Story by Dwain Hebda
The road to service is often paved with discovery and that certainly applies to the professional journey of Philip Walkley, executive director of SOS Service Over Self.
Walkley, who will graduate from the Clinton School of Public Service in May, discovered his calling at the Memphis-based nonprofit after experiencing the organization as a college student.
“I first volunteered with the organization in 1998,” he said. “I had gotten involved with campus ministry at Ole Miss and I ended up interning [at SOS] after I graduated. Through that I was hired as a summer interim youth minister, and youth pastor at a small church in Mississippi.
“Never in a million years did I think I would work at a church or be a youth minister, but I ended up really liking it and they ended up hiring me and asked me to stay full-time. I ended up doing that for about four years. All the while, I’d been involved with SOS.”
Walkley, a native of Jonesboro, Arkansas, who has been in the executive director position since 2007, today oversees SOS’s slate of programs. These include providing opportunities for engagement in ministry in underserved neighborhoods, leadership development and job training for youth and making critical home repairs for homeowners in partner neighborhoods.
He enrolled in Clinton School Online with 15 years of this work under his belt yet recognizing the need for personal and professional development.
“I didn’t do it thinking I necessarily needed to have this degree,” he said. “It was more like when I looked at the course curriculum, I felt like there were multiple courses that were interesting to me and that aligned with the work that I do. I felt like it would enhance what I do and help me do what I do here better.”
Entering the program at age 40 — and online, no less — was at times daunting but once into it, Walkley saw how the concepts being taught at the Clinton School could pay immediate dividends for the Memphis organization.
“One thing that surprised me with this program was how directly applicable it was to my current work at SOS,” he said. “About nine or 10 years ago we started an after-school program doing some construction training with youth and after COVID we really ramped up that program to be more of a full-scale vocational training program. For a huge portion of my [Clinton School] coursework, starting early on, I was able to use SOS Builds, which was the program at the organization here, as part of the assignment. The stuff I learned, therefore, was immediately applicable.”
One tangible benefit to this training has been in landing grant money. Walkely said after his schooling, he basically “cut and pasted” from a paper he did for a Clinton School class, which resulted in twice as much funding being awarded as in previous years.
“That happened because those courses forced me to do the research, do the work and learn more about the type of work I was doing,” he said. “It was really beneficial to me and I think I was able to bring to my cohort that kind of affirmation that these things we’re learning, these are directly applicable to the nonprofit world. You will use these skills. You will use these methods.”
Walkley said the classes also benefited him personally by helping him reorder the knowledge and skills he’d already learned on the job, helping him be more intentional in the application of that knowledge.
“I learned so much of what I do here in kind of the grassroots, hard-knocks way, just figuring it out as you go,” he said. “There were so many things that I felt like I was learning that were things that I was already doing, at least to some degree, but I either didn’t have the framework through which to think about it in a way that was more helpful or didn’t even have the language to describe it that was helpful.
“I’ve been planning and managing programs for 15 years. I’ve been writing grants for 15 years. Then, I’m taking a class like programming planning and development that’s basically teaching you how to think through program design, how to evaluate it and then think through how to present that in grants. It put a lot more structure to things that I was already doing in a way that just made my work easier and made my work more effective.”
Now, armed with a proven framework, he said he’s reenergized for the future of SOS as it lives out its mission to help others chart their own professional journey.
“Through all that I’ve learned, through all the research I did, through all the work I did through the Clinton School related to job training and our program, it’s only given me even more passion and desire for this work,” he said.
Philip Walkley, a 2024 graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service, is currently the Executive Director of Service Over Self, a Memphis-based nonprofit that delivers service in underserved neighborhoods through home repair and leadership development.