Leadership Fellows Academy: Equipping Leaders for North Carolina

The Leadership Fellows Academy is a transformational, cohort learning experience for executive directors, owners, and board chairs of consumer operated nonprofit organizations in North Carolina. Since 2017, the program has facilitated over 50 Fellows through a 26-week program, which entails in-person and online training along with one-on-one coaching. Fellows participate in a cohort model, and Academy has now hosted three cohorts through the program’s contents.

The Academy began as a project of the NC State Institute for Nonprofits and is now facilitated by the School of Public and International Affair’s Department of Public Administration in partnership with the NC Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services and the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work’s Jordan Institute for Families.  

The intent of the Leadership Fellows Academy is to inculcate leadership capacities in individuals, throughout the organizations they lead, and within the communities in which they live and serve. The Academy is based on two complementary frameworks: 1) a framework developed by Ronald Heifetz who explores the relevance of technical and adaptive leadership as skills needed for today’s leaders and 2) five leadership challenges which were formalized by the Institute for Nonprofits as means of focusing on challenges that leaders face in today’s nonprofit and social sectors.  

The reports from Fellows demonstrate the effectiveness of the program in empowering leaders.  For example, comparing reports pre and post participation in the 2019-2020 Academy, Fellows reported increasing in knowledge and skill level of leadership and 89% reported being satisfied or very satisfied with the usefulness of the Academy’s contents. One 2019-20 Fellow reflected:

“I never used the word leader before, so…professionally what I see in myself that has developed is my understanding <of> what a leader is, how to implement those attributes as a leader, and understanding who I am as a leader.”

In this fourth year, the Academy brings together the cohort members from the previous three years, and aims to create an engaged community of North Carolina consumer-operated organizations and foster engagement of these organizations with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and state and federal policymakers. SPIA faculty contributing to the project this year include Professor Richard Clerkin and Associate Professor Amanda J. Stewart, along with a second-year Master of Public Administration student Madison Kirshner.