LEADERSHIP TYLER board of directors president Laura Jackson speaks at Tuesday's Leadership Live 2018 event.

It took only a few minutes for a group of strangers to end what had been an otherwise positive two weeks of a new school year for Natalie Warne and others at a Michigan high school.

Warne, then 14, recalls the day she and other students were leaving school and were approached by members of a hate group who yelled racial slurs at her and other people of color and distributed racially offensive flyers.

“It — long story short — turned into a situation where they did create a ton of racial tension and divide,” Warne said.

While the situation was tough for her, she was encouraged when she saw members of the community from different races and back grounds come together to try and solve the problem.

But even through their efforts, Warne said the problems the school experienced intensified, ultimately resulting in students of color, including Warne, changing schools.

Warne, who knew she wanted her life’s work to be in pursuing social justice, was heartbroken.

“This experience for me as a kid was very discouraging because it was the first time I gave up that hope of social justice,” she said. “I had been raised believing that the truth would prevail, right defeats wrong, if you have the hope of your community and your church and God … a good outcome has to happen.”

Warne shared her story about what she has learned while becoming a leader at the “Leadership Live 2018 — Discover the Leader in You” event held at the Green Acres CrossWalk Conference Center on Tuesday.

It wasn’t until her senior year, at a high school in Arizona, that her passion would be reignited.

A few weeks before she was set to graduate, Warne saw a documentary titled “Invisible Children.”

The film depicted human rights abuses by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.

“The aspect of the kids is what really triggered me when I was a teenager, because they told us that there were kids as young as … 6-, 7-years-old who were abducted and forced to become child soldiers and forced to kill,” she said.

At the end of the film, an intern for the Invisible Children organization told the students there were things they could do to help put an end to the atrocity.

Intrigued by what she had experienced, Warne took a gap year from college and became an intern at Invisible Children.

With 99 other interns, she later helped conduct an international awareness campaign in 100 cities around the world that attracted more than 100,000 participants.

She was in charge of making sure the event ran smoothly in 10 cities in the Midwest. In each city, participants asked a celebrity, politician or person of great influence to come out on the day of the event and use their voice on behalf of the issue.

Each event could not end until the person of influence showed up to rescue the interns, volunteers and other supporters of the event. Warne was responsible for the event in Chicago and wanted Oprah Winfrey to rescue them.

Six days after the event began, Chicago was the only city that hadn’t been rescued.

After hearing Winfrey would soon be leaving town, the group organized a new plan and showed up outside the studio of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” waved peace signs and performed a song and dance to convince Winfrey to give them five minutes of her time.

Winfrey featured the organization and its message on her show. Soon after the show aired, a bill supported by Invisible Children that called for strengthened efforts to arrest the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army and aid communities devastated by its violence was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama.

“I look back at the experience that I had in high school seeing that I didn’t get to be a part of a season during that experience of where I felt like there was a moment of success,” she said. “But this experience showed me that maybe it is all a part of the trajectory.

“Maybe it’s all a learning experience and there are pain points,” Warne said. “But instead of seeing it as a setback or as a failure, it’s just a learning experience.”

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CLOSER LOOK: LEADERSHIP TYLER

Members of Leadership Tyler’s Class 32 were introduced before Natalie Warne’s address.

Established in 1986, Leadership Tyler’s mission is to help leaders by informing them of issues that affect the area and teaching them ways to motivate and strengthen others.

Those who are part of Leadership Tyler’s Class 32 represent a variety of local businesses, organizations and nonprofits.

Members of Chapel Hill High School’s student senate leadership group were part of the hundreds of attendees at the event.

“This gives them the experience to understand that high school is just the start of their journey,” Chapel Hill ISD Superintendent Lamond Dean said. “

They are in a leadership entity within our school district and we want them to see how leadership spreads out and becomes more broad in Tyler area.”