Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Eclipse Effect
Big moments create big possibilities—but only if leaders know how to harness them. The Eclipse Effect isn’t just about eclipses; it’s about recognizing and acting on unique opportunities that have the potential to bring people together. This book builds on Robert D. Putnam’s concept of social capital, showing how leaders can foster bridging connections—uniting people across different backgrounds and perspectives—rather than just reinforcing bonded groups that already exist.
Chapter 2: Deciding to Lead
Leadership doesn’t require a title—it requires stepping up when no one else does. Some leaders emerge out of passion, others from responsibility, but all recognize when the moment demands action. This chapter explores how to find your role in creating something bigger than yourself and why the most impactful leaders are often the ones who never planned to be.
Chapter 3: Drive
Sustained energy is the key to success. If leaders burn out, so does momentum. This chapter explores how to stay motivated, push through challenges, and inspire others to keep going. Passion is contagious, but it needs to be nurtured—both in yourself and in the people around you.
Chapter 4: Leader Expectations
Forget the idea of a leader as a top-down authority figure. Real leadership is about facilitating, not commanding. The best leaders don’t have all the answers—they create the conditions for success by bringing the right people together, fostering collaboration, and staying adaptable as challenges arise.
Chapter 5: Community Architecture
A strong community doesn’t just happen—it’s built with intention. Leaders must design structures that encourage participation, make communication easy, and create a sense of shared purpose. This chapter lays out the essential components of a thriving, resilient community that can sustain momentum long after the initial excitement fades.
Chapter 6: Get Started: The Nuts and Bolts of Community Creation
Great ideas don’t turn into action by themselves. This chapter provides a practical roadmap for getting started—identifying key players, organizing meetings, setting clear goals, and building early momentum. The perfect plan isn’t the goal; taking action is.
Chapter 7: Strategies for Community Cohesion and Momentum
Keeping people engaged is just as important as bringing them in. Communities thrive when members feel connected, valued, and excited about the future. This chapter explores ways to maintain enthusiasm, celebrate milestones, and ensure that momentum doesn’t fade once the initial spark wears off.
Chapter 8: Risk, Uncertainty and Resistance
Every great effort faces obstacles—skepticism, bureaucracy, and unexpected setbacks. The difference between success and failure is how leaders navigate them. This chapter offers strategies for overcoming resistance, managing uncertainty, and turning challenges into opportunities.
Chapter 9: Hype, Media and Outreach
If no one knows about your effort, it won’t succeed. Leaders must learn how to build excitement, tell compelling stories, and use media—both traditional and digital—to draw people in. This chapter breaks down the essentials of effective outreach, helping leaders turn awareness into action.
Chapter 10: Failure and Recovery
Not everything will go as planned—and that’s okay. The key to long-term success is knowing how to learn from setbacks, adapt quickly, and keep moving forward. This chapter explores how to turn failures into stepping stones rather than roadblocks.
Chapter 11: Measuring Success
Success isn’t just about numbers—it’s about impact. This chapter helps leaders define what success truly looks like, from strengthening relationships to creating lasting change. The real measure of success isn’t just what happens during the event, but what remains after it’s over.
Chapter 12: Legacy
Extraordinary moments may be brief, but their effects don’t have to be. The real goal is to create something that lasts—whether it’s a stronger community, a shift in perspective, or an ongoing movement. This chapter helps leaders ensure their efforts leave a meaningful, long-term mark.
Introduction
by Debra Ross
In the fall of 2012, my daughter Ella attended a middle school astronomy class at the Strasenburgh Planetarium of the Rochester Museum & Science Center (RMSC). One day after class, she hopped in the car and announced, “In five years, I’ll be sixteen. I’ll have my driver’s license, and you and I will take a road trip to Missouri.”
“Sure,” I answered, privately thinking, Who plans for anything five years in the future? (And, Missouri?)
Ella’s class had just learned that on August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse—the first major one in the continental United States since 1979—would start in Oregon and, over the course of an hour and a half, travel diagonally across the country and exit at the South Carolina shore. A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly between Earth and the Sun, briefly blocking sunlight. While partial solar eclipses happen globally about twice a year and can be seen across a wide area of the globe, total solar eclipses are less frequent and can only be fully experienced within a very narrow path of totality.
“It’s going to pass just south of St. Louis,” Ella reported. “You like St. Louis. So that’s where we’ll go.”
“Sure,” I answered again, smiling to myself.
“But seven years later, on April 8, 2024,” she continued, “there will be another total solar eclipse in the U.S. For that one, the path of totality will pass right over Rochester. I’ll be an adult by then, but I’ll come back home for it.”
For the following five years, I remained an eclipse skeptic. People seem to go nuts for this, I thought. It gets dark every night. I know what a shadow is. What’s the big deal? As August 2017 drew nearer and Ella planned the trip, I was enthusiastic, but mostly at the prospect of spending a few days together nurturing her passion for science.
What I didn’t expect was that the moments Ella and I would spend in totality on that steamy August day in Kimmswick, Missouri, would, for me, become one of those bifurcation points in life where a sudden force changes your momentum and launches you in a whole new direction. As Ella and I watched the Moon gradually cover the Sun’s bright disc through our eclipse glasses, I grew to appreciate what the fuss was about. All of the astronomy and solar system textbook knowledge I’d amassed since third grade suddenly became something I was experiencing in my whole body rather than just in my brain. In the last minute before totality, the light around us grew silvery and glittery, the birds flew back to their nests, and the crickets started chirping. The moment the Moon completely covered the Sun, the world around us blurred and dimmed. Then it was safe to remove the glasses and look up. As I gazed at what seemed to be a velvet hole in the sky, I was tinglingly aware of only four bodies in the entire universe: the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and me. I was one of those bodies. While some report feeling humbled when faced with the vastness of space, I experienced a profound sense of the significance of humans’ place in the universe and our ability to understand it.
A minute and a half later, the Sun emerged from behind the Moon, and, as Ella likes to say, “My mother went a little crazy.” In just seven short years, our hometown would be in totality for three minutes and thirty-eight seconds, and we needed to make the most of it. Someone needed to start preparing the Rochester community for what would happen, and it might as well be me. The Rochester Eclipse Task Force formed in my head on the drive home from Missouri, and I first started tagging people to be part of it the following month.
Why me?
In part, it was because my particular profession gave me unique access to resources that were to be invaluable in the seven-year effort. In 2001, shortly after Ella was born, I had founded KidsOutAndAbout.com, a website that helps families across North America discover and connect with local events, activities, and community opportunities. The network began expanding beyond Rochester in 2010, and it now serves parents coast-to-coast in the U.S. and Canada. As publisher and CEO, I lead a team that runs the business, but I remain a passionate cheerleader for all things Rochester. I had many dozens of connections within our area from which to recruit participants and other leaders. I had developed a self-driven work ethic that didn’t rely on external validation, and the autonomy of being a business owner, which allowed me to dedicate myself fully to what became a second full-time job. Celebrating this community for the past quarter-century has blessed me with countless personal connections with the people who make things happen here, and they know that if they do great things, I’ll shout about those things to people who will listen.
Publishing KidsOutAndAbout.com has given me a unique window through which to view a wide range of communities across North America—large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, thriving and struggling. Having this vantage point has allowed me to think deeply about what makes some communities flourish while others falter, insights that have shaped many of the strategies shared in this book. I first applied these strategies within my own business team, then in community leadership roles, and ultimately with the eclipse task force.
But more than anything, I was fueled by a passion sparked by the eclipse: a desire to help others experience the awe and wonder I had felt. I felt certain that our region could succeed in 2024 as other path communities had in 2017, and was ready to put in the work to make it happen. My role was to connect people, build dashboards and newsletters, and bring what my children call my "painfully cheerful" energy to meetings. My ultimate goal was to celebrate the individuals who drive our community forward, encouraging them to seize this opportunity not just for their own businesses and organizations, but to help the Rochester area shine in its moment in the shadow and secure its place in history as a connected community who made the most of this once-in-a-century opportunity.
Of course, leading the task force was never something I intended to do alone. As our region’s main informal science learning hub, the Rochester Museum & Science Center knew, decades ahead of everyone else, that the eclipse presented an opportunity both for our community and for science learning and connection. They were the main backbone of the effort here in Rochester: They not only implemented systems of education and outreach for their own programs, but they also sponsored the task force with rooms for our in-person meetings, provided technology both for meetings and for outreach, made connections to educators, industry, and funders, and, most important, had people with brains and passion.
Equally useful in community organizing for the eclipse was my upcoming role as chair of Visit Rochester’s Visitor Industry Council (VIC), the member-driven arm of our region’s destination marketing organization. The leadership of Visit Rochester had seen the data from communities in the 2017 path and immediately grasped its potential for our area, both for visitor influx and for visibility on the national stage. The way Visit Rochester had structured and nurtured the VIC since the early 1980s made it the perfect model for the eclipse task force. I’ve been an enthusiastic member of the VIC since about 2010; as its 2018 chair, I started each of our monthly VIC meetings with “What’s happening in Rochester on April 8, 2024?” Although it was still six years in our future, everyone knew the answer by the March meeting.
The Rochester area also had a resource that other communities lacked: enthusiastic input from our area’s regional transportation planning organization, the Genesee Transportation Council (GTC). In early 2018, a GTC staff member attended the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, DC, where one session described the many-hours-long traffic jams caused by unpreparedness for the 2017 eclipse. The lessons presented in that session made GTC’s Executive Director, Jim Stack, and his colleague Lori Maher, the Program Manager for Community Engagement, realize that our area could avoid the issues that plagued our nation’s highways and smaller roads in 2017 if we planned well in advance of the 2024 eclipse. I later discovered that involving traffic and emergency-management entities was a common difficulty among eclipse community organizers in other regions, but Jim and Lori had us covered right from the start.
In April 2019, almost exactly five years before the 2024 eclipse, the RMSC hosted astronomy educator Janet Ivey-Duensing for two days of eclipse preparation seminars in Rochester, which were attended by over 150 stakeholders. Janet, founder of the PBS program Janet’s Planet, brought valuable strategies from her experiences assisting Nashville, TN and Columbia, SC, with their 2017 eclipse preparations, which allowed us to avoid creating our plans from scratch. She also connected us with leaders of the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) Solar Eclipse Task Force (SETF). That summer, the Museum’s President and CEO, Hillary Olson, and I attended the Task Force’s conference, where I met key national leaders, including Drs. Rick Fienberg and Angela Speck, who had been guiding the AAS’s eclipse efforts since 2014. These national connections greatly enhanced Rochester’s access to the resources, expertise, and energy of the people in that network—many of whom you’ll meet in the upcoming chapters—further positioning us for success.
We had everything we needed. And yet, most people who heard us talk thought we were crazy. “Hundreds of people are preparing for something that’s not going to happen for five years?” they’d say. “Who knows what will happen between now and then?”
We found out soon enough what would happen: Less than a year after Janet gave us her playbook and we started making connections outside our area, the world shut down. In other regions, the COVID-19 pandemic thwarted early eclipse planning, but Rochester’s momentum couldn’t be stopped.
Plus, we had Dan.
The first official meeting of the Rochester Eclipse Task Force had convened on a beautiful fall day in October of 2019 on the campus of the RMSC, right next door to where everything had started back in 2012. Artist-astronomer Dr. Tyler Nordgren, whose 2017 poster art series had recently been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution for its permanent collection, was at the podium in front of a crowd of several dozen Rochesterians, recounting how the professional astronomy community had helped prepare communities in the path of totality in 2017. In the front row was 29-year-old Dan Schneiderman, gripping his personal copy of Tyler’s book Sun Moon Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets, and–as Dan himself would say later–“asking too many questions and offering too many ideas” about how Rochester could best take advantage of its position in the path of totality of the upcoming 2024 eclipse.
I was standing at the side of the stage next to Hillary. She leaned toward me, angled her chin toward Dan, and whispered, “See that guy? That’s who’s going to manage the RMSC’s eclipse efforts. He’s perfect.”
In March of 2021, Hillary fulfilled her 2019 vow to hire Dan as the RMSC’s Eclipse Partnership Coordinator; in October of 2022, the position became full-time. By April 2024, Dan’s work on the eclipse had helped raise $361,000 in grants and sponsorships (and $565,000 overall); he had given hundreds of science education and safety presentations, and he had met with thousands of people at festivals and other gatherings, usually accompanied by one of the six pairs of the 205-pound giant eclipse glasses he had specially commissioned.
During the following years leading up to April 2024, Dan and I became known around Rochester as the eclipse nerds whose energy and enthusiasm never wavered. We ran monthly stakeholder meetings, we presented at libraries, Rotary meetings, schools, social clubs and neighboring tourism bureaus. We appeared in countless segments on local TV, radio, and podcasts to spread the word about what would happen and why everyone should make sure that on the afternoon of April 8 they would be squarely in the path of totality. And Dan set up and disassembled those glasses more times than was probably healthy for his back.
So Rochester not only had the perfect catalyst but also the perfect group of people who recognized its potential to have a profoundly positive impact on our region.
The Rochester Eclipse Task Force eventually attracted over 750 members from a wide variety of sectors, almost 200 of whom were highly engaged. We had sector members from tourism, government, education, community management, emergency management, arts, culture, and commerce. We had experts in accessibility and inclusion, traffic predictions, and outreach to every corner of our area. We were unified in our identity as the U.S. region most prepared for the eclipse.
In short, it worked. In fact, it worked not just for Rochester but for the whole country: We became nationally recognized as the leader in eclipse preparations. After the AAS’s SETF met in Rochester in 2022, Rick asked me to co-chair the national task force with Angela so I could help them help other communities in the 2024 path prepare as Rochester had done. This gave me unprecedented access to the people throughout North America and the rest of the world who were as determined as I was to help ensure that no one missed the opportunity to learn about the eclipse and experience it safely. I also finally had a community where no one thought I was crazy.
Serving as national co-chair also connected me with science journalist Jamie Carter, the co-author of this book. Jamie writes for Forbes.com, Space.com, Sky & Telescope, and Travel+Leisure; he also runs WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com. Jamie wrote hundreds of articles in the years leading up to the 2024 eclipse, including several that featured me and Ella. Jamie’s Rolodex of contacts, his archive of dozens of interviews, and his 25 years telling the stories behind science make him the perfect storyteller for this effort. He’s also just a great guy, and, now, the exclamation point at the end of my personal eclipse story.
As Jamie and I interacted with all of the people in the communities making it happen, it became clear that each, in their own way, was an example of what we have come to call The Eclipse Effect.
The Eclipse Effect describes how ordinary people can harness extraordinary moments to create something remarkable and lasting by uniting diverse talents and communities. At its core, the Eclipse Effect begins with a catalyst—an event so compelling it captures attention and ignites curiosity in a small group of people who see its potential for creating value in the world. If those visionaries work together to harness the catalyst’s momentum and deliberately unite people in the effort, they can make the most of the unique opportunity to push value into the world. Ultimately, the true power of the Eclipse Effect lies in the lasting impact it leaves behind: an enduring legacy that extends far beyond the event itself.
This book offers a framework for turning any catalyst—a natural event, milestone, or unique opportunity—into a lasting legacy. It is applicable to regions large and small, to businesses, to schools, nonprofit boards, and even to families. By emphasizing vision, collaboration, and strategic action, it provides a roadmap for uniting diverse talents and communities to maximize potential and create meaningful, long-term impact in virtually any context.
In a world frequently overshadowed by division and uncertainty, this approach inspires hope, promotes unity, and reinforces the belief that meaningful change is possible through collaboration. Leveraging Eclipse Effect strategies allows individuals and communities to reclaim a sense of agency during a time when many feel overwhelmed or disillusioned by larger societal forces. By seeking and leveraging extraordinary catalysts with clear vision, collaboration, and action, ordinary people can create significant, positive change.
That’s why we thought it deserved a book.
This book explores the core elements of the Eclipse Effect and demonstrates their relevance to various efforts and communities, set against the compelling stories of the 2017 and 2024 North American eclipses. We argue that seizing these extraordinary moments to build strong, inclusive communities is essential, and we demonstrate the transformative power of such efforts. By drawing from real-life examples, we show how to recognize and embrace catalysts as opportunities to foster connection, collaboration, and lasting impact. Readers will be introduced to an inspiring cast of individuals—Angela Speck, Rick Fienberg, Dan Schneiderman, Trish Erzfeld, Sarah Wolfe, and many others—who have brought the Eclipse Effect to life in meaningful ways, from grand-scale initiatives to local grassroots efforts. Along the way, the book provides practical guidance for creating and sustaining communities: rallying others around a shared vision, building a cohesive identity, keeping the group motivated, measuring success, and ensuring a lasting legacy. It’s a call to action and a roadmap for turning extraordinary opportunities into remarkable, enduring achievements.
The book also describes how to define success in ways potential leaders might not have considered, and it provides ideas for managing the inevitable failures and disappointments while creating communities that last… because no matter how many contingencies we anticipate or how carefully we prepare, there will be things we can’t control.
Although many communities in the path of totality had gloriously clear skies that made for perfect eclipse viewing, when Rochester’s moment finally arrived at 3:20 p.m. on April 8, 2024, we had thick clouds. That meant that our skies got deeply, profoundly dark, which was a beautiful experience … but we missed what others in the country saw—the ‘hole in the sky.’
“If anyone deserved to see the Sun that day, it was Rochester,” many people who knew of our countless hours of preparation have told me.
“That’s okay,” I always respond. “Our magic happened on the ground.”
—Debra Ross, February 2025
