evolve: Emerging Leaders Peer-to-Peer Network Application 2024-2025

SoCal Grantmakers (SCG) is pleased to announce the call for applications for our 2024-2025 Emerging Leaders Peer-to-Peer Network. This exciting professional learning program, modeled after SCG’s Senior Peer-to-Peer Network, brings together early to mid-career foundation professionals from SCG’s membership for a year-long cohort dedicated to cultivating the next generation of philanthropic leadership. The group will dive deep into the skills and mindsets needed to be an effective leader in the 21st century, and will explore a wide-range of topics such as adaptive leadership, organizational dynamics, cross-sector collaboration, and professional and personal goal setting. Additionally, this opportunity will enable participants to acquire the interpersonal skills needed to foster new connections and expand their professional networks. At the program’s conclusion, participants will have gained a peer community and some examples of frameworks and tools to enhance their leadership capacity.

Participants will convene on a quarterly basis over one year (2024-2025) to:

• Re-invigorate their intellectual and emotional connection to their philanthropic work.
• Engage closely with new colleagues in a tailored forum dedicated to thoughtful reflection, collective problem-solving, and mutual learning on questions central to personal and professional growth.
• Build leadership and management strengths while cultivating tools and frameworks for addressing challenges.
• Develop a more defined life and career trajectory grounded in their values, vision, and goals.

What to Expect:

• A learning curriculum tailored and curated to the cohort’s unique needs and interests. Curriculum topics will be solidified by the group and facilitator at the beginning of the program and provide access to external philanthropic professionals in the space.
• Each Emerging Leaders Peer-to-Peer module will feature self-reflective dialogue, exercises, and practical application, all designed to strengthen participants’ personal and professional tool kits.
• A collaborative environment and space to explore strengths and challenges and test new leadership practices.
• A peer community where group processes will enable shared connection and group problem-solving.
• 1:1 coaching access with their facilitator.

Facilitator

John E. Kobara
Chief Facilitator, Random Acts of Progress

This year, SoCal Grantmakers is proud to announce John Kobara, Chief Facilitator of Random Acts of Progress, as their 2024-2025 Emerging Leaders Peer-to-Peer facilitator. John is the wildest American dream of his immigrant grandparents who came to this country with nothing. A third-generation Japanese-American. Married over his head to a woman he met on a plane. A proud father of three college graduates with no student debt. A struggling poet. A humbled activist who still is trying to change the world and not grow up.

In Partnership With