Our Story
What Is New Leaders Council?
New Leaders Council’s mission is to recruit, train, and promote the next generation of progressive leaders.
We believe in a progressive movement where our best and brightest leaders have access to the same resources and team-building efforts as our conservative counterparts. This includes leadership development, mentoring, and long -term career development. By building leadership teams both locally and nationally across different sectors, NLC is working to create a generation of effective progressive change-makers.
The NLC Institute’s goal is to provide an executive skill set to rising-star progressives who can help build a cross-sector coalition capable of leading, advocating, and governing. To do this, the NLC Institute’s curriculum focuses on entrepreneurship, high-level personal communications skills, significant fundraising experience, and executive management and political strategy during a five week intensive educational program.
What NLC Seeks in Applicants
NLC attracts the best and brightest rising star leaders because of the premier quality of its curriculum, faculty, and volunteers.
NLC is a selective program that always has more applicants than spaces available. Our faculty is 95% volunteer, our local board members are 100% volunteer, and the vast majority of our donors are small-dollar, grassroots supporters. All of these groups invest in our Fellows because NLC believes in each Fellow’s potential. An applicant, therefore, should demonstrate their future promise by showing:
• Serious, career-long commitment to building progressive infrastructure;
• Executive potential— indicating the ability to lead;
• Entrepreneurial spirit—having the desire to take risks to pursue opportunity; and,
• A team orientation, confidence, and humility—being the type of person who supports others.
NLC—Houston’s Selection Philosophy
We aim to create a fellowship class that represents a great diversity of people from all backgrounds, professions, life experiences, communities, and more. As we make selections, we factor in not only things about a single applicant’s experience, goals, and accomplishments, but how each candidate will relate to the others in the cohort.
We keep the fellowship class small, which means we must turn away some applicants, even those with strong credentials and excellent experience, because we simply cannot accommodate everyone.
We do not think that being an NLC Fellow is the ONLY way to be engaged in creating a stronger progressive infrastructure in our city, state, and country—indeed, we hope it is not. We encourage all who apply to stay involved, apply again if they wish, and keep working for the change we all hope to see in the world.
