Empowering local communities
Roots and Resilience Leadership Summit.
On 22 October, in London, explore the experiences, values and influences that have shaped you as a leader through an immersive training day of CPD-certified learning, reflection and connection. Deepen your self-awareness, build resilience and strengthen how you lead yourself and your organisation with purpose.
Rooted in Community, Rising Together.
Roots and Resilience is a one-day leadership summit for community leaders and social entrepreneurs who want the space, tools and conversations to think differently about how they lead, what their leadership currently asks of them, and what needs to change for that leadership to be sustainable.
Through expert-led CPD-certified learning, facilitated reflection, practical exercises and meaningful conversation with peers, the summit creates space to look beyond the demands of the next deadline, programme or funding round and focus instead on the person leading the work and the conditions surrounding them.
About the summit
Before we can lead others and build sustainable organisations, we need space to understand who we are, what has shaped us, what we have come to carry, and how we want to lead.
Community-facing leadership can be deeply rewarding, but it can also place particular demands on the people responsible for holding organisations, teams, relationships and missions together. Commitment can gradually become constant availability. Lived experience can become an expectation to keep giving. A leader’s ability to make things work can become the reason that too much continues to depend on them.
Roots and Resilience is Do it Now Now’s inaugural Resilient Leadership Summit, bringing together community leaders and social entrepreneurs for an immersive day of learning, reflection and connection.
The summit begins with the self: your identity, values, experiences and assumptions about what leadership requires of you. From there, we look outward at the organisational and structural conditions in which you lead, asking what is creating pressure, what you may have normalised, and what needs to change so that important work does not depend upon personal sacrifice.
This is not a day about teaching leaders to tolerate unsustainable conditions more effectively. Nor is it a generic wellbeing retreat. It is an opportunity to understand the relationship between the person, the organisation and the system, and to leave with practical decisions about how you want to lead differently.
The day combines:
CPD-certified leadership development grounded in the realities of community-facing and mission-led work
Expert facilitation rather than a programme of speeches and panels
Structured personal reflection without requiring anyone to disclose experiences they would prefer to keep private
Practical organisational tools to examine workload, emotional labour, decision-making, boundaries and leadership support
Peer conversation with other people who understand the responsibilities of leading purpose-driven work
Time to turn reflection into action, including your own workbook and resources
The summit will take place from 10 am to 4pm on the 22nd of October in London.
Who is it for?
Roots and Resilience is designed for people carrying meaningful responsibility for both a mission and the people around it.
We are inviting founders, CEOs, directors, senior leaders, social entrepreneurs, network leaders and others leading community-focused organisations and initiatives who want to build ambitious work without assuming that exhaustion, overextension or constant personal sacrifice are simply part of the job.
You do not need to be at breaking point to attend. In fact, part of the purpose of the summit is to create the space to examine how you are leading before unsustainable ways of working become a crisis.
You may find the day particularly valuable if you have been thinking about questions such as:
How much of the organisation currently depends on me?
What have I started treating as normal that is not actually sustainable?
Where am I carrying responsibility that should sit somewhere else?
How have my identity and experiences shaped the way I respond to pressure, responsibility and other people’s expectations?
What would it take to continue doing ambitious work without the work consuming the people responsible for it?
If those questions feel familiar, we would like you in the room.
The Experience
Roots and Resilience has been designed as a journey through the day rather than a conventional conference programme.
You will move between facilitated learning, private reflection, practical exercises, conversations with peers and periods of connection. The aim is to give you enough space to think deeply while making sure that what emerges from the day can be translated into decisions you can actually use.
Arrive, connect and land
We begin by creating space away from the immediate demands of work. You will meet the other leaders in the room, establish how we want to learn together and begin reflecting on what leadership currently feels like for you.
There is no expectation that you arrive with a polished leadership challenge or that you share anything personal with the group.
Explore your roots
Before asking how leadership can become more sustainable, we look at the leader.
You will reflect on the experiences, values, identities and expectations that have shaped how you understand responsibility, success, service and leadership, including the things you may have learned to carry because you are capable of carrying them.
The purpose is not simply introspection. It is to recognise how our understanding of ourselves can influence the organisations we build and the behaviours we come to accept within them.
Examine what leadership is costing
We then move into the core Leading Sustainably learning.
Together, we explore burnout, overwork, emotional labour and the ways in which commitment to a mission can gradually become dependence on sacrifice. Rather than treating every challenge as something the individual leader must become better at managing, we consider whether its cause sits with the individual, management, organisational design or the wider systems around the organisation.
Connect over the shared experience of leadership
There will be dedicated time for conversation and connection throughout the day.
This is not networking for networking’s sake. It is an opportunity to meet people who are navigating some of the same questions, exchange perspectives and recognise where experiences that can feel highly personal are also shaped by the environments in which we are being asked to lead.
Look at the organisation around you
The afternoon moves from reflection into design.
You will examine whether the way work currently happens in your organisation is genuinely sustainable: how capacity is understood, where emotional labour sits, how decisions are distributed, what boundaries exist with funders and other institutions, and what support is available to the people doing the leading.
Leave with something you can use
Rather than leaving with pages of notes and good intentions, you will identify where the greatest sustainability risks currently sit and decide what you need to stop, delegate, redesign, renegotiate or seek support around.
You leave with a practical commitment for what happens next.
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Burnout is not simply tiredness, and it cannot always be solved through rest or individual wellbeing practices.
We explore some of the distinctive pressures that can emerge when leadership is closely connected to community, lived experience or a deeply held mission, including blurred boundaries, responsibility for other people’s wellbeing, chronic under-resourcing, emotional labour and the expectation that committed people will simply find a way to make things work.
Participants begin identifying what pressure actually looks like in their own context and what may be producing it.
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When does commitment become dependence on sacrifice?
This part of the learning looks at the hidden work that can keep mission-led organisations functioning: unpaid hours, leaders absorbing gaps in funding, emotional support that has never been properly resourced, people delaying their own development or pay, and organisations continuing to deliver because somebody consistently gives more than the operating model assumes.
The purpose is to make that hidden labour visible and distinguish genuine commitment from an organisation becoming dependent upon it.
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Different causes require different responses.
Participants learn to distinguish between pressures operating at four levels:
Individual: personal health, wellbeing, recovery, circumstances and working patterns.
Managerial: workload allocation, supervision, priorities, role clarity and management practice.
Organisational: staffing, systems, governance, decision-making, funding models and the way work has been designed.
Structural or institutional: underfunding, inequitable relationships, commissioning practices, institutional expectations and wider systems that transfer pressure onto community organisations and their leaders.
The distinction matters because a personal wellbeing intervention cannot repair an organisational design problem, just as better delegation cannot solve structural underfunding.
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Sustainable leadership is not only about changing what an individual leader does. It also requires looking at the organisation around them.
We examine five areas of sustainable organisational design:
Capacity and workload
Are your expectations realistic given the people, time, money and systems actually available?Emotional labour
Who is responsible for supporting people, maintaining trust, responding to distress and managing difficult conversations, and is that work properly recognised and resourced?Decision-making
Where is authority concentrated? What still requires the founder or senior leader to intervene, and what would happen if they were unavailable?Boundaries and external expectations
What are participants, partners, commissioners, funders and institutions asking of the organisation? What is actually funded, what has become expected for free, and where does the organisation need stronger boundaries?Leadership support
Where does the person who supports everyone else receive support themselves? Is there meaningful cover, peer support, supervision, development time and space to step away?
Inside the CPD-Certified Learning
How can leaders continue important work without the work consuming the people responsible for it?
The sessions examine the personal, organisational and structural conditions that can make community-facing leadership dependent on overwork, sacrifice, emotional labour and the constant availability of a small number of people. Each session combines focused teaching, applied examples, individual reflection, practical organisational analysis and action planning.
Take the time to think about how you lead
The people doing important work are often given very little space to think about what that work is asking of them.
Roots and Resilience creates that space.
Come prepared to reflect, learn, challenge some assumptions, meet other leaders and think seriously about what sustainable ambition could look like for you and your organisation.
Roots and Resilience, Do it Now Now’s inaugural Resilient Leadership Summit
22 October, 10am to 4pm, London.
Why us?
Do it Now Now has supported hundreds of community-led organisations through leadership development, organisational strengthening, grantmaking, social investment and capacity-building. We work closely with founders and senior leaders navigating the realities this summit is designed around: small teams, stretched capacity, founder dependency, funding pressure, emotional labour and the challenge of building organisations that can grow without relying on constant personal sacrifice.
That means this learning is not based on leadership theory alone. It is shaped by what we see every day across the organisations we support, and by our experience helping leaders strengthen the systems, funding, governance and organisational infrastructure around them. We understand that sustainable leadership is not simply about how well an individual copes; it is also about what the organisation and the wider system are asking them to carry.
Application Support
We want you to have the best possible experience of this programme. Please feel free to get in touch with us so we can help you through.
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Get in touch with us directly by email and we’ll get back in touch within 2 working days.
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1-2-1 support calls are available throughout the duration of the Expression of Interest window.
This is an opportunity for you to clarify any questions you may have about the application process. To request a call, please email us. Please join the call with your questions prepared.
