Cohort Builders Program

Who do you wish would join you as a student in the Executive Program? Know someone who is ready to level up their social impact work? Want to share accessible and actionable training opportunities with your team? Nominate a friend or colleague to join a CSIS Executive Program today and help us grow your cohort into an inspiring learning community.

Nominate a friend or colleague and the CSIS team will reach out to them personally with an invitation to apply to one of our programs with a $500 tuition discount. If your nominee submits an application, you will receive an invitation to a Master Class with CSIS Faculty Director Peter Frumkin. If your nominee enrolls in a program, we will show our appreciation by inviting you to enroll at no cost in a new CSIS course of your choosing in Spring 2022. Each course will feature lecture videos, text-based discussions, weekly jamout sessions with the instructor, and feedback from the instructor on your assignments. We will offer one or more of the following instructor-facilitated courses, depending on class size:

• Self and Society with Kaveh Sadeghian: This course will lead you through a journey of discovery about your deepest passions and the world’s most pressing needs. Our goal is to help you find that powerful point of intersection between your identity and the problems that weigh most heavily on your community; setting intentions so you can leverage your time in the program most effectively, to take the course with purpose and with clarity; gaining greater insight about yourself and the impact you can create on the world.
• Research Design for Social Impact Leaders with Allison Russell: This course is designed for social impact leaders looking to familiarize themselves with the research process and learn how to engage in feasible, stakeholder-centered research. It will help you to determine if and when to engage in research; to understand the difference between academic and social impact research contexts; to develop a sensible research question, based on your initiative’s theory of change; to involve community perspectives at different stages of the project, from design to data collection to implementing findings; and to cultivate an ethical and actionable research plan that will help you and your organization assess whether your work is creating impact.
• Digital Media for Social Movements with Rosemary Clark-Parsons: Digital media platforms and their users are changing the way social movements mobilize. While activist organizers continue to face many of the same obstacles that have challenged movements for generations, the internet has raised both new opportunities and questions for today’s change-makers. Building successful movements in the digital age requires a thorough understanding of digital media and their affordances and limitations as organizing resources. Drawing on case studies of movements from around the world and cutting-edge social science research, this course will equip you with an actionable toolkit for strengthening your digital media practices.