Diane Endres Ballweg understands the importance of both coming together and of spreading your wings. A long-time music educator in her hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, and leader of Madison's MyArts Center, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra, and Community Foundation (as well as a member of the Kennedy Center’s National Committee for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.), the former Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow has a deep appreciation for civic engagement, particularly the value of the arts to the lives of young people. But sometimes, as the nonprofit leader also comprehends, young people also need to take flight in their own ways.

This is a lesson Ballweg learned for herself, when – approximately 25 years ago – she first thought about learning to fly a plane. “I thought if I flew, maybe I could go visit my kids in college more easily,” she recalls. “I went out to the airport for the introductory flight, and it was love at first flight!”

Ballweg wasn’t content with simply earning her own pilot’s license. Instead, she drew on her experience as an educator to begin teaching high school students to take to the skies and also sponsors about 12 scholarships per year through Women in Aviation International for young female pilots.

Such experiences have continued to inspire her, prompting her to take flight further, branching out from education and into judicial reform with the Justice Project during her time at ALI. Aimed at reducing solitary confinement and other abuses of the judicial system, the Justice Project seeks to help incarcerated people rebuild their lives. Starting with three focus areas – “where we’re at, what are our goals, and what do we need to do to achieve them” – the project benefits society at large as well as the thousands of women and men who have been or are currently incarcerated. With facts and figures readily to hand, she notes: “For every year that a person is incarcerated in Wisconsin, you could pay six university college tuitions for that year.” Also, “For every $1 spend on education, we would save about $4.50 on incarceration.”

Inspiration for this project came from Frederick Douglass’s famous maxim – “it's easier to build strong children than repair broken men” – as well as Ballweg’s own experience as an educator. Amending Douglass’s words to include an important corollary – “If you don't repair the broken men, the cycle just continues to repeat.”

Although the Justice Project was a departure for Ballweg, bringing her interests and enthusiasm to bear on the judicial system, she continues to remain meaningfully involved in many other aspects of her greater community, both as president of the family foundation of Endres Manufacturing, her fourth-generation family business, and with the Odyssey Project, which helps formerly incarcerated people earn college degrees and turn their lives around.  This builds on her ongoing commitments to children, through such organizations as the Boys and Girls Club, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and Madison’s award-winning Children’s Museum, where she served as board chair, and Porchlight, which tackles the roots of homelessness. The through line, she explains, is “growing and learning: developing education at an early age.”

For Ballweg, engagement in the wider community all comes from the same place, whether that means teaching music to children or aviation to young people who never thought they’d have a chance to fly. As a teacher and mentor, she emphasizes the need to pay attention, listen, provide hope and encouragement, and show people what's possible. “You have to work with a crew, whether it's an ensemble or an orchestra or your weather briefers and your flight instructors and the tower and mechanic.”

When you put in the work, however, it all pays off. “Every time you listen to music, it touches your heart. And every time I take off,” she says, “it's beautiful.”