Congratulations to Stefania Delprete of EA Italy and Naham Shapiro of ALTER, the graduates of the third Operations Fellowship (now called HIA Organization Accelerator) program!

In this third iteration of the program, we focused on building strong organizations, increasing our participants skills and implementing the processes necessary to achieve optimal organizational growth.

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
• They really enjoyed exposure to various experts for content delivery
• The peer based feedback sessions gave a lot of value
• The first 3 sessions (Mission/Mision/Values, Theory of Change, Workflow & Growth) were especially helpful in laying a lot of the groundwork for future sessions and for creating an underlying perspective of the organization's direction.

Some things changed and have seen good results with:

• Moving the session on a business plan to the middle of the course, so that it can be developed throughout the life-cycle of the course, especially after they've laid the groundwork for it.
• Meetings twice a month instead of once a month
• The pace (1 content session / homework per month) and timeline (12 months) worked well for achieving the results we were aiming for.

Potential future adjustments:

• By default, breaking the discussion groups into smaller groups (max 4) for higher quality conversations. In this scenario, the larger group would meet 1x/month for the content session and the smaller groups would meet in 2 individual groups for the 2nd session.
• I'm thinking of making an abbreviated version that's solely operations focused to make it more affordable and fast-paced. I'll likely provide both options in the next applications round.

Other notes of interest:

• As I've been working with more organizations, I've implemented the structure of this course into our work in setting the organizations up for success, and we're finding that the content is very well structured to encourage organizational success.
• Of our past participants, a few have moved on to other jobs, and having the experience and knowledge they gained from participation in this course has demonstrated a positive impact in their career growth and in the organizations they are working with.
• The next set of cohort applications will be announced around February 2025. If you'd like to be on the mailing list to receive announcements about it, please email me or subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

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.