Empowering Future Leaders
At D-Day Leadership Academy, our mission is to instill core values of courage, humility, and service while shaping the next generation of leaders inspired by the extraordinary actions on D-Day.
Our Pillars
Total Commitment to Mission
Once the mission is set, hesitation kills. “Total commitment to mission” means aligning decisions, resources, and personal comfort toward a clear objective and refusing to quit when the cost rises. In Normandy, this looked like units pushing off the beach despite catastrophic losses, engineers clearing obstacles under fire, and small groups fighting isolated yet still driving toward their objectives. DLA uses those examples to teach that real leadership is measured by what you do when turning back is easier.
Our Pillars
Empathy
Empathy is not softness; it is the discipline of seeing through someone else’s eyes so you can lead them well. DLA teaches empathy through the stories of soldiers, French civilians, resistance fighters, and even former enemies. Understanding fear, loss, and motive across all sides of the Normandy campaign helps students lead with both firmness and humanity in their own lives.
Our Pillars
Preparation
What happens in the moment is decided long before the moment arrives. Preparation at DLA is physical, mental, and moral—study, rehearsal, conditioning, and honest self-assessment. We connect modern training directly to the months of build-up before D-Day: rehearsals on English coasts, sand-table exercises, briefings, and the quiet work no one saw that made June 6 even possible.
Our Pillars
Plan for Chaos
No plan survives contact with the enemy, or reality. At DLA, students learn to plan deeply and then assume that parts of that plan will fail. “Plan for chaos” means building redundancies, anticipating friction, and training yourself to adapt without freezing. Normandy is the textbook example: mis-drops, scattered units, weather, and failed equipment still produced success because leaders were mentally prepared to improvise.
Our Pillars
Lead From The Front
Leadership at DLA is modeled, not announced. “Lead from the front” means taking the first hard step, accepting risk before your team, and setting a standard that others can trust when conditions turn bad. We point to the officers, NCOs, and enlisted men in Normandy who didn’t just issue orders from the rear, but were on the beach, in the hedgerows, and at the breach points, moving first so others would follow.
Core Principles Matter
Values
We uphold values of integrity, respect, commitment, and community. These principles guide all our programs and interactions, fostering a spirit of growth and responsibility in participants.
Our Journey To Normandy
Jake Schroeder did not set out to build an academy. He started with something much simpler, and heavier: walking old men back onto the ground where their youth had been spent in fire.
Year after year, he escorted World War II veterans to Normandy. He watched them move slowly through the streets of Sainte-Mère-Église, stand at the edge of Utah Beach, and pause for long stretches among the white crosses and Stars of David. At first, Jake thought his job was logistics, airline tickets, hotel rooms, wheelchairs over cobblestones. It didn’t take long to realize it was something else entirely.
In quiet hotel lobbies and on bus rides between sites, the same pattern emerged. A veteran would start with a small detail, a friend’s name, a unit patch, a sound they could still hear, and, once they felt safe, the story would pour out. Not for glory, and not to be thanked. What they wanted, over and over, was simple and blunt:
“Make sure they know what happened here.”
“Tell them what it cost.”
“Don’t let them forget.”
Jake heard it so many times it stopped being a request and started feeling like a calling. These men weren’t asking for monuments; they were asking for witnesses, for younger shoulders to carry what they no longer could.
Over time, the trips changed him. He saw students and younger adults travel alongside the veterans and watched what happened when a teenager heard a story while standing on the exact field where it unfolded. Faces changed. Posture changed. History stopped being a chapter in a book and became a set of decisions made by people not much older than they were.
Out of those years, out of those bus rides, hotel conversations, and graveside silences, D-Day Leadership Academy was born.
Jake founded DLA to answer the vets’ demand in a serious, structured way: create a place where their stories would not just be remembered, but used. A place where history would shape character, not just memory. He built DLA so that future leaders of America could learn on the same ground, hear the same wind, and walk through the same choices, guided by the voices of the men who were there.
Since then, he has worked relentlessly: building programs, recruiting historians and veterans, designing experiences that are worthy of the stories that inspired them. Every course, every retreat, every student who sets foot in Normandy under the DLA banner is part of the same promise Jake heard so many years ago:
Tell their stories.
Learn from their sacrifices.
Make sure what happened here changes who we become.
Jake Schroeder
Director
Jake Schroeder is a fourth-generation Colorado native. He fronted the local band “Opie Gone Bad” for 20 years and has performed the national anthem for the Colorado Avalanche more than 1,000 times over 25 years. He began volunteering with the Denver Police Activities League in 1999, joined the organization full-time in 2005, and became executive director in 2014, leading its transition into D-Day Leadership Academy. This new mission for a long-established nonprofit was inspired by Jake’s trips to Europe with WWII veterans in the 2010s and a promise he made to them to carry their stories forward to new generations.
Jake has three daughters, a one-year-old grandson, and lives in Golden with his partner, Brook Ferguson. He loves watching her perform as principal flutist with the Colorado Symphony and also helps raise funds in support of their work.
Flavie Poisson
Historian / Caretaker
Flavie is a Norman whose family has lived in Normandy for generations. From an early age she listened to the stories of her grandparents, who were children during the occupation and liberation, and those memories have become a responsibility she now carries as an adult. She spent several months traveling across the United States interviewing American veterans of the Second World War as part of the WW2 Veterans’ Memories project. After several years as a guide at the Airborne Museum in Sainte-Mère-Église, she served as communications officer for the Utah Beach D-Day Landing Museum before deciding to share her passion and this shared history more directly through Normandy Discovery Tours. Since 2017 she has also volunteered with the WWII International Museum near Boston. Through DLA, Flavie introduces participants to the historical Normandy of 1944 using true stories that connect the ground, the people, and the events that unfolded there.
Thomas Voisin
Historian / Caretaker
Thomas is a young Norman who has spent the past fifteen years immersed in the history of the Second World War. He is an active member of the Carentan Liberty Group, a historical and event reenactment association dedicated to preserving the memory of the Normandy campaign. To stay close to the history and uncover new stories, he spends his weekends meeting older residents across Normandy and recording their recollections. Passionate about American Airborne troops, he went so far as to earn his own parachute qualification to better understand the experiences of the men he studies. After years of work in remembrance and public history, Thomas now guides DLA participants across the Normandy landing and battlefields with the same passion and devotion, telling the story of D Day and the campaign through the lives of the people who were there.
MICHELL COUPEY
Historian / Caretaker
Michelle Coupey is the heartbeat of DLA in Normandy. An American by birth, she met her husband while in college in the United States and soon after moved to Normandy, his home, where she has raised her family for the past thirty years. She manages the DLA Charity House and is the in country logistics lead for every cohort, coordinating the details that keep each program running smoothly.
Michelle is also the house chef, a medical liaison, and a steady problem solver with a rare talent for detail. She is also one of the kindest people you will ever meet in your time on earth.
Transforming Lives
Learn
Kind
Connecting Generations through History
Serve
Empowered
Fostering Respect and Responsibility
Grow
Honored
Creating Lasting Change Through Training
Reflect
Inspired
Carrying Forward the Legacy of D-Day
Explore Our Leadership Programs
Learn about our unique offerings designed to instill courage and responsibility.
