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Chapter 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-5812-9.ch015
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This chapter chronicles the story of how the nonproft intermediary organization Intercultural Development
Research Association (IDRA) and a community organization, A Resource in Serving Equality (ARISE)
Adelante, also known as ARISE, worked together to expand servant leadership among Mexican American
immigrant families living in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. With their strong focus on equity,
IDRA and ARISE embraced and then expanded the traditional 10 characteristics of servant leadership to
include advocacy and action. This chapter describes the history and background of both organizations,
relates the work of these two organizations to servant leadership, shows how they were able to expand
servant leadership to advocacy and action, provides lessons learned, and discusses next steps for how
other organizations might apply these additional two characteristics to increase equity.
INTRODUCTION
IDRA and ARISE (also called ARISE Adelante) have long embodied the concept of servant leadership
first described by Robert K. Greenleaf in his 1970 publication, The Servant as Leader (1970). The or-
ganizations’ work in distributive leadership and shared family leadership (Chavkin, 2017; Montemayor,
2007a; Montemayor & Chavkin, 2016, 2020, 2021) follows a strong parallel to the tenets of servant
IDRA and ARISE Expand Servant
Leadership to Advocacy and
Action in South Texas
Aurelio M. Montemayor
Intercultural Development and Research Association, USA
Nancy Feyl Chavkin
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2251-4518
Texas State University, USA
Lourdes Flores
ARISE Adelante, USA