The Jewish communal landscape is undergoing profound shifts and our work to develop leaders for the sector must evolve alongside it. Six cohorts into our Executive Leadership Program, we took a step back to ask: how can we better equip nonprofit leaders to meet today’s challenges while envisioning and building toward positive Jewish futures?
As we open recruitment for Cohort VII, we are excited to share our vision for the future of the fellowship. In the redesigned program, we expanded eligibility beyond CEO and executive-track roles, emphasized ecosystem and futures thinking, integrated a project component, and strengthened the role of Jewish learning.
Leaderful Organizations
Since 2018, our program has been a pathway for exceptional mid-career Jewish nonprofit professionals pursuing executive leadership. Our graduates continue to earn appointments as CEOs and executive directors across the Jewish nonprofit field—a result we are incredibly proud of. We have also learned that the field needs more leaderful organizations where the capacity for driving vision and action is shared.
As graduates step into CEO roles, they gain a new appreciation for how contingent their impact is on the capabilities of senior partners in their organizations. Many of our graduates are shaping their organizations outside the traditional executive track, through thought leadership, creative initiatives, and coalitional work. The power of distributed leadership is also emphasized in Leading Edge’s 2025 report on the State of Jewish Nonprofit Talent, which notes that the primary levers of organizational health and impact do not reside only in CEOs. In response, we have shifted our selection criteria to include a wider set of mid-career professionals who lead substantive work from a range of leadership positions and professional trajectories.
Ecosystem Mindset
In 2023, we expanded eligibility to all Jewish nonprofits to reflect how modern career trajectories weave through organizations across the sector. This shift was also fueled by our experience in the Mandel education and culture programs, which engage leaders across organizations and artistic disciplines. Fellows affirm how rich it is to learn from and alongside peers who lead through different practices and settings. Our experience with cross-boundary groups has shown that uncommon connections spark new insights and opportunities for collaboration, which are critical for leading in an increasingly multipolar Jewish community.
This ecosystem approach is now reflected both in the composition of our cohorts and the program’s core purposes. The Executive Leadership Program aims to cultivate an ecosystem mindset in the field, where more leaders are guided by a broad understanding of the ideas and practices that animate diverse Jewish communities and an openness to collaboration across organizational and communal contexts. In the program, fellows will learn from diverse sites of innovation and excellence and consider how their leadership contributes to the health and vitality of the broader Jewish communal ecosystem.
Futures Thinking & Experimentation
In times of instability and rapid change, the cognitive load of processing day-to-day events can begin to dim the imagination and sense of what is possible. In the Jewish communal sector, we see this expressed in diminished hope and exits from the field. We have refreshed our curriculum with a focus on futures-thinking methodologies, which will invite fellows to imagine possible Jewish futures, understand the forces shaping them, and pursue meaningful directions for change.
Fellows will now enter the program with a new or existing project, which will serve as a laboratory for testing ideas, applying learning, and bringing their visions for communal impact to life. We hope that the experience of working on an experimental project will grow fellows’ sense of confidence and agency as creative shapers of Jewish life.
Jewish Learning as an Anchor
We believe that for communal leaders to chart the Jewish future, they need a grounding in the ideas, texts, and histories that have shaped our past. Jewish learning will now be a core aspect of the program. Fellows will study Jewish texts, histories, cultures, and debates, not as content to master, but as sources to enrich fellows’ leadership and to examine broader visions for Jewish life in which to situate their work.
Applications are Open
As the Executive Leadership Program evolves, we are excited to grow our community of vision-guided leaders who work in service of the common good.
Applications are now open for Cohort VII and close May 15, 2026. We invite you to explore the redesigned program and to consider whether you or someone in your network is ready to learn and grow in a community of thoughtful, committed leaders.