Fellows Program
“Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately leadership is about creating new realities.”
Joseph Jaworski, Founder, American Leadership Forum
To achieve our goal of healthy, vibrant communities, each year ALF chapters across the country offer a year-long Fellows Program designed to build collaborative leadership skills and an expansive leadership network across communities. ALF starts by bringing together experienced leaders with a diversity of views and backgrounds for an intense one-of-a-kind leadership development experience. During their year together, the classes focus on dialogue skills for complex and generative conversations, developing an openness to be influenced by others’ perspectives, and build on trust that can serve their communities for decades.
Each Fellows class is composed of up to twenty-eight proven leaders from all sectors, who are selected in each chapter to participate in the program. The program year begins with an orientation, and includes a series of monthly seminars on topics such as dialogue, conflict management and resolution, ethics, systems change, and emerging themes in leadership. Each Fellows class embarks on a multi-day wilderness experience focused on recharging in the natural world and building community trust in order to deepen the capacity for transformative collaboration. The wilderness experience leads participants to tap into seldom-used inner resources in a way that transforms their perceptions of personal abilities, and strengthens and adds new dimensions to their visions of themselves and others and what, together, they can do.
ALF distinguishes itself from other leadership programs by creating an environment where leaders of companies, organizations, communities, and movements convene and commit to mindful reflection, ground-breaking dialogues and co-creating new ways of being and doing that serve the greater good. Through the ALF Fellows experience, leaders reach outside of their professional training and networks to explore stories and strategies that raise our collective consciousness, deepen empathy and expand our ability to see, feel and lead in this ever-changing world.
Graduates, called Senior Fellows, form a diverse network committed to building stronger communities, using network leadership skills to identify and deal with complex regional and state-wide issues. The Senior Fellow Networks create opportunities to work together in ways that make a significant difference to their communities.
To learn more about the Fellows Program offered in each chapter, please see the individual chapter website of interest.