Founders Forum:
Resilience in Challenging Times
Mike Signer
Former Mayor of Charlottesville, VA, Attorney,
Author, Executive and Public Scholar
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Mike Signer served as the first Jewish Mayor of Charlottesville VA during the Alt Right / Nazi rallies that shook America to its core.
He now speaks regularly on personal and societal growth in the face of trauma, tragedy and extremism.
Cry Havoc
Signers most recent book, Cry Havoc, is a chronicle of the events of the “Unite the Right” rally of 2017 and what we as individuals and as a nation can learn from it.
Excerpts from Cry Havoc
“There is nothing like fighting for something you believe in where there’s no easy answer, because, in the end, if you want to lead, that’s just what you’ll have to deal with.”
“We like to think of leadership in Hollywood terms: the successful IPO, scoring a touchdown, passing a bill, winning great cheers. But more often than not, it’s a gritty slog up a field, battered from all sides, with a concussion or two along the way. ...(T)hat’s what real leadership is, and we need to understand it better.”
“The struggle we see in the real world—the world as it is, not as we want it to be—can be uncomfortable and even ugly. But the cost of the struggle, on human beings, institutions, and society as a whole, is not only incidental to progress, but necessary to it. …and that progress won’t be without agony, but because of it.”
Founders Forum:
Resilience in Challenging Times
Mike Signer, @mikesigner
The Hon. Michael Signer, the award-winning former mayor of Charlottesville, is a public scholar, practicing attorney, and executive.
He currently serves as partner, VP, and general counsel at the country’s largest independent digital design agency. From 2016 to 2018, Signer served as mayor of Charlottesville, a AAA-bond-rated city of nearly fifty thousand. He was previously senior policy advisor at the Center for American Progress, counsel to governor Mark Warner of Virginia, national security director on the 2008 John Edwards presidential campaign, and an associate at WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. He has been an instructor at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and the University of California. He was a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 2009 and has received senior appointments from three Virginia governors. In 2018, he founded and chaired Communities Overcoming Extremism, a bipartisan capacity-building project for leaders in the public and private sectors. He was chair of the Emergency Food Network in Virginia for three years and for four years a member of Virginia’s Board of Medicine.
He is the author of three books: Cry Havoc: Charlottesville and American Democracy under Siege, Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father, and Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies. He has written opinion pieces and essays for The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Time, Vox, and Democracy. He has been profiled by NPR, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Guardian and interviewed by Meet the Press, Face the Nation, The Rachel Maddow Show, and NPR's Morning Edition. He has received awards from organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the University of California D.C. Alumni Association, the American Society for Yad Vashem, and the Matthew Shepard Foundation. He was recognized by The Forward magazine in its "Forward 50 2018" list of the fifty most influential Jewish leaders in America. He is a member of the 2018 class of the Aspen Institute's Rodel Fellows.
Signer holds a Ph.D. in political science from U.C., Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow; a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law; and a B.A. in politics, magna cum laude, from Princeton University, where he was a work-study student. He lives with his wife and their twin five year olds boys in Charlottesville.