RISE Resilience & Renewal
Applications accepted through Wednesday, August 6, 2025
RISE Resilience & Renewal is a whole-body leadership program designed for nonprofit leaders who seek to reconnect with purpose, cultivate wellness, and lead in alignment with their values. Over eight Friday sessions, participants will explore the roots of burnout, develop emotional agility, and practice self and collective care—all through the integrated lenses of polyvagal theory, adaptive leadership, and systems thinking.
The nonprofit sector is facing a leadership crisis rooted in burnout, overextension, and chronic stress.
Nearly 43% of nonprofit executives report that burnout has directly impacted their ability to deliver services, undermining both mission outcomes and team well-being.
BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women-identifying leaders face disproportionate exposure to racialized stress, emotional labor, and systemic inequities, placing them at greater risk for chronic exhaustion and attrition.
Compounding this is a sector-wide culture of urgency and self-sacrifice, which often valorizes overwork and neglects the necessity of rest, regulation, and care.
RISE Resilience & Renewal responds directly to these conditions by offering a trauma-informed, somatically grounded leadership experience that centers sustainability, healing, and adaptive capacity as core leadership competencies.
Learning Objectives
Recognize the impact of chronic stress, burnout, and trauma on leadership
Apply trauma-informed and somatic practices to personal and organizational leadership, decision-making, communication, and team care
Distinguish between technical and adaptive challenges in complex systems by applying adaptive leadership strategies to navigate organizational uncertainty, resistance, and change
Develop and implement a personalized resilience & renewal plan focused on sustainable practices that support well-being and strategic focus that includes integrating somatic awareness and movement into their daily lives
Build and contribute to a culture of collective care and relational leadership by strengthening community-based leadership rooted in trust, empathy, and shared accountability
Apply organizational development tools through a living systems lens to explore how wellness, equity, and sustainability can be embedded in organizational norms and strategy
Reimagine leadership as a liberatory and sustainable practice through the embodiment of rest, resistance, and collective resilience
Participation
RISE Resilience & Renewal is designed for nonprofit leaders and changemakers who are navigating the emotional, strategic, and systemic demands of mission-driven work, especially those who hold identities historically marginalized or underrepresented in leadership spaces.
This includes:
Executive directors and program directors who are experiencing burnout, disconnection, or a desire to lead with more intention and sustainability
Leaders working in communities impacted by injustice, who are committed to healing, equity, and collective liberation
Nonprofit professionals who want to align wellness with leadership, and systems change with sustainability
RISE Resilience & Renewal is especially meaningful for those seeking space to pause, reflect, replenish, and reimagine what liberatory leadership looks and feels like in practice, not just in theory.
Participants are expected to attend all eight sessions of this program, which will be offered in person. Each participant will also engage in one-on-one coaching sessions with a certified coach to support the integration of their experience into their daily lives.
2025 Program Dates
The Fall 2025 program cohort will meet for eight (8) Fridays from September through December. All sessions will be held in-person from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm.
September 5 and 26
October 3 and 24
November 7 and 14
December 12 and 19
Additional Key Dates
Online Info Session: Thursday, July 31, 2025 at time TBA
Application Deadline: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 by 11:59 pm PDT
Cohort selections for the Fall 2025 program will be completed by mid-August and notifications will be emailed to all applicants at that time. Should you have any questions before then, please email resilience@risesandiego.org.
Program Leads
Azadeh is a certified leadership coach and expert learning design consultant in organizational equity, diversity, and inclusion with a particular focus on racial equity and equality. She has over 15 years of experience in designing, developing and implementing personal and organizational leadership programs with a deep reflective approach to raise consciousness.
An award-winning trainer, Azadeh has a successful record of founding and facilitating over 200 local and international leadership capacity building workshops for professionals in the fields of human resource, science, technology, engineering, startups, education, and healthcare; and for organizations such as UN, UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, multinational corporations, NGOs, and universities. She is a researcher with a diverse academic background from leading universities in the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East, with a focus on cultural aspects of leadership, intercultural understanding, diversity, inclusion, and equity.
She received her doctorate in leadership studies from the University of San Diego, where her dissertation work was focused on culturally-based leadership perspectives. As an organizational consultant and coach, her interest is to create a deeper understanding of self, others, and systems to develop intercultural dialogue and collaboration. Her passion is to increasingly attend to issues of diversity, inclusion, equality, women’s empowerment, mindfulness, consciousness, and reflective practices in leadership.
Roxanne is a Life Transformation Strategist and Owner of Kymaani Catalyst Consulting, a self-owned coaching and consulting business dedicated to helping individuals, communities, and organizations create a more just and equitable society. Roxanne offers inclusive practice frameworks that bridge communities across racial, economic, religious, and cultural divides. She engages her clients in diversity, equity, and inclusion work using an identity construction lens that allows people to connect to who they are and how they show up in the world, as the entry point for understanding the external systems in their community that create the internal realities that many people experience daily.
Roxanne’s passion is to support others in constructing their authentic self and creating an understanding of who they are "being" as a way of developing a new relationship with themselves that offers a fresh dialogue for how to view and experience the world. Using this as her foundation, she supports individuals and organizations to create an environment where we are free from fear and can develop, explore, and express our true capabilities.
In addition to her consulting, Roxanne is a Senior Equity Leadership Consultant for the National Equity Project, a leadership and systems change organization committed to increasing the capacity of people to achieve thriving, self-determining, educated, and just communities. She received a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Leadership Studies with an emphasis in Human Development from the University of San Diego. She is a certified Life/Executive Coach through Accomplishment Coaching. Additionally, Roxanne serves as the board co-chair for the San Diego Food Systems Alliance.
Roxanne’s specialties include dialogue, liminality, identity construction, diversity, equity and inclusion, community development, group dynamics, leadership development, systems thinking, and cultural competency.
Our Partners
Special thanks to the Prebys Foundation and its BRIDGE Initiative for their support of the RISE Resilience & Renewal program.
