Cultivate aims to

Transform movements, fortify
relationships among participants,
and foster collaborations

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Cultivate Program

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

  • women’s rights
  • 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 We do not try to fit the women into an old, outdated leadership mold - that for too long has only served to alienate, discredit them and keep them from leadership positions of high impact.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.

Learn About Our Cultivate Values

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

Be a part of our next cohort

The deadline to apply is coming up soon!

Application deadline:

Next application will open on September 2021

Criteria Apply Today

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Healing

Healing

Both a process and an action, it’s an acknowledgement of hurt & pain. It is the slow & steady progression to move away from old behaviors and patterns that do not serve us anymore, rule or dictate who we are. It honors a healing journey of, and, each individual’s pace in a space properly cultivated for women of color. Our spirit and time together is naturally healing.

Re-Charge

A deliberate time to rest, recuperate, and rebuild energy to keep doing the good work. It is tied to healing and must be considered a continuous practice.

Personal and Cultural Truths

My Full Self in Leadership

The way in which I lead and the way I appear is just and right. After giving myself time to heal, I do not need to conform to white supremacy culture. I am allowed to shop up as I fully am, for my lived experiences inform my leadership.

Lived & Shaped Experiences

What I have lived through to make me who I am, what has shaped my values, thoughts and actions.
Cultivate acknowledges the experiences of women of color, which are often not valued/devalued, as important components of their leadership styles.

Creative

What flows innately out of each of us, to contribute to a project, action, and/or collective work.

Innate, Indigenous, Homegrown

Insight and expertise informed by our ancestral beliefs, practices, lessons, knowledge and core values. Reclaimed.
We reject automatically accepted notions of what is a leader rooted in colonial/patriarchal ideology.

Growth

Experiences with and immersion in Cultivate is for the growth of women of color and their leadership, in order to lift others.

Community and Trust

Shared Experiences

What I share with others in support of how I show up. My experiences connect me to others. Shared experiences transcend identity(ies) and awaken me to our common humanity and our interconnection with one another.

Brave Space

Dialogue to build trust with another; listen to each other’s truths with no judgement; recognize that nine months may not be enough, even among WOC, to feel safe or have trust with one another. Rooted in respect, trust and conscientiousness.

For Us By Us

Cultivate is designed for women of color with support of, and co-creation with them.

Community Building

Includes building bridges to find common ground with people who may not share the same perspectives or don’t have similar experiences; finding common ground to connect and define mutual set of values.

Accountability/ Transparency (Funders)

For funders to stand in partnership with women of color leaders; learn from this journey/process to take back to their respective foundations. Cultivate 2.0 commits to shifting the needle of philanthropy; build practices that honor the truths of WOC , their leadership and growth

Co-Creating

Done in collaboration with others in a respectful manner and honors all that people bring. Discard what doesn’t work for the collective, and keep overall goals and values in mind.

Friendship, Trust, Respect and Conscientiousness

Includes unpacking indifference in order to connect with others. These are essential to building community and take time to nurture.