Brava Leadership Institute

Now accepting applications for 2027

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The BLI Experience

The Brava Leadership Institute is a year-long leadership development program for people leading multiracial, multicultural institutions. Through facilitated sessions, peer learning, and practical experimentation, participants develop the skills and practices to navigate power, manage conflict, and lead organizational change in ways that sustain their people, their mission, and themselves.


Together, we explore and create new ways of leading that reflect the institutions and world we're trying to build.

The problem we're solving

If you lead a multiracial, multicultural institution, you know the weight of it. You're expected to hold your mission, your budget, your people, and your culture all at once, often without a roadmap. The "best practices" you were handed were built for organizations that were never designed for inclusion or shared power, so when tension around difference inevitably surfaces in your team, the standard tools don't work, and you're left frustrated, confused, and wondering if you're the problem.

You're not the problem. You're leading in a system that wasn't built for you.

At Brava Leaders, we believe it's time to build something new. We don't spend our year together re-proving what you already know. We build what comes next.

BLI helps you see

The patterns you've been living without names for, in your institution and in your own leadership

Your relationship to power, and the internalized habits you've carried into rooms where you're the first or only person with your identities

How to make and communicate hard decisions knowing they'll be read through the lens of who you are

What accountability looks like when identity informs it rather than deflects it

New ways of leading that sustain your people, your mission, and yourself, practiced in experiments inside your own institution

BLI is also a place where we name hard patterns out loud, in ourselves and in our institutions, because pretending they aren't there is how they win. Patterns like leaders becoming more authoritarian under pressure rather than less, information distributed without intention and called transparency, and identity used to deflect accountability rather than inform it. We’re a community willing to tell each other the truth to help shine a light on how we can all become stronger and more deeply supported. 

There's no universal playbook here, and we don't pretend to have one. The work is building your capacity to recognize inherited patterns, imagine alternatives, and lead in ways suited to your people, your purpose, and your context.

  • BLI is for you if you shape decisions, culture, and organizational direction within a multiracial, multicultural institution, and you want practical tools for navigating power, conflict, and change. Titles vary. Executives, directors, and founders often hold this kind of authority, but the program isn't limited to them. What matters to us is responsibility, not a title.

    Applicants must work at multiracial, multicultural institutions, which we define as at least 20% BIPOC and 40% women and femmes at all levels of leadership.

  • This institute is being led specifically through a pro-Black, pro-immigrant, pro-LGBTQIA+, pro-working class, pro-disability justice lens. Participants are signing up to learn a vulnerable leadership style that examines systems. This requires robust participation to be effective.  Please read through our ethos, beliefs, and values on our website to ensure this kind of development and support is a fit for you.

  • The BLI 2027 cohort is a hybrid program. We will retreat in person in Pasadena, CA. The cohort will also meet online twice a month for cohort training and peer coaching. 

    We ask that you plan for 100% participation at all scheduled cohort activities to complete the full program.

    In-Person Training (Los Angeles, CA) 

    March 9th - 11th  (9am - 5pm PT)

    Virtual Zoom Sessions:
    Peer Coaching (90 minutes) on Fridays from 10am - 11:30am PT / 1pm - 2:30pm ET:

    March 19, April 23, May 21, July 9, August 13, September 24

    Cohort Training (3.5 hours) on Fridays from 10am - 1:30pm PT / 1pm - 4:30pm ET:

    April 9, May 7, June 11, July 23, September 10, October 8, November 5

  • The full cost of participation in BLI is $12,000 per person. That’s what it takes to deliver a year of facilitated sessions, coaching, and community, and it’s what we ask of institutions that have the budget for professional development at this level. If your organization can cover the full cost, we encourage you to pay it. Your investment directly sustains the program and makes it accessible to leaders whose institutions cannot.

    We know that’s not everyone’s reality, which is why, with significant support from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, BLI’s 2027 cohort tuition operates on a sliding scale that begins at $2,500.

    Tuition does not include travel for our in-person gathering in Pasadena/ Los Angeles, CA (flight, hotel, ground transportation).

    If the cost is prohibitive for you or your institution, please reach out. Cost should never be the reason a leader misses this experience.

  • While Brava Leaders has zero issue with participants talking about their experiences, good or bad, but we do want to secure privacy for leaders who are going to be sharing about organization challenges. As such, we will be asking every participant to sign an NDA that they will not disclose private information about any other participant and their institution to the public.

  • All participants will be asked to honor Covid protocols for our in-person event. This will include the use of N95’s in any indoor space (bathrooms). All participants will be asked to use N95 masks in the airport and airplane to the event, use provided tests each day, and to refrain from participation if they have any cold/flu/covid-like symptoms.

BLI Testimonials

A Testimonial from Andre Carr

A Testimonial from Michelle Espino-Lira