Empowering Nonprofit Leaders to Thrive

Catalog description

NPLD 5870 is designed for interdisciplinary students interested in cultivating flourishing organizations, engaged stakeholders, and inspiring leaders across sectors and especially within nonprofits. NPLD 5870 focuses on both theoretical and practical insights that can be gained from cutting-edge research on how and when people thrive at work. This research can be applied to help practitioners enrich people’s experiences at work, in collaboration with various stakeholders, and beyond. Additionally, NPLD 5870 is built upon a foundation of experiential learning, such that students can expect to experiment and apply course concepts in their own lives throughout the semester. Indeed, we intentionally start with ourselves as the first site of learning and development to promote greater authenticity and psychological safety. The experiential learning community is enhanced throughout the course with highly interactive, live class sessions, in-depth feedback from the Teaching Team, and intentional practice with constructive peer coaching. At the end of the course, students will feel a strong grounding in their own strengths and values, their own authentic leadership, their ability to connect with others in meaningful, supportive ways, and their capacity to surface opportunities that inspire constructive change at any level of interaction or organizing. The learning objectives of the course provide students with: 1. Techniques and real-world experience in using positive leadership concepts to enrich one’s own career, relationships, and life; 2. Ability to identify opportunities to use positive leadership practices in the workplace to enhance stakeholder engagement, individual and organizational performance, and collective impact; 3. Tools for applying positive leadership concepts in nonprofits, as well as all other organizational domains (e.g., business, government,…