Nonprofit Leaders Forum
Empowering nonprofit leaders to build capacity, address challenges, and achieve collective impact through a collaborative peer learning and coaching program, enhancing our community’s well-being.
Impact Reports
The Nonprofit Leaders Forum connects mid-level leaders to build capacity and tackle shared challenges. Partners report high satisfaction (4.8 out of 5) as they address real issues like imposter syndrome, progressive discipline, and leadership transitions through peer support and expert facilitation. Participants gain practical tools to strengthen their teams, forge cross-sector partnerships, and enhance their agency’s capacity to navigate funding pressures and organizational transitions. The program demonstrates measurable impact through improved leadership effectiveness and expanded network connections that directly benefit service delivery.
Leaders play a crucial role in community nonprofits.
Thriving nonprofits invest in cultivating ambitious, visionary leaders. These individuals are encouraged to develop their capacity for calculated risk-taking, thinking beyond daily tasks, and a broader strategic perspective.
Without support, challenges arise:
Isolation – The weight of decision-making can lead to isolation, with limited time for peer support and open dialogue.
Knowledge Exchange – Learning from the experiences of other organizations and leaders in the field can be difficult to prioritize.
Limited Development – A lack of internal leadership development funding often restricts access.
This proven peer learning and coaching program effectively addresses the challenges of management isolation, knowledge gaps, and limited leadership development, empowering partners to access a robust peer network, advance their professional skills, engage in shared learning, and achieve critical agency and mental health network goals.
This is accomplished through eight in-person half-day forums, supporting up to 12 partners:
Partner-Driven Agenda: The key challenges identified by the partners shape the outcomes, ensuring relevance to the most pressing needs. Each session includes professional development topics, partner consultation, agency spotlighting, and capacity check-ins.
Facilitated Solution-Finding: “We don’t just talk; we problem-solve.” Effective facilitation ensures that discussions result in immediate and practical solutions. Each segment concludes with a summary of discoveries and the establishment of specific, measurable goals.
Expanding Network Knowledge: Through a rotating hosting model, partners gain hands-on experience of agency operations, deepening their understanding of the community network, which drives referrals and further collaborations.
The Latest from the Field
Ten Nonprofit Leaders Close a Year of Building Trust (Hanover Township Nonprofit Leaders Forum – September 2026)
A partnership between organizations is worth what it moves for the people they serve. Ten nonprofit leaders spent a year building the trust that makes that possible. In the final session of the 2025-2026 cohort, mid-level leaders from agencies funded by the Hanover…
What Trust Between Partner Agencies Actually Looks Like (Schaumburg Nonprofit Leaders Forum, August 2026)
Thank you to NWSRA for hosting the Nonprofit Leaders Forum in a space where inclusion isn’t just a mission statement, it’s how the agency operates: NWSRA leans on park districts across northwest Cook County and its own fundraising arm (SLSF) to make inclusive…
What If I Am the Problem? Bloomingdale Nonprofit Leaders Forum – August 2026
“What if I am the problem?” That question stopped the room at our Bloomingdale Township Nonprofit Leaders Forum, hosted by UCP Seguin of Greater Chicago. Partners realized that stepping in to just handle something themselves, instead of inviting a teammate to rise to…
Two People Housed: The Real Return on Resource Sharing (Nonprofit Leaders Forum – Hanover Township)
Two people have a place to live tonight because one partner shared a landlord list with another agency. That’s the return our Resource Sharing segment was built to produce, and it’s the news that opened our seventh session of the Nonprofit Leaders Forum serving the…
What Happens When HR Is Slow and the Manager Is Stuck? (Schaumburg Nonprofit Leaders Forum, June 2026)
“It is not my responsibility to carry their feelings.” There is a difference between supporting your team and absorbing what belongs to them. Finding that line is a challenge in any management position, and understanding it does not make it easier to hold. This…
“It’s Your Challenge, But I Don’t Hear You Wanting to Do Something About It” (Bloomingdale Township Nonprofit Leaders Forum – June 2026)
“It’s your challenge, but I don’t hear you wanting to do something about it.” That kind of honesty happens in a group that has built real trust, and it’s exactly what showed up at our Nonprofit Leaders Forum, where mid-level nonprofit leaders serving Bloomingdale…
“One of the mandates of the Illinois Community Mental Health Act is to build a comprehensive network of services within our community. I really see this forum as a building block of that comprehensive network.”
– Amanda Teachout, Hanover Township Mental Health Board Manager