Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, PhD

Class of 2006

Co-Executive Director
LeaderSpring Center

Greetings to all the LeaderSpring alumni, supporters, and friends,

My fellowship experience started in 2005, when LeaderSpring was Eureka Communities. At the end of my fellowship in 2006, we became LeaderSpring, a project of Tides Center and the only existing leadership development site from the national Eureka Communities sites. Although I wasn’t new to the executive director position, I was new in my role as an ED in a university setting. I had the honor of sharing my fellowship experience with an incredible group of 14 amazing leaders, many of whom I’m still in community with to this day. The fellowship gave me the opportunity to be “in community” with other EDs, providing a safe space where I could reflect on my philosophy, style of leadership, and the impact I had on the university center I led and the community it served. The most significant aspect of the fellowship experience was creating partnerships and collaborations with other members in my cohort that continued beyond the fellowship program.

The fellowship had an immediate impact on how I thought about my leadership and who I was/am as a leader. It happened when I received The Tao of Leadership: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching Adapted for a New Age by John Heider and the opportunity to work with Hilda Ryūmon Gutierrez Baldoquin, as our opening retreat cohort facilitator. The Tao of Leadership was a very simple and non-technical read on finding the leader within or being a servant leader. Our facilitator Hilda Ryūmon, an Afro-Latinx Soto Zen priest from Cuba who grew up in Harlem, had a profound impact as she approached leadership from perspectives that were not widely accepted or acknowledged. These resources gave me the ability to not only think about leadership differently, but to bring my whole Afro-Latina self into full view and be unapologetic about living out loud as a BIPOC leader.

This impact would stay with me throughout my leadership journey in academia and back to the non-profit sector when I returned to the Bay Area to become the first alumni executive director of LeaderSpring in 2018. As we celebrate 25-years of this amazing fellowship program, September 10th at the Oakland Museum of California (also led by a LeaderSpring alumna), I’m joined by other amazing alumni who serve on the advisory board and in leadership. Collectively, we are focused on racial justice leading to system change in the non-profit sector and philanthropy, and more specifically to cultivate and support BIPOC leadership.