ADVISORY BOARD

World Leadership Foundation’s mission is to partner with K-12 schools worldwide to bring greater purpose to learning. Our vision is that K-12 education can, and should be, the ultimate platform for launching children into lives of purpose. World Leadership Foundation accomplishes its mission in a variety of ways. We support rural schools and non-profit partners around the world. Our latest effort, K12 Change Lab, is focused on helping K12 Schools “make change that sticks.”

 

Funding Rural School Infrastructure

World Leadership Foundation was founded in 2009, two years after World Leadership School. Since the beginning, we have channeled student donations from World Leadership School travel programs toward our rural schools and non-profit partners. Since 2009, these donations have exceeded $1 million for various school improvements, including clean water systems, dining halls, classrooms, playgrounds, etc. Here is a complete list of those projects.

 

Transforming Rural School Education

In 2012, World Leadership Foundation began an ambitious effort to support rural schools in Costa Rica, Tanzania, and the USA to “reduce inequity through education.” The effort began as TabLab and then re-branded as TeachUNITED (www.teachunited.org), which became an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit on January 1, 2020, and continues to grow quickly. 

 

As of May 2023, TeachUNITED had reached 1 million students across Africa, Latin America, and the USA. We are proud of the role that World Leadership Foundation had in starting this fast-growing global non-profit with the mission to “coach and empower rural and underserved teachers to prepare the next generation of students with the skills to graduate, earn more income, and disrupt cycles of poverty.”

 

Helping Schools Make Change that Sticks

K12 Change Lab launched in January 2025 as an 18-month program to help schools move ahead on strategic change initiatives. We are generously supported by the EMA Foundation, which allows us to offer grant funding to charter, public, and smaller independent schools.

 

The program is based on our work since 2018 with our annual K12 Purpose Summit. In this 3-day event, we help teams of educators embark on the individual journey to explore what purpose means for them and the school expedition to design a game-changing idea for learning. As we worked with hundreds of teams, we began to see clearly why certain teams succeeded with their ideas, but others struggled. We codified those learnings into the design of K12 Change Lab, which continues to have the K12 Purpose Summit at its center.