ALF Insights

Mission

ALF Insights creates spaces of productive tension that maximize growth, mitigate harm, and leverage the development of strategic opportunities.

Vision

We envision a community of served clients that have become impactful leaders through their ability to foster:

• Emotionally intelligent leadership that creates high functioning organizational culture

• Quality decision making processes that leads to better results and outcomes

• Clear, strategic thinking that brings forth innovative service models

• Productive dialogues that support organizational strategy and innovation

Values

• Belonging and Relationships

  • We seek to curate spaces that promote inclusion, intentionality, empathy  and grace. 

• Tension and Growth

  • We embrace tension as a leverage point for interpersonal and strategic growth.

  • We foster learning environments that support progress over perfection and celebrate learning through curiosity. 

• Innovation & Impact

  • We seek to provide clear processes that spark innovation and move forward an organization’s strategic goals.

American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley

American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley joins and strengthens diverse leaders to serve the common good. We do this through a year-long Fellows Program in each Chapter’s community in which leaders can engage in dialogue, differ, and build relationships. ALF strengthens Fellows’ capacity to address public issues collaboratively and builds a strong leadership network to work for positive change in the communities we serve.

American Leadership Forum was first founded in 1980 on the premise that investing in diverse, cross-sector leaders and putting them in relationship with each other—to expand their perspectives and empathy of different experiences—could help create a more equitable and thriving society. Founder Joe Jaworski made dialogue across differences and unconscious bias cornerstones of the curriculum from day one. He lays out this objective of ALF as follows:

“Build deep trust and respect among the group, and help each Fellow get beyond the devaluing prejudices that we all hold. Foster an experience of how a group of leaders, from many different sectors in a community, can coalesce around issues of shared concern and move to successful resolution.”

American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley builds upon that foundation by putting diversity, inclusion and equity at the foundation of our organization. When we assemble teams – whether they be staff, board members, Fellows classes or network gatherings – we design for maximum diversity. For ALF, achieving maximum diversity means not creating silos or “choirs,” but instead bringing leaders from divergent perspectives together to build bridges of understanding across difference through dialogue with deep listening and honest sharing. Leveraging ALF dialogue strategies and expertise in creating impactful convenings, we aim to curate the conditions for learning and empathy by engaging people with a wide variety of experiences and points of view through diversity in age, ethnicity, race, gender and sexual orientation, political orientation, religion, socioeconomic background, and sector. If we are creating and designing relationship building and problem-solving curriculum and containers for the “community,” then it is imperative that “community” be at the table.