2025 Rising Leaders Cohort

The Application is Closed.

About

The Rising Leaders Cohort offers emerging leaders the technical and transformational skills to move into your power within philanthropy. The cohort is designed for individuals with a deep-seated commitment and passion for advancing your leadership journey and your impact. The 6-month cohort program offers training around growing in your self-awareness, emotional intelligence, power mapping, relationship management, values alignment, facilitation, and conflict management and transformation.

The future of philanthropy lies in the hands of emerging leaders. We are honored to accompany you in your journey.

Learn More about the Cohort & Faculty

Target Audience


This cohort experience is designed for individuals working within the broader field of philanthropy.

Are you ready to deepen your skills and grow professionally, politically, and emotionally? Are you looking for connection and belonging with other funders and grantmakers? If you answered yes to these questions and you work at a grantmaking institution, whether that is a philanthropic advisor, a foundation, an operating foundation, an intermediary, or a philanthropic support organization, please consider applying. 

Curriculum

Details

• Six cohort sessions, all held in person in San Francisco.
• Four small group sessions in between whole cohort gatherings, held via zoom.
• Intimate cohort experience of approximately 20 participants. While the arc of sessions is known, faculty adapt specific content in response to the interests of the group.
• Facilitated experience with the Reflected Best Self Exercise, a personal development tool that helps you see who you are at your best, engaging you to live and work from that powerful place daily.
•  Presentations and activities facilitated by expert and diverse faculty.
•  Experiential engagements that encourage reflection, practice, and immediate application of new tools, ideas and frameworks.
• Access to tools, templates, resources, and shared learning.

Sessions

The curriculum follows 4 main threads:

1) Emotional intelligence and leadership development; 2) Technical skills development; 3) Equity, inclusion, identity, and power; 4) Career development. Topics within these threads include values (personal and organizational): facilitation, collaboration, and decision-making; self-awareness; listening and inquiry skills; conflict management; power mapping; managing up.



Session 0 | Orientation and Connection (January 30, 2025):

This introductory session we take space to meaningfully introduce participants and faculty to one another.
Building on this connection, we integrate the current moment, what is happening in the world around us, and how it will impact our time together. We’ll share the design and curriculum with its pedagogy while we prepare for the first full session together.



Session 1 | Managing Self: Building and Leveraging Self-Awareness (February 27, 2025):

The global community and planet are facing unprecedented challenges and philanthropy is navigating its way through them. More than ever our world needs leaders who consciously lead with self-awareness and integrity. Session 1 of the Cohort begins with a focus on self-awareness, a key competency of effective leadership. We will explore your career journey to date, discuss how to create and claim your future narrative while identifying the learning journey to help get you there. In this session, and throughout the cohort, we will use the Reflected Best Self Exercise to ground these conversations, giving you the reflection of who are you at your best, a place from where you can develop future goals.



Session 2 | Managing Relationships: Navigating and Influencing Power (March, 27, 2025):

You are powerful and have agency. You deserve to recognize and exercise your power in ways that feel true and authentic to you while being in service of the collective good. Session 2 explores the concept of power from the individual, positional, and systemic perspectives. You’ll gain insights into leveraging your power to manage and influence others across power structures and hierarchy. Equity, belonging, and accountability are foundational values to this session’s curriculum.



Session 3 | Managing Relationships: Collaboration and Conflict (April 24, 2025):

As you rise within your career, the requirements demanded of you don’t just scale, they evolve. At higher levels of an organization your ability to see systems, create and
execute strategy, while being able to rally and coach others towards collective goals, is only the beginning defining your success. Doing all of this well requires skill and emotional intelligence. Session 3 tackles one of the most difficult dimensions of relationships: conflict. We will expand your capacity to understand your own story, illuminate the stories of others, and move forward with collaborative solutions.



Session 4 | Collaborative Leadership through Facilitation (May 29, 2025):

Skillful collaboration is facilitated by an open mind and heart, keen powers of observation of self and others, compassionate communication, a whole-systems view and a willingness to witness and experience emergence and transformation. By practicing presence, expanding our awareness of self and others and unlocking our creativity, we can realize our potential as inspired and skillful facilitators or participants in any group system. Session 4 promotes these qualities while seeking to enhance leadership skills and a
capacity to contribute to positive change at any scale. Participants will be introduced to a variety of group work and collaborative leadership tools. This will help improve our
practical facilitative skills for decision–making and conflict resolution, as well as develop the courage to imaginatively embrace emergence.

Session 5 | Closing (June 26, 2025):

In this final session, we will reflect on the learning experience and bring this time together to a close. We’ll create space for participants to share their leadership aspirations and goals as they move out of this cohort experience and discuss next steps following cohort wrap-up.


 

Closing Evening Reception | (June 26, 2025):
Following our final session, we’ll celebrate our time together over small bites.