What If Your Next Strategy Session Energized You?
What If Your Next Strategy Session Energized You?
A note before you read this: the workshop below ran on March 4, 2026, and registration is closed.
I'm leaving it up because the framework hasn't changed, and because its worth seeing how a session gets built, whether or not you were in the room that day. If you're deciding if this kind of work is for you, read on. This is exactly what it looks like.
If you want to join the next event, a new Strategy Studio cohort opens quarterly. Join the waitlist.
A different kind of virtual gathering is coming to Illinois's nonprofit sector.
Let’s be honest. Most virtual workshops feel like a checkbox. You log on, half-listen while answering emails, and leave with a PDF you’ll never open. You come back to the same pressures, the same isolation, and the same unanswered questions about how to lead through uncertainty.
Impact by Design: Planning Together for Change is built to be the opposite of that.
On March 4 from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm CST, Forefront is hosting a 90-minute virtual session facilitated by Allecia Harley of IntuWork Consulting. It’s designed for nonprofit and philanthropic leaders across Illinois who are ready to stop going it alone and start building something together.
Here’s What Makes It Different
The session opens with a grounding exercise and an immersive story, because showing up fully present is the first act of leadership. From there, you’ll take a quick working-style poll that routes you into one of four peer breakout groups: Strategy, Team, Resources, or Systems. Your group will dig into the challenge area where you’re spending the most energy right now.
We’ll use a shared framework called the Thriving Nonprofit HQ to anchor the conversation. It maps the five pillars of organizational health: Governance, Development, People, Operations, and Finance, all resting on a strategic foundation of vision, mission, and values. Whether your roof is leaking in one area or several, you’ll find your people in the room.
Then comes what we’re calling the Campfire Circle: a peer story exchange guided by three honest questions about what our sector is built for, what gets in the way, and how we evolve together. The session closes with a visioning exercise called Letters from 2030, where you’ll write the future you want for Illinois’s nonprofit landscape.
Who This Is For
This session is for executive directors, CEOs, program directors, and philanthropic leaders who are carrying a lot right now and want a room full of peers who get it. It’s for people who believe the sector is stronger when it works together and who are ready to act on that belief.
Registration for this session is closed.
If the room described above is the kind you want to be in, a new Strategy Studio cohort opens September 1. It's a peer network and resource hub for nonprofit executive directors and CEOs: direct access to a strategist, a framework library, board leadership prep, and a room of leaders working the same problems. Free and application based.
