Alumni Profile: Philip McAdoo

When he enrolled in the master's program in Transformative Leadership, Philip McAdoo (TLD '07) was a professional actor performing on Broadway in the musical Rent. In his free time during the day, he cofounded a nonprofit called Teen2Teen. The organization brings together young people from the inner city and suburbs to collaborate on theater projects. Since the Transformative Leadership program is offered online, McAdoo says, "My education at CIIS allowed me to continue working with the programs in New York that I'd established. I was applying what I learned in class online on a day-to-day basis. The same questions that challenged me at CIIS, I used to challenge the kids: how to think about leadership, authenticity, and being centered."

As his capstone project for his MA, he organized a trip to China for a group of low-income youth from the Lower East Side in New York City who had never traveled. "The experience of visiting another country really meant a lot to those young people. Part of the project involved raising the funds for their plane tickets," he recalls. "The Transformative Leadership program involved study, but it also was about actually doing something in the world."

While at CIIS, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah interviewed McAdoo about how the kids he worked with reacted to reading the auto­biography of Sidney Poitier, the first person of African descent to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. "I got to eat dinner with Oprah and Sidney Poitier on his eightieth birthday," McAdoo remembers. "Oprah asked Sidney Poitier if he was afraid of dying, and he said, ‘How ungrateful would that be?'"

Now McAdoo serves as the diversity director for Pace Academy, a private school in Atlanta. He also travels to South Africa every summer, where he coordinates the summer arts programs for the Ubuntu Education Fund, running camps for young people who have lost parents to AIDS in the township of Port Elizabeth. "Kids sometimes walk for two hours to get to camp. One summer I taught them songs from Rent, which concerns HIV, and they sang ‘Seasons of Love' on their way to camp. It's an incredible experience."