Applications Open: Roots and Resilience Leadership Summit
On 22 October, Do it Now Now is bringing community leaders and social entrepreneurs together in London for our inaugural Roots and Resilience Leadership Summit: a day dedicated to understanding what has shaped the way we lead, what leadership is currently asking of us, and what needs to change for that leadership to be sustainable.
Leadership in community-facing and mission-led organisations can be deeply meaningful. It can also ask a great deal of the people doing it.
For founders, CEOs and senior leaders, responsibility rarely stops at strategy or organisational performance. You may be holding relationships with funders, supporting a team through uncertainty, responding to the needs of your community, filling gaps created by limited resources and making sure that, somehow, the work continues.
When you are good at carrying responsibility, it is remarkably easy for carrying too much to become normal.
That is why we have created Roots and Resilience.
On 22 October, from 10am to 4pm in London, we are creating a dedicated space for community leaders and social entrepreneurs to step outside the immediate demands of their organisations and think seriously about the person doing the leading, the organisation around them and the wider conditions in which that leadership takes place.
This is not a conference filled with panels and speeches. It is not a generic wellbeing day. And it is not about teaching leaders how to become better at tolerating unsustainable conditions.
It is a day of CPD-certified learning, practical reflection, organisational analysis and connection with other leaders who understand what it means to carry responsibility for purpose-driven work. Apply here.
We begin with the roots.
Before we ask how leadership can become more sustainable, we need to understand the leader.
The first part of the summit draws on our CPD-certified learning programme, Roots: Understanding the Self in Leadership.
Every leader arrives at leadership with a history.
Our experiences influence what responsibility means to us. Our identity can shape how we understand authority, care and belonging. The expectations placed upon us can influence how readily we say yes, how comfortable we are delegating, how we respond to conflict and how much responsibility we instinctively take upon ourselves.
Some of those influences become values we consciously want to live by.
Others become scripts we have learned without necessarily choosing them.
During Roots, participants will have the opportunity to explore the experiences, values, expectations and assumptions that have shaped the way they lead.
Through structured exercises including our Leadership Roots Map, we will explore questions such as:
What has shaped your understanding of what a “good leader” should be?
What have you learned about responsibility, authority, care, recognition and pressure?
Which leadership behaviours genuinely reflect your values?
Which are expectations you have inherited from other people, organisations or experiences?
What happens to the way you lead when you are under pressure?
What do you want to keep, question or consciously change?
The purpose is not to prescribe a particular leadership style.
It is to give leaders greater choice.
Because when we understand where our patterns come from, we are better able to decide which ones still serve us.
Then we look at what leadership is asking you to carry.
Understanding ourselves is only part of the picture.
A leader can develop excellent boundaries, become better at delegation and establish healthier working practices, but still be operating inside an organisation or system that continually recreates the conditions for exhaustion.
That is why the second part of the summit moves from the individual to the organisation and the wider system through Leading Sustainably in Hostile Systems.
We will explore what happens when commitment to a mission slowly becomes dependence on sacrifice.
That might look like a founder regularly absorbing work that the organisation does not have the capacity to resource.
It might mean emotional labour sitting invisibly with one or two people.
It might mean leaders becoming the point through which every significant decision has to pass.
It might mean funder or institutional expectations creating work that nobody is actually paying for.
Or it might simply mean an organisation continuing to achieve extraordinary things because somebody, somewhere, is consistently giving more than the operating model assumes.
We call this the sacrifice economy.
And sustainable leadership requires us to make it visible.
Not every leadership problem is an individual problem.
One of the central ideas we will explore during the summit is that pressure can originate at different levels.
Some challenges are individual. Others relate to management and workload. Some are created by organisational design. And others are structural, shaped by funding systems, commissioning practices and institutional expectations.
Understanding the difference matters.
Rest cannot solve chronic under-resourcing.
Time-management training cannot fix an organisation in which too many decisions depend on one person.
Better boundaries alone cannot address a funding relationship that continually expects unpaid work.
And telling leaders to become more resilient is not enough if the organisation itself has been designed around their willingness to sacrifice.
During the day, participants will examine where pressure is currently sitting in their own organisations and what may need to change.
We will look practically at capacity and workload, emotional labour, decision-making, boundaries with external institutions and the support available to leaders themselves.
You will leave with decisions, not simply reflections.
Roots and Resilience has been deliberately designed as a learning journey.
We begin with:
What has shaped the way I lead?
We then ask:
What happens to those instincts when I am under pressure?
And finally:
What is happening around me that makes this way of leading necessary — and what could I change?
By the end of the summit, you will have had the opportunity to identify where some of the greatest sustainability risks currently sit for you and your organisation.
You will consider what you may need to stop, delegate, redesign, renegotiate or seek support around, and leave with practical commitments for what happens next.
Who should apply?
Roots and Resilience is designed for people carrying meaningful responsibility for both a mission and the people around it.
We particularly welcome applications from founders, CEOs, directors, senior leaders, social entrepreneurs, network leaders and others leading community-focused organisations and initiatives.
And you do not need to be experiencing burnout or waiting for a crisis before making space to think about these questions.
In fact, we would rather you didn't.
This summit is also for the leader who is doing well but recognises that too much still depends upon them.
The leader thinking seriously about the next stage of their organisation.
The leader who wants to understand themselves better.
The leader who wants ambition without accepting exhaustion as its inevitable price.
The leader asking not simply, “How can I keep doing this?” but:
“How could this work differently?”
Apply to join us.
The people leading important work are often afforded remarkably little time to think about what that work is asking of them.
On 22 October, we are creating that time.
Come ready to learn, reflect, challenge some assumptions, connect with other leaders and think seriously about what sustainable ambition could look like for you and your organisation.
Roots and Resilience Leadership Summit
22 October 2026
10am–4pm
London
Applications are now open. Apply here.
We would love to have you in the room.