What happens when the drive that fueled national titles, battlefield resilience, and academic honors is redirected toward rebuilding lives, organizations, and communities? In this deeply human and emotionally grounded ThinkND conversation, Angela Logan (St. Andre Bessette Academic Director of the Master of Nonprofit Administration Program) sat down with Danielle Green ’99 and Dr. Shantel Thomas for a candid, insightful exploration of what it means to lead not just with excellence, but with purpose.
From the Court and the Battlefield to the Boardroom
Angela Logan opened the session by inviting the audience to consider the long arc of leadership—how traits like discipline, resilience, and commitment migrate from sports and service into the social impact sector. Both guests—former elite athletes and now recognized nonprofit leaders—embody that arc.
Danielle Green, a Notre Dame basketball alum and U.S. Army veteran who lost her dominant arm in Iraq, now speaks for the Wounded Warrior Project, channeling pain into advocacy. Dr. Shantel Thomas, an NCAA Woman of the Year for Ohio and now a licensed clinician, founded the Center for Healing the Hurt, supporting trauma recovery through culturally responsive mental health care. Together, they reflected on the lessons they carry from their years of competition—and the new lessons that came only through suffering, adaptation, and reflection.
Leadership That Starts with Loss
Green spoke with disarming honesty about the moment everything changed—waking up in Walter Reed after her injury. But what followed, she emphasized, was not just physical recovery but a redefinition of self. Losing an arm didn’t mean losing her leadership. “I wasn’t done,” she said, recounting how she built a new sense of mission rooted in service to others navigating their own losses.
Thomas shared a different but equally powerful origin story—how her early work in corrections and clinical care revealed the systemic trauma cycles disproportionately affecting Black communities. Rather than despair, she chose to act. Founding A Sound Mind Counseling and later her nonprofit, she reframed her leadership as a form of justice work—healing not just individuals but systems.
The New Discipline: Leading from the Inside Out
A shared theme emerged across the conversation: the transformation of discipline. Athletic excellence demanded toughness, but true leadership, they agreed, demands emotional fluency—the courage to ask for help, the humility to listen, the resilience to keep showing up. Green noted that authenticity became her most trusted leadership tool, while Thomas described how mental health—so long taboo—is now the foundation of her organizational practice.
Logan, drawing from her own scholarship and lived experience, helped frame this transition not as a loss of strength, but a reorientation of strength. Leadership, in this frame, isn’t about control—it’s about servant presence, about becoming trustworthy in times of uncertainty.
Reimagining Leadership Models
Green and Thomas also critiqued prevailing models of leadership—models too often built around domination, hierarchy, and perfection. What they offered instead were models grounded in recovery, faith, and collective care.
Thomas emphasized that trauma-informed leadership is not a luxury in her line of work—it’s the job. And Green reflected on how, even as a motivational speaker, she often shows up “not at 100%,” but still with purpose. Both resisted the myth of invulnerability that so often accompanies success.
Conclusion: Not Just Winners, But Builders
What makes this conversation linger is how it redefines leadership not as the domain of the undefeated, but of the rebuilders—those who’ve lost, learned, and chosen to lead anyway. Green and Thomas are not simply champions-turned-leaders. They are architects of healing, advocates for those silenced, and practitioners of courage that is neither loud nor polished—but real.
And under Angela Logan’s facilitation, this became more than a story of two remarkable women. It became a meditation on the kind of leadership our world needs—one shaped not by ego, but by empathy; not by control, but by calling.
