How Change Happens

6Be Leaderfull

“My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

—Ella Baker

MADD FOUNDER CANDY LIGHTNER is one of the most recognizable and heralded leaders of all the modern movements we studied for this book. Her organization is synonymous with the triumphant anti–drunk driving crusade. Lightner founded MADD in 1980 in a fit of grief—and rage—after one of her young daughters was killed by a drunk driver while walking down a bicycle lane to a church carnival. Lightner was both anguished and incensed because she learned her daughter’s killer—a repeat offender—would likely not do any jail time. Within five years, Lightner had built up MADD from a scrappy California-based group into a $13 million national organization with more than 450 local chapters and two million members and donors nationwide.¹ Teaming up with Cindi Lamb and other bereaved mothers of children harmed or killed by drunk drivers, Lightner and her MADD crusaders convinced Ronald Reagan to initiate a Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving, and governors nationwide established task forces. A comely, articulate, impassioned spokeswoman, Lightner was an instant media darling: She appeared on popular TV shows like Phil Donahue and NBC premiered the made-for-TV movie, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers: The Candy Lightner Story which made MADD a kitchen-table name. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History has memorialized Lightner, holding in its archives her vanity license tags, “I AM MADD,” among ...