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Marketing

The most interesting thing about the East Village is the people who inhabit it. Some neighborhoods, it might be the stores or the bars, restaurants or the art scene. Try as we might, we’re not there just yet. In the meantime it’s the people, more of whom are moving in every day. Along with their furniture, for better or worse, they bring their personalities. In the case of Wanyee Leonard, his is the kind that adds character to a village steadily extricating itself from a years long identity crisis.

Leonard came to Long Beach in 1990 to attend CSULB where he graduated with a Degree in Communications.
He moved into the Lafayette in February of 2009 and credits Sharon and Geronimo as well as the fine folks at Crestway for making the transition from his previous residence near the traffic circle seem effortless.

As the President and CEO of 3E Consulting Services, a company he founded while working as an educator at Long Beach City College, Leonard provides business strategies, grants development and community planning to non profits and for profits in the Southern California area.
His company has raised over $69 billion with an 89% success ratio in procuring grants and contracts for more than 325 companies to date.

Wanyee Leonard was born in Oakland, but later uprooted to Oxnard at the age of 12 after the breakup of his parent’s marriage. It was there that he spent his formative Jr. High and High School years, excelling in track and field, singing and prescient of the career path he would choose, public speaking.

“I did the whole student council thing and I remember after freshmen year, because I was always considered to be such an eloquent speaker, nobody would run against me. They didn’t want to lose.”

During Leonard’s High School graduation ceremonies he was recognized for being the only candidate in the district to run unopposed for student council 3 times.
It was then that Leonard realized that he had a few marketable gifts.
Most important among these was his poise.
“But so many things that happen in between where I, you know, like everyone else, you doubt yourself.”

Leonard credits his family’s unflagging support in getting him through the periods of insecurity as well as helping to shape the organizational skills he would utilize later in life.

“I was raised by my brothers and sisters. One helped get me ready for school in the morning. One picked me up. One supervised homework. And one supervised everyone else supervising me. I was truly managed. My father and mother would come home and there was a checklist. Did he do this? Did he do that?”

Growing up in a Pentecostal neighborhood where attending church 5 to 6 days a week was the norm; Leonard’s alternative lifestyle was never an issue with his parents.

“They outed me! Are you kidding me? My father, before he died, told my brothers and sisters, you know, Wanyee is a little…but love him anyway. They knew. They knew that love is love.”

As a child Leonard spent 2 summers at Juilliard School in New York and went on to perform in musical theater and opera.
He took this experience in the performing arts and began consulting for independent films as well as for projects with heavy hitters like Sony and Disney.

“I live a polar opposite life on any given day” Leonard says. “One day I’m dressed up going to a business meeting and maybe getting together a state discretionary grant for 29 churches or another day I am walking around with an array of actors and doing indie films. An average day now looks like, maybe I’ll get up in the morning before ten o’clock, and maybe the fuck I won’t.”

The rest of the day is spent working on scripts for his movies, making calls, taking production meetings, and managing the business at 3E Consulting.
“3E Consulting is what pays the bills,” he says. “One of the things that’s special about my production company is that we don’t get outside [film] financing because the big company pays for it.”
One of Leonard’s short films, “Clown Down”, an avant-garde story about the killing of an executive director of a non-profit has gone on to win awards.

As my interview with Leonard winds down, he shares with me something his father once told him.
“Just because you suck cock doesn’t mean you have to be a punk.”
Words to live by, my friends.

At Lema School in the north of Nigeria, children and teachers try to make the most of their new building despite the lack of furniture, books or salaries for the staff. The school was built after community members successfully lobbied their local overnment with skills that they learnt on a training course run by MCDF. The course helped them to learn how to speak out and influence local government policies on behalf of their village and to ensure that budgets are handled transparently. ..However, just four months after the school was completed the building is already deteriorating. The village believe that this is just another example of corruption in Nigeria, although this has not been proved in court. They are now pressuring the government to share the budget for the school so that they can cross check it with the building contractor. "Corruption is everywhere here" says Alh Yusuf Usmann who lobbied for the school, "the government organises things that never work, they inflate contracts deceiving the public. They promise to do something and then just don't do it, or it is badly done even though they have spent lots of money on it. We are challenging this now"