New Student Leadership & Learning Director Emily Pigott Shares Her Vision for the Future

By: David Harding, Writer
August 14, 2023

Emily Pigott was recently hired to lead ACSI’s Student Leadership & Learning Department. Our ACSI writer, David Harding, sat down with her to hear her vision for the future.   

DH: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

EP: I began my educational journey in 1999 and was at the same school, South Florida Christian Academy, for 20 years. I served as a teacher in the high school and as a principal there, and it was at SFCA that I first began the student leadership development journey that I'm on. 

The head of school and I co-founded the Student Leadership Academy at SFCA, and the purpose was to train and develop student leaders who would go out and have a cultural impact. We wanted students to fully understand leadership and what it truly meant so that they were ready when they left our four walls. That is where my love for student leadership really began, because you could see the difference it made in the students’ lives. 

I spent 20 years there doing that and then had the opportunity to go serve at Student Leadership University as their executive director. I traveled globally conducting student leadership development in the Middle East, Israel, Bethlehem, the Golan Heights, to Europe, and everywhere in between. While I was at SLU, I co-authored with the vice president an eight-semester leadership development curriculum. That was a lot of fun, probably one of the most challenging things I've ever done.

I was in this role at SLU when I attended an ACSI FSi conference and David Ray mentioned an open position at ACSI. He asked me if I would be interested, and my first answer was that I love the thought of it, but I'm fine. He said, “You know where I am,” and then I went and slept on it and found him the next day, and his words were, “I knew you'd be back.” It was just a great opportunity—to serve at ACSI—as ACSI was so important in my journey as an educator, especially as an administrator.

DH: Tell me a little about the history of ACSI’s Student Leadership & Learning Department and where you see it headed in the next couple of years.

EP: ACSI has been involved in student activities since its inception in 1978. It has always been a department that comes alongside schools and serves them well by enriching their students’ learning experience. The team making it happen has been consistent and incredible. 

Now what we're going to do is take it up about ten notches. We want to look at the educational experiences that students are having and basically advance them in two different ways. Number one, we will be equipping the educators, which is something that will be brand new to this department. Along with the ministry team and professional development, we want to equip educators so they can develop student leaders. 

We want to bolster students’ creative thinking, problem solving, and leadership skills—teach them how to serve well. God has uniquely and perfectly gifted and wired each of them for the plan He has for them. We want to do our part in helping them discover what that plan is, what those unique giftings are.

How we do that is through our immersive events and experiences, so they get to discover their strengths and learn how to use them effectively. The ultimate goal is to equip student leaders who are skilled and motivated to go out to the landscape of our world, which is a crazy place right now, and impact their communities for Jesus. When they do, cultural change will take place.

I love education because I believe it is the solution to a multitude of problems. So is student leadership—a student who understands their giftings and abilities and knows how to use them to impact the world. We get to come alongside schools and help them with that: to do the heavy lifting that they may not necessarily be able to do because they are in the weeds training them in math, the sciences, and things like that. 

Right now, the Student Leadership & Learning team serves around 700 member schools, we put on over 300 events, and we will impact about 40,000 students in the next couple of years. Our hope, prayer, and goal that we have as a team is that those numbers just skyrocket. When you think about all the schools and students that ACSI serves, then we look at that and say, well, we're going to take those 40,000 students and we're going to double that and eventually triple that. 

In five years, our goal is to start seeing the cultural impact of our students. We hope to see the world and the landscape changing. We’ll witness more students out in the world that are confident in who they are. They’ll understand the truths found in Scripture. And they will be fully capable because they will understand how to lead and what influential leadership looks like. In five years, because that means we've had five years with them, we should be seeing these things happening in the culture, and that’s our vision. That's part of what we can't wait to see happen. 

DH: What I'm hearing is a definite shift from just providing students with extra-curricular activities to using those activities as a vehicle to train them in leadership and go back to their schools and be leaders. Is that correct?

EP: Yes. Math Olympics, spelling bees, fine arts performances, Venture Startup Innovation Challenge, which is like Shark Tank, debate clubs, speech meets—those are all very important things in learning how to articulate something, how to study, prepare, and present content. All of those things are necessary, but we want to then take those enrichment opportunities, as we call them, and go a step further by putting students in experiential opportunities. This way they can exercise all that they learned in those components, and they're applying them in leadership ways because that's the only way we're going to have a cultural impact is if we use the way God has gifted and wired us.

Learn more about ACSI Student Leadership & Learning Experiences at https://www.acsi.org/studentleadership.