Years ago, I was part of a CEO/Entrepreneurs Group. We met monthly as a group and then had the opportunity to have 1-to-1 coaching sessions with our facilitator. What I experienced personally as a leader by participating in that group was indescribable. I was the only nonprofit leader in the group. While I got a ton out of being in the group (because bottom-line nonprofits are businesses), I kept thinking of how much more powerful it would be if the group were full of nonprofit leaders. I remember asking myself and my business coach at the time, Ed Cox, "Why doesn't something like this exist for nonprofit leaders?" Ed's response was, "You should start it!" Years passed, and it was always something I dreamt of starting, but I didn't have the capacity to do the work, so I kept putting it off for a future year. In 2023, together with my board of directors, we realized how imperative it was to invest in nonprofit leadership, and I shared my idea with them. It was go-time. I had a team in place to help with my workload, and another business coach, Beth Wonson, encouraged me and helped me as a sounding board. Everything kept pointing in the right direction; it was time to prepare to launch this program. Today, we sit with a test pilot project on something we know is scalable and worthy.

This past Friday was our first group session with the pilot. The power of watching this collective group of incredible leaders work together and support each other through this group session affirms that we made the right decision to launch this project, and we are fulfilling a need in our region that will yield an enormous investment return for our community. Our goal is to pilot with this initial group and then build a replicable model to expand. This initiative will allow us to establish additional nonprofit leadership circles in the future, ultimately serving more leaders at all levels.

So grateful to do this work and invest in local leaders! ~ Becky Gray

Click HERE to read more details about the need, the outcome, and the impact of this new project.