Below the Line With Julia Rugg, CEO of Wings for Kids

Welcome to Below the Line, a monthly question-and-answer column in which Chancellor Bennie L. Harris, Ph.D., of the University of South Carolina Upstate interviews a leader about change, technology, education, and leadership. This month, Dr. Harris spoke with Julia Rugg, the chief executive officer at Wings for Kids, a nonprofit organization that equips students, educators, and youth-serving organizations with skills to thrive inside and outside of the classroom. (This article has been edited for clarity, content, and length.)

Harris: You said that when you first read Wings for Kids “Words to Live By,” you saw your own childhood reflected back at you. Can you take us back to that childhood? What did growing up in those circumstances actually feel like on a day-to-day basis?

Rugg: Of course. First, let me start by saying Wings for Kids is a 30-year-old nonprofit in the youth development space. We serve elementary school-aged children who live in underserved communities. Our mission is all about helping kids to stay in school, succeed in school, and thrive in life. 

The “Words to Live By” are really the way that we build those skills. It's everyday language to help talk about self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness, and relationship skills. We break it down with our words to live by, talking about things like, “I love and accept who I am on the inside. Life's full of surprises that make me feel different ways. If I can control myself, I'll have much better days.”

I moved to Charleston almost 16 years ago and came across this nonprofit. They were looking for someone, I was looking for a job, and the first thing I did was go to the website and I came across the “Words to Live By.” It resonated with me in such a deep way because I'm a first-generation South Korean immigrant. 

My dad came here in 1971, and I was born in what was considered the Baltimore projects. We had one mattress, three daughters, and two parents in this home. When you come from really nothing, you don't really know what you don't know. Your world is just a pin drop. Growing up and then having to navigate life, school, education, different circumstances, you realize there's so much that you can be exposed to, like technical skills and academics that you can learn. But what's really hard to learn are these kinds of skills that really help you thrive in any situation: how you become assertive, how you become confident, how you ask for help in certain situations.

What I did a lot of was code-switching. I knew how to be in certain environments to give off the perception of what I think was expected of me. But I don't think I really found who I was and acknowledged and owned it until I found Wings for Kids.

Harris: You built a career that included a law degree from the University of Maryland. Why did you go in that direction?

Rugg: My deeper interest is always trying to figure out how to feel more empowered. At the time I thought that if you could understand the laws of this country and what's going on, you could feel more equipped, more assertive and empowered, and better able to help contribute to society. 

Harris: So you went from being a federal government attorney to joining Wings for Kids as chief program officer in 2011, and then you became CEO in October 2024. 

Rugg: It was growth opportunity. Every day I grew as a person, and that was most important to me — feeling challenged and understanding how I could be better, all coupled with the fact that I love kids. 

I'm going to be honest: I had just had my daughter. She was about a year, maybe 18 months old. Being around little kids can be a little unnerving as an adult. You're like, “What do I do, what do I say?” You're just not sure how to interact. But it is absolutely the most precious time. I say all the time, if I'm having a bad day, I fill my bucket by hanging out with our kids.

Harris: I fill my bucket by hanging out with my kids.

Rugg: Yes. The freshness, the curiosity, the no-filter; it's just honesty every single day that comes at you. And that's something I appreciate.

Harris: You're very intentional. How does that show up at home?

Rugg: I've got a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old. My 16-year-old got a little bit of the short end because I didn't spend enough time at Wings yet. With my 12-year-old, I just had so much more patience. Kids are young, they don't have the words, they throw tantrums, they get emotional. And I stayed calm. I was able to get down at his level, breathe, give him a moment. 

As a parent — and trust me, there were many of those moments where I'm like, “just get out of the bathtub” — you're racing, you've got a lot of things to do, and you don't have the patience. But that's the biggest thing Wings has taught me on a personal level: it is all about me. It's not the kids. Kids observe and they model the behavior that they're around, and that's where they learn. Especially in today's age with young kids K-5, they're going to tune you out in about 10 seconds.

Harris: Tell me more about Wings for Kids: who it serves and who it's trying to teach.

Rugg: We are 30 years old. We started our roots in youth development after school. Our founder, Ginny Deerin, who's a rock star, found herself in her own midlife crisis thinking about her life choices. She had an opportunity where different things culminated, and she wished she had these skills in her own life. She started Wings for Kids as a summer program for two years for girls of different backgrounds, and then quickly realized we didn't have enough time. We wanted more time with more kids. So it converted to an after-school program. 

We are school-based and community center-based. We are different from most after-school programs in that we are not drop-in. Our kids come three hours a day, five days a week for the whole school year. We have smaller staff-to-student ratios: about 1 to 10 in academics and 1 to 15 in our other enrichment programs. We have a full-time director, and we typically hire part-time college-age and older students. 

What we're very intense about is the training we give to our staff: 60 to 70 hours prior to working with kids. Our training is really focused on how the adult develops their own social-emotional skills in order to model them for kids. Kids in our program have fun. It is loud, we play music, they get field trips and enrichment. We focus on academics, but most importantly, every day they are getting teachable moments: how to calm myself down, how to pivot because all of a sudden it's raining and we can't do the activities we planned outside. 

We teach a very intentional social-emotional learning curriculum modeled through the staff in teachable moments with a layer of explicit curriculum taught every day. 

The elementary schools where we are located are Title I, so most of the kids are 90 percent to 100 percent within the federal poverty lines. We work in urban and rural communities. Founded in Charleston, South Carolina, we have a community center program there and programs in Atlanta, Georgia.

Harris: Give me a moment where you looked at your work and thought, “Wow, that's what it's all about.” 

Rugg: We have something called Community Unity where we start our day with “Heys and Praise,” an opportunity for anybody in the room to give praise to one another: student to student, student to their staff member, staff member to kids, peer-to-peer. We will see a child who in the beginning of the year is really shy and just can't get up there, but by the end of the school year stands up and gives praise to their classmates, their friends. 

It's when a child can acknowledge a mistake and own it and say, “I lost control of my emotions.” We're not discounting the circumstances of what happened, but when a child can internalize that and say, “I lost control of my emotions,” it's huge. It’s powerful for a 7- or 8-year-old to be able to do that.

Harris: A LinkedIn colleague who worked with you on moot court in law school described you as “soft-spoken yet powerfully persuasive.” Is that who you are now, as CEO?

Rugg: I think CEO is probably the hardest job I've had yet in my life, because you navigate so many different things. I'm going to be honest; I find myself every day feeling that I have to justify, respond, be reactive. I can't be that poised, proactive person all the time because you just have things coming at you. 

The biggest thing I'd love to see in myself is just asking more questions. I have to stop talking sometimes and just be more inquisitive. That's the biggest piece I'd love to see.

Harris: Wings was founded in 1996, before social-emotional learning was even widely recognized as a term. I believe I read that someone once said something like, “Who cares how children feel if they can't read or write?” How do you respond to skepticism today, and how much has the conversation about social-emotional learning shifted?

Rugg: That statement was actually made by somebody who was reviewing a grant application that we wrote. And I'm really saddened, disappointed and, to a certain extent, horrified. Because how a child feels is the foundation for how they grow. Yes, social-emotional learning is this terminology that is so broad, and I understand that something so broad and vague can lead to skepticism. A lot of it is just about how is it implemented, what does it look like on the ground, what does that mean concretely? 

But I say every day, you have to meet people where they are. We all come from different cultural contexts, environments, and knowledge bases. It's about bringing it down into simple terms of what really resonates with you. 

Fifteen years ago I was traveling around Texas and I talked about it as “life skills,” because that's how they understood it. You can talk about it as character, as resilience and grit, and as growth mindset. What's most important for folks to understand is that these are skills and asset-based strengths that we really can develop. You're not just born with it; you really can cultivate and help shape kids to not only understand it in their heads, but to internalize it in terms of behavior. And I think that's what's most powerful as a game changer.

Harris: You've talked about social-emotional learning not necessarily having a greater impact in underserved communities. Why is that?

Rugg: Social-emotional skills are necessary for everybody, for every child and actually every adult. It can really help in different contexts, like workforce skills or civil discourse. Where we find an advantage is that with kids who are in underserved communities, there are a lot of things not within their control because of financial resources, exposure, or opportunities. And I find that this is something they can control. They can truly develop it, and it can be reinforced. So a child is able to say, “I can make the choices that are best for me.”

In the after-school context, for example, we'll bring in soccer shots, chess, drone making, African drum beats, something fun and different to expose our kids to. They get to say what's their first and second choice. A lot of times kids say: “I got stuck in basketball and I wanted art.” So we take that as an opportunity and say, “OK, this is a choice you were faced with. You're disappointed. You're in art. But how can you make the best choice while you're in art? You don't want to draw. Can you be the support person to help with organizing supplies, distributing them, helping the leader get the group together?” There's always alternative ways to view something. And I just don't know if there's that reinforcement from the school.

Harris: You can self-correct, you can improve, and find opportunities in that. So how has your legal training shaped the way you lead Wings? And do you ever see tension between thinking like a lawyer and leading like someone who works in empathy and emotional development?

Rugg: Law school taught me how to consume a lot of information and then synthesize and get to the core of it. When you have a lot of different things coming at you with different stakeholders, you’ve got to cut to the chase and boil it down so you can make a quick decision. 

I will say I have an analytical and probably overthinking brain because I'm always trying to process and connect the dots and see where things are going. It's really hard when I work in teams. I've already had five conversations in my head and I've brought them into conversation six, so getting people up to speed with me is a challenge. 

As a CEO, I feel beholden to the organization for what's happening at the big-picture level. The time I spend in the programs with the kids is what keeps me grounded. I have amazing team members and supporters who remind me of the importance of people and that nothing gets done without the people around you.

Harris: What do you see for the next five years at Wings?

Rugg: I have a really big goal, and I know it won't be achieved in five years. But where my mind goes to is permanence. Some nonprofits have the goal to eventually be out of business, because you have cured something or solved an issue. That is amazing. But with our nonprofit I know that the work we do is going to be needed every day. I want our doors to be open for every child who wants and needs an opportunity to be a part of Wings, and I want to figure out the sticky way to scale and impact more kids. That means we don’t go away, and that requires resources and support. 

I’m putting Wings on a new pathway called “Wings Amplified” – a dual-engine approach that deepens our core (after-school) while using everything we’ve learned to transform the adults who reach the children we never could on our own. 

Harris: So where do you get your funding from right now?

Rugg: We have traditionally been majority funded by federal funding that goes down through the states. It's called 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which have been absolutely critical and a lifeline for after-school programming and youth development across this country, not just for nonprofits like ours but for school districts that run after-school programs every day and provide a safe space and enrichments and academics. 

We're proud of the relationships we've had across South Carolina and Georgia. Our liaisons are amazing. We are then funded through foundations and then a small part through individuals.

Harris: What's the hardest part about leading an organization you know from the inside out? Are there blind spots that come from knowing it so well?

Rugg: Yes, and I'm sure there are blind spots I don't even know about, because that's why they're blind spots. I've been with the organization for such a long time and I've grown in different ways and seen different parts of the work. The hardest part is shifting to that external lens. When you're in it and doing it every day, but then you're speaking with someone from the external community you have to remember that they're not in our everyday world. How do I give them enough information so that they can stay with me, but not too much information? 

Harris: I’d next like to talk about Leading Below the Line. What I mean by that is that oftentimes we don’t know what’s going on beneath the surface — for leaders and for their teams — and we have to dive in and find out exactly what’s at play in order to make a project or a plan successful. What comes to mind for you when I say, “Leading below the line”?

Rugg: I think about ways to get to truth. How do you really understand how the people who support your organization, and are there day in and day out, feel? Because what they're feeling is based on what they are perceiving, hearing, and think they know, and by the dynamic of the space they're in. 

The truth is: they may be confused. The truth is: they may not feel like they belong. The truth is: they may not agree with where we're headed. 

You can do all the surveys you want, and we do them too; it's just a pulse check on the climate and environment. We do so much work with our own kids, our own families, even partner trainings to help folks understand the culture and climate. And yet I think we don't do enough of that internally. That's hard. 

But it doesn't mean you stop; you continue to strive for it. That means transparency for the good and the bad. That means communicating and over-communicating. And I think it all starts from building strong relationships.

Harris: Do you have a hero? Who has been the biggest influence in your leadership journey, and what have they taught you?

Rugg: I don't think I have a hero or role model in the traditional sense. Where I feel like I've learned the most is from my peers and those who have been in different departments. When I had a stint working for an investment bank doing corporate events, back in the ‘90s, they had a mailroom. The mailroom guys were the smartest, most discreet, and knew everything.  I see learning and development all around me regardless of title or position. 

Every day when college-age students, who are part of our program, tell me something about what they like or don't like, I learn from that. That's powerful to me. I learn more from the folks around me and the ones who are doing work in different spaces. They're my leaders. They're my heroes.

Harris: Is there a quote or mantra that resonates with you?

Rugg: What I really believe in is that quote about how people may forget what you said or did, but not how you made them feel. And I think it is all about how you make them feel. We have a phrase at Wings called “Let Your Wings Out”: how do you welcome people and bring joy to others with a smile or simple greeting? Because every person has the power to affect somebody else by your actions.