Nonprofit Leaders for Excellence & Emerging Leaders
Knapp Community Care Foundation & Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation
The Challenge:
In 2022, Cielo Strategy Group launched Nonprofit Leaders for Excellence (NLE) in partnership with Knapp Community Care Foundation and Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation to invest in what the Rio Grande Valley’s nonprofit sector needs most: its people. For four years, the program brought together 12 nonprofit executives for a nine-month cohort experience built on relationship, trust, and a shared belief that strong leaders build strong organizations. In 2025, that vision grew further with the launch of Emerging Leaders, a companion program focused on equipping middle managers – an overlooked but critical leadership role.
The Rio Grande Valley is home to a community of passionate leaders tackling some of the region’s hardest challenges with limited resources. Even so, many nonprofit executives felt like they were on an island, navigating board relationships, budget pressures, and unexpected crises with little connectivity to peers who understood the weight of the work. As one alumnus put it, “Nonprofits are mostly constrained by capacity, not commitment.” That isolation didn’t stop at the top, either: the talented staff just below the executive office, the future leaders of tomorrow, carried enormous responsibility with just as little formal support of their own.
From the very beginning, a clear set of commitments anchored NLE’s design: build capacity across the region’s nonprofit sector; strengthen individual leadership skills and abilities; deepen organizational collaboration through community, trust, and mutual respect; meet each leader where they are and invest in where they need to grow; and facilitate real peer learning. Those commitments guided every planning decision, and they held steady across the full four years of the program.
Our Approach:
We designed NLE as a nine-month journey, not a one-day training. We intentionally designed the entire curriculum and every touchpoint to be highly effective, deeply relational, and tailored to the unique strengths and needs of the Rio Grande Valley community.
Each year, our foundation partners nominated and sponsored 12 nonprofit executives who committed to an orientation and nine full-day, in-person sessions. Every session blended expert instruction, peer collaboration, and real-world application across the leadership domains that matter most to nonprofit executives: governance, financial leadership, strategic planning, fundraising and philanthropy, organizational culture and team building, risk management and crisis communication, data-driven decision-making, and organizational storytelling. Sessions rotated through member organizations’ own locations, so all could experience each other’s work firsthand and build the kind of trust that outlasts the program year.
In 2025, we extended that same philosophy in creating the Emerging Leaders program, a companion track for mid-level managers, nominated by NLE alumni executives. Four focused workshops, covering middle management essentials, nonprofit finance and philanthropy, communications and public speaking, and board governance and strategic planning, built the confidence, skills, and professional networks these future executives needed. Together, the two programs create a leadership pipeline that reaches beyond the top level.
From Our Partner:
“NLE has opened doors for me to practice ideas that are necessary and important in nonprofit work. This type of learning has been especially beneficial and encouraging to me. The intentional small group experiences are more life-changing than meeting in large groups. The Foundations that have made this investment in me has positively changed my leadership and will enable me to continue with confidence.”
“Last May, I was exhausted and discouraged. I felt that NLE was an opportunity I did not want to miss. I have been renewed in my commitment to my organization.”
“This session felt like therapy.”
“I realized I don’t have to do this alone.”
“I now have friends I can call for support that I have not had in 10 years of serving.”
“I’ve seen a significant change in my confidence as a result of the Emerging Leaders program. I am also committed to surviving the craziness with more purposeful moments of pause. I hope to continue this new perspective into the future.”
–NLE AND EMERGING LEADERS ALUMNI
The Outcome:
After four consecutive years, the numbers tell a consistent story. Session satisfaction never dropped below 4.80 out of 5 in any cohort year, and 90% of the 2025-2026 participants agreed or strongly agreed that the program positively impacted their organization. Confidence and impact have not faded once their cohort year ended either: alumni surveyed one to three years after graduating rated their leadership confidence and organizational impact at 4.67 out of 5, nearly identical to what current participants reported in the moment.
The relationships prove just as durable as the results: 83% of alumni report meaningful, ongoing connections with fellow cohort members, from joint grant applications to covering for each other in a crisis. One participant summed it up simply: “I have friends I can call for support that I have not had in 10 years.” Across four cohorts, NLE graduates have restructured boards, formalized governance, built crisis communication plans where none existed, doubled operating budgets, and launched strategic plans that are still guiding their organizations today. The inaugural Emerging Leaders cohort matched that momentum, earning a perfect 5.0 out of 5 overall satisfaction rating in its first year, proof that the model works at every level of leadership.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. Behind every data point is a real outcome. The executive director who walked into orientation exhausted and left renewed. The program manager who never saw herself as a leader until this program helped her realize she already was one. The program gave her the language and community to own it. The CEO who built a succession plan through NLE, not knowing until three years later just how much he would need it. The Year 2 executive whose growth through this program prepared her for an even bigger challenge: she recently stepped into an executive role at a larger Valley organization. These moments are among the truest measures of what this program has accomplished.Altogether, NLE and Emerging Leaders have reached nearly 60 nonprofit professionals across the Rio Grande Valley. We’ve walked alongside every one of them, and we’re proud of a sector that is measurably, collectively stronger because of it. The results confirm what we believed from the start: when you invest in leaders the right way, the impact holds, and it grows.
