We started scrappy. We still are.

The Santa Fe Leadership Center (SFLC) was founded as a non-profit organization by Gary Gruber and Carla Silver in 2010. The goal was to provide professional learning for school leaders, particularly to do the inner work that enabled them to meet external demands. The very first Santa Fe Seminar was held in April of 2011. Carla officially became the Executive Director and helped the SFLC grow and network with leaders around the country. Expanded service offerings included strategic planning, leadership coaching, and a variety of compelling live professional development experiences with a focus on supporting senior leaders working in schools. 

Leading is Learning was established by Ryan Burke and Greg Bamford in 2012 as an unincorporated educational collaborative dedicated to experimenting with the future of learning. Their first workshop - offered free to students and teachers - was a week-long design thinking immersion called “Leadership + Design Summer,” and made possible through donated space at the Mithun architecture firm, the donated expertise of Seattle-area designers, and binfuls of prototyping material collected through dumpster diving. Over time, this group gained expertise in design thinking and began collaborating with the Santa Fe Leadership Center to apply those principles to leadership challenges. It also started presenting Critical Conversations Lab. 

In 2014, our four co-founders, Gary Gruber, Carla Silver, Ryan Burke, and Greg Bamford, formally merged the two organizations, which took the name “Leadership+Design.” 

Since 2014, we have continued to grow from a scrappy team of educational innovators, most of whom had full-time jobs in schools, to a still-scrappy team of full-time team members. 

Our programs and services have expanded to include both online and in person programs that support innovation, women’s leadership, individual reflection and growth, a year-long fellowship for leaders, facilitation training, coaching for teams and individuals and services that are both strategic in nature but also help schools to evolve to meet new market demands and provide students with a rich and relevant educational experience.  

Above all else, we see ourselves as a capacity-building organization, helping both individuals and school communities to develop habits, mindsets and skill sets that make their work more effective and more joyful.  As we’ve grown, we’ve worked to deepen our grounding in the organization’s values: people, collaboration, action, transformation, and joy.