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by Deena Englander
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Congratulations to Alex Rahl-Kaplan (community coordinator for EA-NYC), Ruben Dieleman (campaign manager for Existential Risk Observatory and incoming co-director of Effective Environmentalism), and Myriam Vanderzwalmen, project manager at Eurogroup for Animals, the graduates of the second Operations Fellowship (now called HIA Organization Accelerator) program!

In this second iteration of the program, I've gotten to watch our  participants absorb the content, becoming excellent nonprofit leaders and helping both themselves and their organizations grow.

Here are some notes of their key takeaways from this experience, which were similar to the takeaways from our first cohort:

  • They all felt that they gained useful knowledge and experience to be able to do their jobs better
  • They all felt that the program gave them good experience as career capital in nonprofit leadership and management
  • The coaching sessions and the content sessions and homework were independently valuable, and together they made their gains stronger
  • Some especially valuable takeaways included:
    • Exposure to different areas of expertise and experts available to play a role as service providers and support the organization, especially ones that are not focused on naturally (eg, marketing and strategy)
    • Highly relevant day-to-day and strategic content

Some things we're going to change going forward for future cohorts; some of these changes are already in place with our 3rd cohort:

  • Moving the session on a business plan to the beginning, so that it can be developed throughout the life-cycle of the course
  • Meetings twice a month instead of once a month

As a recap, this program is an experiential learning style and hands-on educational experience designed to support nonprofits and infuse nonprofit leadership with strong operations and management skills. It exposes our participants to many key ideas regarding effective management and leadership techniques while strengthening their organizations as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing what our new graduates will do with their careers, and am grateful for the opportunity to help them achieve optimized impact. I know that they have the skills and knowledge to be a great asset to their current and future employers and organizations.

For more information about our programs, this is a prior post about it, or you can check out our website or send me an email.

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