Citizen Leader Lab is a home-grown leadership development and support organisation. This award- winning, globally ranked non-profit believes that the tenets of equal opportunity for all, accountable and responsible leadership and partnerships that foster unity and inspire common identity are essential in creating the #TheFutureWeWant for South Africa.

In pursuit of this future, Citizen Leader Lab offers a variety of programmes and workshops. Through its Leaders for Education (formerly Partners for Possibility) programme, School Management Team leadership programme, School Leadership Forum, School for Community programme, Community Building workshops and Alumni Network, Citizen Leader Lab promotes and facilitates leadership development opportunities for school principals and their school management teams and enables citizen leadership opportunities for business leaders.

By utilising innovative leadership development models to develop leaders who catalyse positive change, facilitating cross-sectoral collaboration to strengthen connections and partnerships across boundaries, creating opportunities for active citizenship and engaging with key public sectors, Citizen Leader Lab strives to build social cohesion, uplift communities and achieve a just society.

The work of Citizen Leader Lab is strongly aligned with the National Development Plan (NDP), which sets out six key priorities for reducing poverty and inequality:

• Uniting all citizens around a common goal;
• Promoting active citizenry;
• Increasing economic growth and labour absorption;
• Focusing on key capabilities of people and the state;
• Building a capable and developmental state; and
• Developing leadership throughout society

Leaders for Education

The renowned 12-month Leaders for Education (formerly Partners for Possibility) programme pairs principals from schools in under-resourced communities with business leaders from the corporate sector. Principals receive the support and skills to lead change and mobilise communities around their schools. The programme’s goal is to support school principals to become successful change agents who can transform their schools into effective environments for teaching and learning. The school is approached as the unit of change, and is done so in collaboration with private sector business leaders who support capacity building and the desired change pathway in targeted schools. Business leaders, too, develop new leadership skills through exposure to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world of the South African public school.

The programme features the key elements of professional coaching, five-days of world-class training workshops over the course of the year, practical leadership development exposure in a South African public school and regular learning and networking opportunities for principals and business leaders.

To date, over 1,900 schools, from major metropolitan cities to remote rural areas across South Africa, have participated on the programme.