What St. Lucia Taught Me About Regional Leadership and Shared Futures

What does leadership look like in places where no single country can afford to think alone?

Being in St. Lucia made that question feel less theoretical. In small island nations, policy, community, and regional cooperation are not separate conversations. They are woven into everyday life. Decisions made at one level ripple quickly across borders, shaping how people move, work, prepare for environmental change, and imagine long-term stability.

During my time there, I learned more about the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a regional intergovernmental body supporting collaboration among Eastern Caribbean nations, including St. Lucia. The OECS exists to strengthen shared systems across the region, from economic coordination and social policy to environmental resilience and mobility. What stood out was not just the scope of the work, but the orientation behind it. This is governance rooted in interdependence, shaped by the understanding that sovereignty and collaboration are not opposing forces, but necessary partners.

In St. Lucia, this type of regional thinking does not feel abstract. It shows up in how communities plan for climate impact, how economies remain interconnected, and how identity is shaped across islands that are close, distinct, and deeply linked. The systems are visible, but so are the people moving within them.

Being in that environment highlighted how often policy conversations elsewhere are framed as tradeoffs between scale and intimacy, efficiency and care. In St. Lucia, those boundaries felt less rigid. Regional coordination and community life existed in conversation with one another, not in competition.

That perspective stays with me. It’s a reminder that strong systems are not built only through consolidation or control, but through alignment, trust, and a shared sense of responsibility. The role of narrative in that process is not to persuade, but to help people see themselves within something larger, without losing their sense of place.

St. Lucia pointed toward a way of thinking about leadership that values cooperation over dominance and proximity over abstraction. Those are the frameworks that continue to inform how I approach storytelling, especially in spaces where decisions travel far beyond the rooms where they are made.

To learn more about the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, click here.