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 positive change in the communities we serve.

Our Ultimate Outcome
Courageous, diverse networks of cross sector leaders are working towards an equitable and thriving Silicon Valley.

Our Strategy
Develop and nurture interwoven 21st century networks in Silicon Valley that instigate and facilitate transformative change.

ALF Core Values

• We believe in the power and importance of trusted relationships.
• We believe that diversity, equity, inclusion, justice and belonging are critical for thriving, equitable communities, healthy people, and a healthy planet.
• We believe in the power of dialogue and collaborative leadership with leaders who have curiosity about people whose identity, culture, background and life experiences may be different from their own.
• We believe we have a responsibility to prioritize active civic engagement to equitably serve for the benefit of all people in our communities.
• We prioritize and engage in practices of mindfulness, grace, acceptance, accountability and openness to personal and professional growth.

ALF Cornerstones

• 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.
• Highlighting how our global connectedness and influence can create possibilities for personal, organizational and community change.
• Working together to co-create a just and equitable society through the exploration of historical inequities.
• Inspiring leaders and their networks to be catalysts for creating a community in which all people have the ability to thrive.

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.”

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.

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. As stated in the United Nations Human Rights Declaration of 1948, we believe that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of personhood.” We believe that our society has set up systems that create inequality, to the detriment of our potential as a community and a nation. In order to live up to the vision our Founders framed, we commit to creating spaces where dialogue across difference can thrive for the purpose of emerging solutions that create a more equitable and thriving society.