Expanding Mid-Career Professional Growth Opportunities for Communal Leaders

Two and a half years ago, the Jim Joseph Foundation launched an initiative to test new models of connection, learning and leadership development for mid-career professionals within the Jewish community. It has now been a year since we last shared our efforts to design cohort-based professional development experiences (CBE) to be more accessible and affordable for this demographic. We’ve been intent on learning about what components help create the most effective experiences, with our ultimate aim to understand how we can expand this work.

Today our efforts with the Jim Joseph Foundation, in partnership with Gather Consulting and Conscious Builders, are growing. We’re scaling our work to offer more opportunities for mid-career Jewish communal professionals to learn, grow, and support one another in trusted cohorts of colleagues.

Now called Chavurot: Expanding Professional Growth for Communal Leaders (Working Title), the initiative has been testing cohort models of connection, learning and leadership development to understand what makes these experiences so powerful and which design elements contribute to increased professional retention, support for career growth and feelings of connectedness and belonging.

Cohort members self-organize around who is in the group and the content they discuss, which varies from facilitation support (for facilitators and group practitioners), to event planning (for event planners), to personality/leadership assessments, to wellness and self-care needs. The initiative then helps them find facilitators or outside speakers to minimize the burden of scheduling and leading the professional development themselves. While the design is not as comprehensive as selective fellowship programs, we are finding they achieve many of the same outcomes and at a fraction of the cost. Cohort members are chosen based on roles (e.g., event planners, cohort practitioners), affinity (e.g., founders, solo consultants, etc.), or identity (e.g. race, gender, age, etc.), and are based a combination of factors: needs in the field, priorities of the funders, and demand for this kind of learning, connection, and nourishment. We’ve chosen cohorts based on an RFP model at one point, and will probably go that route again in the future.

We know cohort members have a hunger for connection, but they also value getting to choose for themselves how they want to learn, with whom and in what ways. They desire emergent content and are seeking a supportive container to be cared for and supported. We also see that there are not nearly enough cohort-based professional development experiences geared toward mid-career professionals rather than CEOs, that are bottom up, rather than top down.

Read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy.

Seth Linden is the founder of Gather Consulting and Gamal J. Palmer is the founder of Conscious Builders. Together, they lead Chavurot: Expanding Professional Growth for Communal Leaders (Working Title).