Mission & Overview
Our Mission
The American Leadership Forum 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 change in the communities we serve.
Our Strategy
Develop and nurture interwoven networks in Silicon Valley that instigate and facilitate transformative change.
American Leadership Forum is a non-endorsing and nonpartisan
organization.
ALF GUIDING PRINCIPLES
American Leadership Forum was 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. Our 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.”
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.
American Leadership Forum is a non-endorsing and nonpartisan organization. We do not subscribe to a liberal or conservative ideology. We do not, as an organization, formally endorse initiatives or candidates.
ALF CORNERSTONES
ALF is committed to:
- Building a network of leaders dedicated to nurturing relationships across a diversity of backgrounds, beliefs, and practices.
- Designing spaces for leaders to engage in self-reflection and build trust across differences as a spark for personal growth and development.
- Creating space for conversations that encourage leaders to eliminate absolute thinking and practice curiosity.
- Inspiring leaders and their networks to be catalysts for creating a community in which all people have the ability to thrive.
SENIOR FELLOW COMMITMENTS
Take the call & make the call. Use the network.
Dialogue First. Suspend judgment, be curious, be open, listen.
Educate, Innovate, Donate. Be a part of systems change.
Engage in ALF. Your participation makes us all stronger.
History of American Leadership Forum
American Leadership Forum (ALF) was founded in 1980 in Houston, Texas by Joseph Jaworski, who left his successful law practice to address what he increasingly saw as a crisis of leadership throughout the country. He envisioned an organization dedicated to bringing together diverse leaders from multiple sectors in communities across the country to deeply explore their personal leadership capacity, build deep trust among the group to help each leader to get beyond the devaluing prejudices that we all hold, and to learn how diverse people can coalesce around issues and discover new possibilities.
After a year of meeting with leaders from across the United States, Jaworski and seventeen other prominent Americans launched American Leadership Forum. This group included John Gardner, former secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; James MacGregor Burns, professor emeritus of Williams College; Warren Bennis, former professor at USC and a respected author; Tom Bradley, former mayor of Los Angeles; Harlan Cleveland, former ambassador to NATO and president of the World Academy of Art & Science; Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School; and James B. Stockdale, vice admiral in the U.S. Navy.
In 1996, Joe Jaworski published a book, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, in which he chronicles his efforts to build American Leadership Forum and explains the principles and values that ALF embodies.
There are now eight active ALF chapters across the U.S. – Charlotte, North Carolina; Houston, Texas; Modesto, California; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento, California; San Jose (Silicon Valley), California; Tacoma, Washington; and the Waccamaw Region, South Carolina. More than 4,500 ALF Fellows nationwide have completed the program, bringing a new sense of commitment, understanding, and interconnectedness to their disparate communities.
Silicon Valley Chapter Founding Leadership
At the invitation of Joe Jowarski, Ann Debusk founded the Silicon Valley chapter in 1988. She established a founding board led by Paul Freiman, then president and CEO of Syntex Corporation, with representatives from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, and in 1989 she launched ALF’s first Silicon Valley class of Fellows.