About

SoCal Grantmakers (SCG) is pleased to announce the call for applications for our 2024-2025 Emerging Leaders Peer-to-Peer Network. This exciting professional learning program, modeled after SCG’s Senior Peer-to-Peer Network, brings together early to mid-career foundation professionals from SCG’s membership for a year-long cohort dedicated to cultivating the next generation of philanthropic leadership. The group will dive deep into the skills and mindsets needed to be an effective leader in the 21st century, and will explore a wide-range of topics such as adaptive leadership, organizational dynamics, cross-sector collaboration, and professional and personal goal setting. Additionally, this opportunity will enable participants to acquire the interpersonal skills needed to foster new connections and expand their professional networks. At the program's conclusion, participants will have gained a peer community and some examples of frameworks and tools to enhance their leadership capacity.

Participants will convene on a quarterly basis over one year (2024-2025) to:

  • Re-invigorate their intellectual and emotional connection to their philanthropic work.
  • Engage closely with new colleagues in a tailored forum dedicated to thoughtful reflection, collective problem-solving, and mutual learning on questions central to personal and professional growth. 
  • Build leadership and management strengths while cultivating tools and frameworks for addressing challenges.
  • Develop a more defined life and career trajectory grounded in their values, vision, and goals.

What to Expect

  • A learning curriculum tailored and curated to the cohort's unique needs and interests. Curriculum topics will be solidified by the group and facilitator at the beginning of the program and provide access to external philanthropic professionals in the space.
  • Each Emerging Leaders Peer-to-Peer module will feature self-reflective dialogue, exercises, and practical application, all designed to strengthen participants' personal and professional tool kits. 
  • A collaborative environment and space to explore strengths and challenges and test new leadership practices.
  • A peer community where group processes will enable shared connection and group problem-solving.
  • 1:1 coaching access with our facilitator.

Facilitator

John Kobara's Headshot Photo

John E. Kobara

Chief Facilitator, Random Acts of Progress

This year, we are proud to announce John Kobara, Chief Facilitator of Random Acts of Progress, as our 2024-2025 Emerging Leaders Peer-to-Peer facilitator.

John is the wildest American dream of his immigrant grandparents who came to this country with nothing. A third-generation Japanese-American. Married over his head to a woman he met on a plane. A proud father of three college graduates with no student debt. A struggling poet. A humbled activist who still is trying to change the world and not grow up.

John’s destiny was forged in the internment camps of 1942, where his grandparents and parents were stripped of all their rights and possessions and incarcerated in the desolate desert of Poston, Arizona for more than 4 years.

His Dad, in his awkward Asian fatherly way, expected John to become a "public person". It took John many years to understand that a "public person" was someone his father wasn't — A person who was social, networked, engaged in the American community, was a good communicator and to have the courage to say what he thought. His mother, a late blooming artist, taught him how to notice the world and to be generous with one’s gifts.

John headed to Los Angeles to attend UCLA which started his 45-year love affair with the imperfect paradise of the City of Angels. His quest to be a public person took him on a career traversing all sectors. His role at the California Community Foundation is his 18th job. He survived three start-ups in three different decades. He worked primarily in the so-called non-profit arena or what he likes to call the “for-purpose” field, interrupted by for-profit and public-sector jobs. He has held big titles and important positions but usually not at the same time. His early work with juvenile felons in maximum security prisons pushed him to become a Big Brother for 10 years and study and eventually teach mentoring all over the world. His work with at-risk youth and recently released felons fulfills him today. His education, both formal and experiential, has empowered his open-mindedness and open-heartedness. He is obsessed with understanding and releasing the unexpressed and untapped human potential in himself and in others. The “public person” journey his father put him on, is infinite. John is grateful for the opportunities to sustain the dream of his grandparents by dedicating his life to helping others build a more joyful, equitable, just, and compassionate world.

In partnership with:

evolve is SCG’s suite of programming that champions transformational leadership made possible by the generous support of the Angell Foundation.