You Know Leadership When You See It
Mike McGirr for Chair of the Rural Caucus of the Virginia Democratic Party
People spend a lot of time trying to define leadership. They build charts, list traits, and write books about it. But the truth is simpler. Leadership comes in all kinds of shapes and temperaments, and you know it when you see it. More than that, you know it when you feel it. You know it when a person steadies the room just by being in it.
I was raised around veterans who understood the difference between talking about leadership and living it. They told stories about the kind of military officer who never had to shout. The men followed him because he had earned their trust in the mud and cold, not in a classroom. Later in sports, I saw the same thing. A good coach does not have to sell you on his vision. You follow him because you know he is leading somewhere worth going. In business, real leaders had the same quality. They made people want to show up, pitch in, and try harder.
Leadership does not force people to follow. People follow because they recognize the real thing.
And that is the kind of leadership Mike McGirr brings to every room he enters.
Mike’s family story begins in Appalachian soil long before he ever returned here. His mother was raised by two widows who survived on a small plot of garden. His father slept in the rafters of a one room house warmed by a pot belly stove. Both families had outhouses, hand pump wells, and water with so much mineral buildup the pipes needed changing every couple of years. Poverty did not pass by. It stayed awhile.
His parents were the first in their family lines to get beyond a primary education. His father played sports in high school for the simple privilege of a hot shower. He and his brother worked wherever they could. They harvested vegetables in the muck fields with migratory workers. They drove the milk truck before school. They hammered nails for the Shoemaker family’s building business. When they graduated in 1959, they left home to chase a better life, and the people they left behind felt the loss.
Travelers Insurance recruited his father and moved the family to Hartford. There they were told, quietly but firmly, that their Appalachian twang and small town ways marked them as outsiders. So they took diction classes to soften their speech, etiquette lessons to help them blend into middle class circles, and worked their way upward with determination that became family DNA. They passed that grit to Mike.
Mike carried those lessons through Rochester Institute of Technology and a career that took him through print, photography, design, marketing, and national advertising. Later he moved into community food work, building institutional food access networks, cooking in Atlanta, and forming agricultural, mental health, and suicide-prevention partnerships to help independent farmers in crisis. Those lessons shaped him long before he settled in Bristol and called it home.
Living in eleven different places taught him something else. People will either recognize sincerity or they will recoil from anything unfamiliar. In Northborough, Massachusetts, he was “Mike from California.” In Calistoga, he was “Mike from back east.” Even his own kin in Stark County called him “Cousin Mike who went to college.” Being gay added another layer to that outsider lens, but it never kept him from showing up. Mike has found a real passion for labor. From farmers and ranchers working their land, to unions organized to protect their communities and build strong families that endure. They see his commitment to their causes and his loyalty to the working man, because Mike knows Work Boots Built America, not the billionaires. They recognize the honesty, the clarity, and the steady heart he brings into every conversation, every meeting.
Here in Southwest Virginia, Mike’s leadership shows up in the work. He is part of the Richmond Federal Reserve Community Investment Cohort, the Regional Workforce Housing Alliance, Beyond Housing’s Special Projects, and draws on resources through Virginia Housing, Appalachian Funders Network, and private foundations. He serves on the Bristol Industrial Development Authority. He sits through Metropolitan Planning Organization meetings, Believe in Bristol gatherings, VI Forward discussions, Feeding Southwest Virginia projects, and every other room where the decisions about our future are shaped.
People follow him because he listens. Because he brings calm to rooms that are often tight with frustration. Because he asks the right questions. Hard questions. Because he knows how to bring people together who have not agreed on anything in a long time.
He is also the kind of person who can take so-called locals to the Mendota Store for salty peanut butter cookies and cherry popovers, show them where the beavers and green herons live at the Old Reservoir, and lead them to the secret glen where the blonde morels rise in spring. He learns a place until it becomes part of him. He is “rural” Virginia.
Being local is a choice. It is the work you put into a community, not the number of years your family name has been on the mailbox.
The Rural Caucus of the Virginia Democratic Party needs someone who can fill a room at the local county committee meetings, build trust, bring people together, and lead with steadiness instead of noise.
Mike McGirr is that leader.
And rural Democrats know it.
Contact information: MichaelRay4VA
Be curious, not judgmental.
Till next time, that’s the story from the ‘Back Forty’. — John W. Peace II
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John W. Peace II is a fifth-generation farmer from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he grew up on his family’s dairy, Clinch Haven Farms, and still lives today farming hay and beef cattle. He’s a proud father to Trey and Shelby Peace, and partner in life to Cathy Swinney. A Virginia Tech graduate with graduate studies at Penn State, he served as the youngest Chair of the Wise County Board of Supervisors (2004–2008). John co-owns SafeHavenServices.co and urTOPIX LLC (urTopixLLC.com), a Democratic campaign consulting firm focused on reaching rural voters that is sponsored by www.RuralAmericaRising.com PAC. He’s also a two-time Amazon bestselling author. Learn more at www.JohnWPeace.com.