Reflections on the Champions Framework: James Oglethorpe

Over this series we have followed James Oglethorpe's remarkable life through debtors' prisons, the birth of a new American colony, storms and salons, wars and weddings.

Now I want to step back from the stories and reflect on what they teach us about the Champions framework.

Below is a podcast, where you can listen to the main aspects

Oglethorpe and the Champions Framework

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Champion Stories of Humanity provide important clues about the 'how'.

How do people become Champions? How do they develop human and moral gravity? What choices, relationships and struggles shape them?

Oglethorpe's life is a living map of it, as we all are to a degree.

Trace his journey and you can watch, stage by stage, how an ordinary — even flawed — individual being becomes someone whose humanity can bend the arc of history.

Let me walk through that map with you.

1. Starting the journey: becoming the person you want to become

At the very heart of Champions sits one principle:

Humanity is not where we start, but who we choose to become

This is a statement about agency.

About personal choice, self-control and responsibility.

It insists that we do not have to remain "products of a system."

That, whatever our beginnings, we retain the power to choose who we become.

The starting canvas

And yet we must be honest about those beginnings.

None of us starts with a blank canvas.

None of us begins with a blank canvas. Biology, family, circumstances and experience have already made their marks. And these can shape our later lives profoundly.

We know this from the research on Adverse Childhood Experiences — ACEs — that adults who suffered several ACEs carry a significantly higher risk of poor outcomes in later life.

Not an inevitability, but a real and increased risk.

The reverse is true too.

A child born into privilege, able to reach a college degree, living on the "better side of town," with a ready-made community and network — enjoys a genuine head start.

Again, not destiny, but a real advantage.

So we all begin, in a sense, as a product of the system in which we emerged.

Oglethorpe was no exception: born to privilege and empire, and to the ugly assumptions of his age, including that some human beings were property.

We see that he was also born on the 'wrong side' of the political line. That gave him a certain perspective. Privileged yes, but an outsider in his own land.

We become the painter

Then something changes. At a certain point, the brush of our lives falls into our own hands.

We become the painter. And now we face a choice.

We can keep repeating the strokes and the design that were handed to us — or react against them — or we can begin, deliberately, to choose a design of our own.

For most of us, what finally puts the brush in our hand is a prompt — a moment that jolts us awake.

For some it comes as a sudden, rude awakening: Oglethorpe at twenty-five in a jail cell on a charge of murder; the Wesleys in the grip of a literal storm at sea, and then in the wreckage of their own self-inflicted failure in Georgia.

For others it arrives more gently — the quiet awakening Oglethorpe felt through his friendship with Castell, or the Wesleys learning, humbled, from the calm faith of the Moravians.

We all meet such prompts, one way or another.

The only question is how we will respond — what, in those moments, will we choose?

Oglethorpe took up the brush. The rest of his life is the picture he chose to paint.

2. Becoming a Champion: the Champions Pathway

How does that transformation actually happen?

Through the Champions Pathway — the three movements of Choice, Connection and Creation by which we activate and deepen our own humanity.

This is the process that shapes our identity: who we become.

The Champions Pathway is not some cold equation.

It grew out of my own observation of people who have become Champions — the common threads that run across their very different lives, and what those threads mean for the rest of us.

Oglethorpe's life shows us several of the mechanisms that drive it.

Proximity is the fuel

Time and again, the thing that powered Oglethorpe's pathway was proximity — his choice to draw close rather than keep his distance.

We see it in his response to the tragic death of his friend Robert Castell, drawing near to the horror of the debtors' prison.

We see it in his decision to sail to Georgia and live among the settlers rather than govern from afar.

We see it in the letter from the enslaved African, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo — Oglethorpe paying for his freedom and bringing him to Britain.

We see it with the Jewish refugees, and with the Native peoples.

Proximity was the fuel — the engine that drove the whole Champions Pathway forward.

You cannot activate your humanity toward people you hold at arm's length.

Champions Angels: the protectors who stand in the gap

Connection, though, is never a one-way street.

Within it are certain people who play a critical, outsized role in a life — often people we never sought out.

We call them Protectors, or Champions Angels: the connections that arrive unbidden and change everything.

Oglethorpe had several.

There was the captain in the tavern who, in a violent moment, chose restraint — disarming the young Oglethorpe rather than taking his revenge.

There was the Duke of Argyll, who became his mentor and protector across many years.

And there were the Jewish refugees and Dr Nunes, who arrived unasked and saved his colony.

These figures stand in the gap for us.

Part of walking the pathway is learning to recognise them — and, in humility, to receive what they offer.

Calling our humanity forward

The pathway also depends on moments that call our humanity forward — that summon our human core to the surface, where it can be activated and strengthened.

Two forces do this especially powerfully.

Moments of crisis. Sometimes it takes an event, a shock, to expose and awaken us.

The Wesley brothers found this in the storm at sea, watching the calm faith of the Moravians.

Oglethorpe found it, perhaps, in his five months in jail on a charge of murder — his life suddenly hanging by a thread.

Crisis has a way of stripping us back to the question of who we really are.

Friendship. And more gently, but no less powerfully, our humanity is called forward by friendship.

By Castell. By Tomochichi, the Creek chief. By Elizabeth, his wife — each calling out the best in the other.

By Dr Nunes. And by his boyhood friend James Keith, at whose side he would one day stand in the thick of a European war.

Crisis and friendship: one dramatic, one tender. Both call our humanity to the fore.

3. Developing our Champions Core: bending the arc of history

As we walk the pathway, something is being built inside us — our Champions Core.

It is made of what most makes us human: our empathy, our enterprise, and our moral standards.

And as that core strengthens and gains "mass," we begin to develop a kind of moral and human gravity — a force capable of bending the arc of history.

Moral gravity

Michael Thurmond, Oglethorpe's biographer, put it perfectly:

If you can look in the mirror, see your faults, the things that need to be improved, if you can change yourself, you ultimately can change the world, and you may in fact change the course of history — which is what Oglethorpe was able to do.

That is moral gravity in a single sentence.

Change yourself, and you gain the weight to change the world.

Turning vices into virtues

One of the defining marks of a strong human core is the ability to turn vices into virtues — to transform the bad that happens to us into good that flows from us.

This was the great insight of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust: we cannot always control the circumstances we are placed in, but we can always control our response to them.

That freedom, he argued, is the last of the human freedoms, and no one can take it away.

Oglethorpe lived this out repeatedly.

When the courts failed to convict the brutal prison warden Bambridge — when justice, in the ordinary sense, was denied — Oglethorpe channelled that defeat into legislation, helping create the Debtors' Act of 1729.

A failure in the courtroom became a reform in the law.

And what a new law: it wrote into the fabric of everyday life the principle that debt should not be a death sentence, for an individual or a company.

The very principle that shapes our lives today was born from this.

When he was denied a military commission and left languishing after his own imprisonment, that very frustration deepened the friendship with Castell that would reshape his life.

And when Britain scorned and rejected him after the Jew Act, he turned even that humiliation outward — slipping off to Prussia, and to his most world-changing chapter of all.

This is the essence of it: humanity, not circumstances, driving our behaviour.

That is the acid test of our human core.

Do we drive our own behaviour — or is it merely a product of what happens to us?

Stress and pressure are what expose the answer.

The Wesleys discovered this in the storm: it was precisely the terror of that moment, set against the Moravians' calm, that forced them to look in the mirror and confront their own faith and humanity. Without the storm, the contrast would never have shown itself.

Pressure reveals the core.

And if pressure finds this core wanting — as it found the Wesleys in the storm, and Oglethorpe in his jail cell — that is never the end of the story. We can look in the mirror, reflect, and strengthen our core: exactly the transformation Michael Thurmond described so eloquently.

And if our core holds, watch what becomes possible: we are able to transform — to absorb the 'arrows' sent our way and, somehow, turn vices into virtues.

None of this is a mathematical formula.

There will have been times when Oglethorpe felt a complete failure — down and out, certain it had all come to nothing.

Some things are simply beyond our line of sight, beyond our understanding.

And that is exactly why the core matters so much. We do not need 20/20 vision of the outcome; our behaviours and our responses flow from our core — the core we shape and build across a lifetime.

Champions Catalysts: humanity is a team sport

There is one final lesson, and it may be the most important of all. Humanity is a team sport.

We know from the research behind the "3.5% rule" that it takes only a small, committed minority to tip an entire system.

But Oglethorpe's life points to something underneath that number.

Behind the 3.5% stand certain rare people who activate, strengthen and catalyse the rest — who make champions of others.

We call them Champions Catalysts.

This is the logic of nodes and networks — the way transformational change actually spreads.

Think of the Republic of Letters, the great web of Enlightenment correspondence, and of a figure like the Quaker Anthony Benezet, who sat at its heart and helped seed the abolition movement across two continents through sheer connection.

Oglethorpe was exactly this kind of catalyst.

Look across his life and you find a handful of key figures who each went on to play an outsized role.

Individually, any one of them might have achieved little.

Together — connected, activated, catalysed — their impact was massive and world-changing.

The birth of the Methodist movement is a perfect example: two broken young priests, a band of Moravian refugees, and one man who happened to put them on the same ship.

No single one of them could have sparked a global movement.

Together, they did.

That is what a Champions Catalyst does.

Not act alone, but call the humanity forward in others — and let the network do what no individual ever could.

Champions act for the good of others

Not for self, but for others

This was the motto written into the Georgia charter when Oglethorpe was 32 years old.

They were the defining feature of his life, his identity.

We say Champions is about the capacity to act for the good of others and the world changes when people change how they treat each other.

Oglethorpe changed how he treated others, and the world changed. More so, he bent the arc of history.

The whole map, in one life

Put it all together and you have the Champions framework, drawn out across a single remarkable life.

We each begin with a starting canvas we did not choose.

At some point the brush passes into our hands, and we begin to paint.

We walk the pathway of Choice, Connection and Creation. Proximity fuels the journey. Champions Angels stand in the gaps. Crisis and friendships call our humanity forward, to the fore.

Slowly a core is built — of empathy, enterprise and moral standards — until it gains a gravity of its own.

And the truest among us become catalysts, calling that same humanity forward in everyone around them.

That is how one flawed young man, once sitting in a prison cell, came to bend the arc of history.

And it is how, in our own smaller ways, every one of us can too.

Become a Champion

Oglethorpe's story shows that humanity is not a soft alternative to performance.

It is a performance multiplier.

When people are seen, protected and trusted, systems become stronger, not weaker.

If this story stirs something in you, don't let it stay a feeling.

Do what Oglethorpe did — turn it into a choice, a connection and then create the future you want to see, become that future!

• Join the 35Champions site as a free member, and follow the movement as it grows.
• Pay it forward as a paid member, helping young people join the Champions program and become Humanity Champions in their own communities.
• Most of all, choose a pathway of humanity — center your leadership on what makes us human, and create ripples of your own.

Join as a member, read and share Stories of Humanity, and help fund the next generation of young Champions.

I'd love to hear your reflections below.

Glen