Oakland Voice | Book Excerpt: Unleashed Potential

The Michelangelo Effect: Seeing What Already Exists

I remember a young person who walked through the doors of the East Oakland Youth Development Center for the first time with his head down and his guard all the way up. 

He wasn’t disruptive, but he wasn’t engaged either. He had already learned, at a young age, how to move through the world without being seen too closely. School hadn’t worked for him. Authority figures hadn’t earned his trust. And like so many young people in Oakland, he had begun to internalize a narrative about who he was—one shaped more by limitation than possibility.

But what I saw was something else.

I saw leadership. I saw intelligence. I saw creativity. I saw a young person who had not yet been given the environment, the language, or the opportunity to fully express who he already was.

That belief—that within every young person exists unrealized brilliance—is at the core of what I call the Michelangelo Effect.

Michelangelo once said that when he sculpted, he did not create the figure; he simply removed the excess stone to reveal what was already there. The masterpiece already existed within the marble. His role was to uncover it.

This is how I have come to understand young people. And not just young people—but communities.

The work is not to create potential. The work is to recognize it, nurture it, and remove the barriers that prevent it from being fully realized.

For too long, many of our systems—education, public safety, even health—have been designed around deficit. They ask: What’s wrong? What’s missing? What needs to be fixed? And in doing so, they often overlook the inherent strengths, resilience, and possibility that already exist within the very people they aim to serve.

At the East Oakland Youth Development Center, we chose a different path.