The O2 Sabbatical Award honors dedicated nonprofit executive directors in San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties with an essential three-month break for rest and renewal.
Donor Name: O2 Initiatives
State: California
Counties:
Type of Grant: Award
Deadline: 08/09/2023
Size of the Grant: $50,000
Details:
The San Francisco Bay Area’s exceptional nonprofit organizations enrich their communities and advance innovative solutions to our toughest challenges. This critical work comes at a price. Rising community needs, inadequate budgets, and understaffed teams lead to overwhelming demands and unsustainable stress for even the most resilient organizations and leaders. Despite a passion for impact, nonprofit executives risk burnout and turnover, often with no succession plan in place.
To help The result is stronger and more resilient teams better prepared to partner with their communities to create positive change.
O2 Initiatives is committed to advancing race equity and strives to create a network of sabbatical awardees that is representative of the rich identities and communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. They strongly encourage executive directors who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to apply.
Goals
The goals of the O2 Sabbatical Award are:
- To honor nonprofit executive directors for their dedication and contribution to their organizations and communities
- To provide executive directors with an essential break for personal and professional rejuvenation
- To advance the skills of senior-level staff members at the sabbatical awardee organizations, bolstering leadership capacity throughout these organizations
- To strengthen the stability and sustainability of sabbatical organizations by promoting shared leadership, self-care, professional development, and succession planning
- To facilitate a peer network of exceptional nonprofit leaders in San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa Counties for mutual support, cross-sector dialogue and collaboration
- To generate a deeper, field-wide appreciation of the critical value of human resources
The O2 Sabbatical Award Includes:
- $50,000 toward the cost of the executive director’s three-month sabbatical
- $15,000 in flexible funding to support staff professional development, as well as stipends for the interim leadership team in recognition of the additional responsibilities assumed in the executive director’s absence
- 25 hours of coaching to help organizations prepare for the sabbatical, advise interim leadership teams during the executive director’s leave, provide support with re-entry, and achieve organizational development goals (e.g., greater shared leadership, succession planning)
- Participation in the O2 Peer Network, including annual gatherings and shared learning opportunities. O2 alumni also mentor new awardees and serve on the O2 Selection Committee
Eligibility Requirements
- Candidates must:
- Be a nonprofit executive director with a proven track record of outstanding leadership within and beyond the walls of their organization
- Have served in their current executive director role for at least four years (at the time of application submission)
- Have worked for at least 10 years in the nonprofit sector (though not necessarily at the same organization) and intend to remain in the sector for the foreseeable future. They respectfully ask those who are actively planning to retire or move out of the nonprofit sector not to apply for the O2 Sabbatical Award.
- Be employed full-time at their organization
- Be a full-time resident in the Bay Area
- The candidate’s employing organization must:
- Be a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization (government agencies and schools are not eligible)
- Be headquartered in San Francisco, Alameda County, or Contra Costa County
- Have at least five full-time, paid employees, including the executive director
- Demonstrate a commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion in their programs and internal operations (e.g., leadership and staff are representative of the communities they serve and programs are informed by the community)
- Recognize the candidate’s sabbatical as an opportunity to create more distributed and sustainable leadership
- Provide board endorsement for the executive director’s request for leave, and submit a plan for organizational management during the candidate’s sabbatical
- Be able to sustain regular operations during the executive director’s absence
- Demonstrate a need for financial assistance to underwrite the executive director’s leave.
For more information, visit Sabbatical Award.
