Nonprofit Learning Series - Building Bridges: Leadership, Belonging, and Progress in Complex Communities
Monday, March 23, 2026 (10:30 AM - 12:00 PM) (MDT)
Description
Step Into a Thoughtful, Energizing Leadership Experience
What does it look like to lead well when perspectives differ, systems feel strained, and time is short?
Building Bridges is a dynamic 90-minute session designed for cross-sector leaders who care deeply about their community and want practical tools for navigating complexity with clarity, steadiness, and purpose.
This is not a debate.
It’s not a policy workshop.
It’s a space to strengthen how you show up as a leader when difference, pressure, and imperfect systems collide.
Why This Session Matters
Leaders across our region share a common goal: contributing meaningfully to a strong, thriving community. Yet many are navigating:
- Increasing polarization
- Accelerated decision-making cycles
- “Us vs. them” dynamics
- Systems that weren’t built for collaboration across difference
Healthy communities include difference.
The challenge isn’t disagreement — it’s how we lead through it.
This experience gives you a shared framework and practical leadership tools you can bring back to your organization, board, and civic roles immediately.
What You’ll Experience
This 90-minute session blends teaching, reflection, and guided practice to keep you engaged without forcing debate or personal disclosure.
You’ll participate in:
- A values-centered opening that establishes shared purpose
- Insightful teaching on belonging, polarization, time pressure, and systems
- A grounded local example to make abstract ideas tangible
- A guided leadership practice in Perspective Taking & Giving
- Thoughtfully designed, values-safe scenarios
- Reflection focused on leadership leverage and modeling behavior
The design intentionally avoids policy problem-solving and instead builds your capacity to lead with steadiness and clarity across difference.
What You’ll Walk Away With
Participants will:
- Reconnect to the shared human drivers of belonging and contribution
- Normalize polarization — and identify when it undermines community values
- Understand how systems shape behavior, not just intent
- Practice Perspective Taking & Giving as a leadership behavior
- Build shared language for navigating difference across sectors
- Leave with tools and resources to continue practicing beyond the session
Why Leaders Find This Valuable
- Nonpartisan and research-informed
- Relevant across sectors and ideologies
- Honors difference without flattening it
- Addresses systems and structures — not just individual behavior
- Strengthens shared leadership capacity across the region
If you’re looking for a meaningful, engaging learning experience that strengthens your leadership presence — especially in complex environments — this session is for you.
Come ready to reflect, practice, and build bridges that support lasting community progress.
Facilitator: Andrea Palm-Porter | Executive Director, Roaring Fork Leadership
Andrea Palm-Porter is a leadership strategist, facilitator, and civic ecosystem builder who works across nonprofit, public, and community sectors to strengthen leadership capacity, trust, and collaboration throughout the ColoradoRiver + Roaring Fork Valleys, and State of Colorado.
As Executive Director of Roaring Fork Leadership, Andrea designs and leads leadership experiences that helpindividuals and organizations navigate complexity, work across difference, and contribute to stronger, moreconnected communities. Her work integrates emotional intelligence, adaptive leadership, systems thinking, and real-world application that supporting leaders to move beyond good intentions toward practices that create durable impact.
Over the past year, Andrea has been an active participant in the Belonging Colorado Communities of Practice, astatewide initiative convened by The Denver Foundation to strengthen belonging across Colorado. Through thiswork, she has engaged with leaders from across the state to explore the research, frameworks, and practices thathelp communities bridge differences, foster connection, and increase civic capacity.
She is now bringing these practices, combined with building a leadership ecosystem with the Boettcher Foundation and civic ecosystem with CiviCo and Civic Canopy across the state, into organizations and leadership spaces throughout the region supporting nonprofits, civic groups, and cross-sector leaders to build shared language around belonging, navigate polarization more constructively, and model leadership behaviors that strengthen connection rather than division.
Andrea’s facilitation style blends research-informed frameworks with practical leadership application. She isknown for creating spaces where leaders can step back from positions and pressures, reconnect to shared purpose, and develop the relational skills needed to lead in complex community environments.
Her work is grounded in the belief that thriving communities are built not just through programs or policies, but through leaders who know how to listen, bridge across difference, and create the conditions for people to belong and contribute.
She brings nearly four decades of experience developing leaders, facilitating complex conversations, and supporting organizations and communities to navigate change and create progress together.
Free for nonprofit professionals and board members!
600 Broadway St.
Eagle, CO 81631 United States
Event will be held in the Alpine Bank Community Room.
This is in an in-person event only. There is no live-stream option available and it will not be recorded.
Educational Programming
Networking Opportunities
Vail Valley Partnership Events Only