Tony Spearman-Leach Carries On a Legacy of Service to Others

Tony Spearman-Leach, the president of the Excelsior University Alumni Association and chair of the Alumni Leadership Council, has spent much of his life in service to others. His commitment to service has woven in and out of his professional journey to his current position as the director of business development and philanthropy at the National Academy of Public Administration, in Washington, D.C.

“Living in service to others was a philosophy that has run throughout the history of my family,” says Spearman-Leach, now in his second year as president of the Alumni Association and chair of the Alumni Leadership Council. Uplifting communities and instilling hope in others runs in Spearman-Leach’s family. He shares that his great-grandfather, Wade H. Spearman, was the first African American elected after Reconstruction to a North Carolina city council. His grandfather, Robert L. Hardin, was a pioneering African American epidemiologist, and his mother, Gayle S. Leach, is a retired librarian, former trustee of the Library of Michigan, and recently retired assistant deputy warden for the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Beginning from when Spearman-Leach was young, his family instilled in him the importance of education, business, and philanthropy. He reflects that we are the sum of what has been passed on through our families. “I’m very humbled because one of the churches that I went to as a little kid, Sandy Grove Baptist Church in Lumberton, North Carolina—its bricks were laid by my great- grandfather,” says Spearman-Leach.

Spearman-Leach watched his mother move from being a librarian to an assistant deputy warden in prisons, teaching incarcerated individuals to read. The joy she brought to men who were illiterate has had a profound impact in Spearman-Leach’s life, he says. In fact, he named an Excelsior Ever Upward Scholarship in honor of his mother because he was so moved by her dedication to teaching others.

Spearman-Leach has enjoyed a varied professional life that has included careers in business, science, technology, and the arts. In his current role, he works to secure contracts and philanthropic engagement. He has also conducted workshops for the U.S. State Department and its programs at the Meridian International Center for international nonprofit and NGO leaders.

In addition to his full-time work, Spearman-Leach enjoys giving his time to community organizations. He chairs the advisory board of the Josiah Henson Museum and Park, in North Bethesda, Maryland, and in fall 2022 connected Excelsior to the museum and participated in an alumni event held there. He is also involved with several other organizations. He is the treasurer of Montgomery College’s Pinkney Innovation Complex for Science and Technology Foundation, which provides a continuum of life sciences and cybersecurity education and training, fostering economic development through a skilled workforce. Spearman-Leach also serves on the board of the Mid-Atlantic Federal Credit Union and is both a board member and governance committee chair for Leadership Montgomery.

As evidenced by his life of service, Spearman-Leach is firmly committed to paying it forward. Just as he learned this from his family and others who have helped him, he feels a responsibility to pay it forward to others. “I think the best thing to do is to follow in the footsteps of your family members and role models and mentors,” he says. “I think that fellow Excelsior alumni and current students should do the same and should ask themselves, ‘If not now, when?’ and ‘If not me, who?’… ‘If I don’t step up, who will?’”