian were invited to open the conference with their keynote experience, “Unfolded: The Transformative Power of Serving,” and to lead a breakout on how to approach challenge, change, and uncertainty as leaders who serve.

This is the story behind that experience—and what leaders everywhere can learn from Serve the City.

Beginning with Open Hands

International travel is often noisy, hectic, and disorienting. People had flown in from places like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Australia, across Europe, and the United States. Some had navigated visa issues, multiple layovers, and long nights in airports just to be in the room.

So instead of starting with content, slides, or strategy, Brian and Linda began with stillness.

They invited everyone to sit quietly, open their hands, and breathe together. No one was asked to breathe in unison, yet the room gradually settled into a shared rhythm of inhales and exhales. With volunteer interpreters quietly translating into French and other languages via small earpieces, hundreds of leaders entered the conference simply by being present.

It was a mindfulness practice, but it was also a picture of the posture required for serving:

• Setting down the things that preoccupy our attention
• Opening our hands to receive what is needed for the next act of service
• Preparing our hearts to be present to the people in front of us

As Brian later reflected, serving often begins with a decision to prepare, release, and be ready to receive.

When Serving Becomes a Leadership Classroom

Throughout the conference, Linda and Brian heard stories of service from across the globe: rebuilding homes with recycled bricks, assembling food for people in need, painting schools, and countless other “small” acts of kindness.

Linda and Brian believe there is almost no better classroom for leadership than serving.

• When you roll up your sleeves to serve, you discover new things about your own strengths and limits.
• When you are the one in need, you encounter the vulnerability of being served.
• When you serve with others, you develop muscles of collaboration, humility, and courage that no off-site leadership training can replicate.

Many of Linda, Brian, and Nathan’s most enduring leadership lessons—whether in Juneau, Alaska, Queens, New York, or elsewhere—are rooted in service projects and volunteer experiences. Service has a way of revealing what kind of leader you are and what kind of leader you’re becoming.

It’s not just nonprofit leaders who understand this. Over lunch, Brian spoke with the European Director of the Toyota Mobility Foundation about why service matters in business. When teams serve outside the office, they reconnect with their capacity for compassion and care—and often bring that back into how they treat colleagues, clients, and customers.

Sometimes the person who most needs your compassion isn’t the stranger on the street. It’s the teammate sitting across the hall.

Leading Through Challenge, Change, and Uncertainty

During the conference, Linda and Brian led a breakout session called:

Unfolded: How to Approach Challenge, Change, and Uncertainty

They began by acknowledging a reality we all feel: uncertainty is everywhere. Social, political, and economic headlines often feel like an unending stream of negativity. Many leaders are overwhelmed, even paralyzed, by the sheer volume of unknowns they’re facing.

But their invitation was this: While uncertainty is all around us, there is also a certainty within us.

To access that certainty, they invited participants to think of their life as an unfolded map:

• On one part of the map, place your finger where you faced a significant challenge. Who was there with you? What year was it? How did you get through it?
• On another part of the map, mark where you experienced change: learning something new, making a pivotal decision, shifting direction.
• Notice how, again and again, you have already navigated challenge and change.

By naming those moments, leaders remembered that they’ve always carried the resources to face uncertainty—within their story, their relationships, and their faith or values.

The conversations that followed happened in small groups, across cultures and accents, but with shared themes:

• The role of family and loved ones in helping people keep going
• The tension between wanting to care for others and needing to recognize your own needs
• The courage it takes to acknowledge that you’re overwhelmed, and the humility to ask for help

The takeaway: When leaders feel stuck in uncertainty, sometimes the next step is to accept the challenge right in front of them or to pursue a new change, rather than trying to predict every possible future scenario.

The DNA of a Movement: Clear, Repeatable Phrases

As this was the 20th year of Serve the City, I wanted to hear from Brian and Linda about what they think might be the cause of such longevity. They told me that one of the most fascinating parts of Serve the City’s story is how its founder, Carleton Deal, communicates. As Linda describes it, Carleton has a gift for creating clear, repeatable phrases—pocket-sized ideas that people can carry into their cities:

• A serving revolution
• Cross the line (from affluence toward those in poverty)
• We know them by their need—can we know them by their name?
• Small acts of service

These phrases are more than slogans. They are identity-shaping statements that make the movement:

• Memorable – easy to recall and retell
• Transferable – applicable in Brussels, Geneva, Manila, Amsterdam, Sydney, and beyond
• Scalable – able to grow without everything depending on one charismatic personality

As Linda notes, this is not a movement built solely on Carleton’s presence. It’s built on a mission and shared philosophy of kindness and service. Today, Serve the City is recognized as NGO of the Year in Europe (awarded by the European Union), has spawned a volunteer app called ServeNow (with over 140,000 volunteer hours tracked through it), and has leaders in Africa boldly declaring:

“Serve the City will be in every country in Africa by 2030.”

That’s what happens when a vision moves from one person’s dream to a community’s shared DNA.

From Global Service to Your Local Team

So what does all of this mean if you’re leading a team, a department, or a local organization?

Here are a few practical invitations:

1. Start with open hands.
   Before the next big meeting, offsite, or initiative, create space for stillness. Even 2–3 minutes of breathing together with open hands can shift the energy in the room from frenetic to present.
2. Treat service as a leadership lab.
   Look for opportunities to serve together as a team—beyond your walls and beyond your usual roles. Then debrief: What did we learn about ourselves? Each other? Our strengths? Our blind spots?
3. Name what’s already on your map.
   Whether individually or as a team, reflect on challenges you’ve already faced and changes you’ve already navigated. Let your own story remind you that you’re more capable and resilient than you may feel.
4. Craft simple, repeatable language.
   What short phrases capture your team’s mission or culture? How can you make them clear, memorable, and easy for others to repeat? Sometimes the right words help a vision outlive its founder.
5. Remember that leaders are hope artists too.
   One of Serve the City’s co-founders likes to say that volunteers are “hope artists”—people who create hope in places of need. Leaders do the same inside organizations when they offer presence, encouragement, and practical help.

“Our Hands Need to Be Unfolded”

As they prepared for the Brussels conference, Linda and Brian sat in a café in Paris and wrote a quote that framed their keynote:

“When we serve with open hands, we create a space for something to land.”

To serve well, we often have to set something down—our distractions, our fear of not doing it perfectly, our need to control the outcome—so that we can pick up a paintbrush, a bag of groceries, a brick, or a listening ear.

In the end, as Linda says, our hands need to be unfolded.

For leaders, that might look like opening your hands to:

• A new way of showing up for your team
• A posture of humility and curiosity
• A renewed commitment to serving your city, your organization, or your neighborhood

Because when leaders serve with open hands, they create space for something powerful to land: hope, connection, and transformation.

Reflection Question for Teams:

Where is your team being invited to “serve with open hands” in this season—and what might you need to set down in order to pick it up?