In 2025, the Collective Impact Forum launched the Collective Leadership Advancing Racial Equity (CLARE) program, a year-long leadership development experience designed specifically for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) leaders guiding place-based collaborative and systems change efforts.
These leaders operate at the intersection of racial equity, collaboration, and systems change. They navigate political complexity, build relationships across differences, and often carry significant emotional labor while advancing long-term community change. Yet leadership development opportunities rarely create space to explore the personal dimensions of this work or invest in the wellbeing of the people doing it.
CLARE was designed to fill that gap. Rather than focusing primarily on technical leadership skills, CLARE asked a different question:
What do leaders need in order to sustain themselves and lead authentically in work that asks so much of them?
The program brought together twenty leaders from across the country for a year of facilitated learning, one-on-one coaching, peer connection, and reflection designed to help participants better understand themselves, strengthen their collaborative leadership, and build relationships with others doing similar work. Its objectives centered on healing and wellness, understanding how identity shapes leadership, and building networks of support among BIPOC systems leaders.
What changed
The evaluation found that CLARE did more than build knowledge, it changed how participants understood themselves and how they approached leadership. Participants rated their overall experience an average of 8.7 out of 10, with many describing the program as personally and professionally transformative.
Several themes emerged consistently across participant interviews:
1. Participants gave themselves permission to lead authentically.
Many leaders entered the program believing they needed to perform a particular version of leadership – one that required code-switching, proving themselves, or suppressing parts of who they were.
CLARE challenged that assumption not only through the content but through one-on-one leadership coaching with Ruchi Warrier, Principal of Strategy and Seva.
Participants described discovering that their most effective leadership emerged not from becoming someone different, but from becoming more fully themselves. They reported greater confidence, a stronger sense of belonging in leadership spaces, and less energy spent performing leadership in prescribed ways.
2. Leaders developed greater awareness of how identity shapes leadership.
Through structured reflection and the facilitative support of Dominique Samari of Kin Consultant Group, participants explored how lived experiences, conditioned patterns, and racialized harm influenced how they responded to conflict, uncertainty, and relationships.
Rather than viewing leadership as a collection of competencies, participants began to see it as a practice rooted in self-awareness. They learned to recognize patterns that no longer served them, respond more intentionally, and extend greater compassion to themselves and others.
3. Wellbeing became a leadership practice, not an afterthought.
One of the strongest findings from the evaluation was the shift in how participants viewed wellness.
Many leaders entered CLARE intellectually believing self-care was important. They left understanding that restoration, boundaries, and balance are essential leadership practices rather than optional acts of self-care.
Participants described disentangling their identity from their work, learning to delegate more effectively, and recognizing that caring for themselves enabled them to better support their teams and communities.
4. Participants approached collaboration differently.
CLARE also changed how leaders understood collective impact and collaboration more broadly.
Using tools such as Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem Map, participants recognized that effective collaborative leadership is fundamentally relational. Many realized they did not have to carry the work alone. Instead, they became more intentional about sharing leadership, elevating community voice, and activating the strengths of others across their collaborative ecosystems. Several participants brought these frameworks back to their organizations and began changing how their teams approached collaboration.
Across these findings, one pattern stood out. Participants consistently described moving:
- from self-doubt to confidence,
- from performing leadership to leading authentically,
- from transactional relationships to relational leadership,
- from burnout toward greater balance, and
- from carrying collaborative work alone to sharing leadership across their ecosystems.
Why this matters
Too often, leadership development for collaborative work focuses primarily on building technical knowledge: facilitation skills, governance structures, strategic planning, or measurement.
Those skills matter.
But systems change also requires leaders to navigate complexity, relationships, conflict, ambiguity, and power. It asks leaders to build trust across differences, adapt continuously, and remain grounded in the face of uncertainty.
The CLARE pilot suggests these capacities are difficult to develop without first understanding how our own identities, experiences, and patterns influence how we lead.
In other words, the work of changing systems also requires the work of understanding ourselves.
What’s next
The pilot reinforced something participants shared throughout the year: this work takes time. While one year created meaningful shifts in awareness and leadership practice, participants also wanted more opportunities to deepen relationships, apply learning in their collaborative and community contexts, and continue growing together.
Based on what we learned, the Collective Impact Forum is exploring several important evolutions of CLARE:
- Extending the experience from one year to two years, allowing leaders to move from personal transformation into sustained collaborative leadership practice during the program.
- Supporting leaders within the same local ecosystems, rather than only national cohorts, to strengthen relationships and collaborative capacity in a shared place.
- Sharing lessons with the broader place-based field to help funders and practitioners better understand what effective leadership development for collaborative systems change requires.
CLARE began as a pilot, but it affirmed something we believe is increasingly important for the field. If we want collaborative efforts to endure, leadership development cannot focus solely on what leaders know or what they produce. It must also invest in who leaders are, how they show up, and the conditions that allow them to lead with authenticity, resilience, and humanity. Because ultimately, building stronger systems begins with supporting the people working every day to transform them.
