Program Details - Cultivate

Cultivate Program

We bring together women who lead in intersecting but separate justice movements that may include:

women’s rights
racial justice
labor rights
civil rights
LGBTQ rights
immigrant rights
and others

The project benefits from a diversity of experiences and perspectives. In doing so, Cultivate creates opportunities to strengthen women’s leadership, their respective organizations and the larger fields in which they work.

Cultivate Values

At Cultivate, we firmly believe in the importance of living out our values. This influences how we run our program, so that it can benefit our participants to the fullest. We have organized our values into three main categories: Healing, Personal & Cultural Truths and Community & Trust. Within these categories, we uphold that a big part of the leadership journey of women of color MUST include a safe and open environment for healing and re-charging. Too often women of color are tasked with more than their fair share of the work, and at Cultivate we encourage women to take a step back and acknowledge where healing and recharging need to occur, so as to strengthen their leadership.

Secondly, we firmly believe that women of color ALREADY have within their beings, innate leadership abilities that are shaped by each of their lived experiences, culture and environment. We do not try to fit the women into an old, outdated leadership mold - that for too long has only served to alienate, discredit them and keep them from leadership positions of high impact. We celebrate all walks of life of women of color, and seek to provide a spark to reignite the strengths and skills they already possess.

Lastly, we believe in co-creation and design. Cultive is unique in that we welcome women from the place they find themselves when they arrive. We encourage them to have that assist them in co-creating their own leadership program and topics. We provide a safe and brave space for women so that they can bring their full selves and at all of the intersections of their lives, not only for transparency but for friendship and sisterhood. In collaboration with the foundation leaders of Cultivate (who are also women of color), our program seeks to reinvigorate and influence our society to change the status quo that has not served women of color and our communities for generations.

The 5 Goals of Cultivate

Toward these goals, Cultivate designs its program to provide a space for women of color with shared interests and backgrounds to convene, a participant-crafted curriculum with sessions for professional and personal development, and professional coaching to women in each cohort.

SUPPORT

Support the personal and professional development of women of color leaders.

RECLAIM

Develop a framework that intentionally and explicitly incorporates race and gender in the participants’ leadership and professional development.

BUILD

Build a safe and healthy space for women of color to discuss and learn about alternative models of leadership development, organization building, community organizing and movement building.

ADVANCE

Advance the sustainability and longevity of individual women of color leadership while enabling a pipeline for new leaders to emerge within grassroots community organizations.

NURTURE

Nurture relationships to create a learning community across organizations and fields of work.

“We use our lives, our stories and the situations that we face to build strategies.”
Cohort Member

Committment & Sessions

Fifteen women of color who play an emerging leadership role in their organization will be invited to participate in Cultivate.

The Cultivate Program is:

an 8-month long commitment
participants attend an orientation
participants attend six (6) bimonthly sessions

The Sessions focus on:

meeting the program goals
leadership development
capacity building
movement building
participants receive personal executive coaching (at their convenience) to build on the bimonthly sessions

Cultivate aims to

Cultivate Program

Cultivate Values