Bopa DiPeo Fellowship
2025-2026 Insights & Learnings
What we learned about growing capacities to catalyze collaboration and shift systems, and our vision for cultivating leaders who navigate complex challenges and co-create collective flourishing.
We’re excited to expand these insights to our next cohort. Learn how you can support.
A Look At Our Collective Learnings
This is a collection of stories of what we learned in the first Bopa DiPeo Fellowship. Powerful stories about relationships advancing social learning, inner work that enables outer stewardship, and intentionally creating ripple effects from one to many.
In 2024, Nono inspired Small Foundation with her dream of making apprenticeship style mentorship available for network leaders across the continent. She knew what it took to transform her leadership and she wanted that same growth for more leaders like her. We brought that experience to 12 fellows, and now they want to see this continue.
The experiential learning journey strengthened essential capacities and capabilities for engaging participants, facilitating learning, and coordinating action through relationships. Fellows shifted their focus from producing outcomes to tending relationships. They recognize that leading in complexity is an art. Stewarding conditions for emergence in a living system is learned in practice and honed through sharing with others.
Circle Generation is devoted to growing capacities of network leaders to catalyze collaboration. We see networks as relational infrastructure — the invisible connective tissue that underlies collective change and adaptation. With a global majority lens and practice based in Africa, the roots of our relational approach run through deep time. We’re proud to share this tapestry of learnings, and invite you to continue weaving the future with us.
The pathway is clear, the methods are here. Let’s make more possible!
How We Evaluated The Results
We practice Regenerative Evaluation using a rigorous mixed-methods approach developed in collaboration with Unity Effect. Bopa DiPeo’s Impact Garden Theory of Change includes four change pathways: individual, peer, network/organizational, and field of practice.
We designed a Holistic Data Collection Plan employing a variety of instruments to capture a holistic view of fellows’ experience integrated into the natural rhythm of the 10-month journey. These include: Baseline, Midpoint, & End-of-Journey Assessments; Professional Development Plan & Advising Logs; Guide Notes; Most Significant Change & Ripple Effect Mapping; and Unsolicited Story & Insight Harvesting. We developed custom rubrics for the assessment of capacities and capabilities specific to network practice which were used alongside validated measures.
Six Insights From Year One
Across ten months, twelve fellows, and four change pathways, these patterns rose to the surface. Each one is a doorway into the stories, practices, and shifts behind it.
1
Stewardship enables healthy ecosystems
From heroic execution to relational stewardship
Fellows stopped seeing leadership as directing people and started seeing it as tending conditions. When leaders make room for trust and shared ownership, the whole network grows stronger.
“I’ve come to see leadership more as stewardship. As a way for me to create the conditions for others to contribute, lead, and own the vision.” —Yvonne
2
Internal anchors enable wayfinding
Unlocking strategic agency and attunement in complexity
Uncertainty doesn’t wait for a clear map. Through practices like heart coherence and systemic awareness, fellows learned to steady themselves first, then sense and respond to what the system needs.
“I have a much deeper appreciation for the nuance involved in leading a network and the importance of self-regulation before trying to facilitate others.” —Nicole
3
Relationality is the difference that makes a difference
The personal touch: how mentorship moves
The growth didn’t come from content alone. It came from relationships with facilitators and peers, and from honest conversations where fellows felt safe enough to show up fully.
“The way facilitators model care, listening, and curiosity makes the fellowship feel supportive rather than performative.” —Hellen
4
Mentoring supports mentoring
Co-design turns leaders into facilitators who trust themselves and teach others
Fellows who experienced co-design began to practice it. Now they’re reshaping how their own meetings, programs, and networks invite people in.
“I’ve shifted from designing for compliance or efficiency to designing for choice and inviting people in as contributors rather than recipients.” —Tendai
5
Relationality is the difference that makes a difference
How growth happens: a network approach to learning
In a world that rewards constant action, fellows found unexpected power in slowing down. Reflection and shared sense-making turned ideas into insight and insight into practice.
“This has offered more opportunity for deeper self-reflection, healing, and leading first from within, then without.” —Ajoke
6
Moving from intuition to praxis
Confident leaders bring inclusive, collaborative practices to their communities
Many fellows already sensed what their networks needed. Bopa DiPeo gave them the confidence to act on it, carrying these practices into places no one expected, from community work to regulatory spaces.
“Bopa DiPeo didn’t give me a formula. It gave me language and practices that helped me make sense of what I was already sensing.” —Ledama
Hear From Our Fellows
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“The world is shifting to collaboration. This fellowship has given me language to express what’s needed for teams and broader stakeholders to enable collaboration, and a community of people engaged in similar work.”
—Khatuchi Khasandi, ORG
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“Since joining the fellowship, my boldness in leading and weaving networks has grown significantly… I launched the Kenya Ocean Guardians Network, something I longed to do, but now I feel fully equipped and confident to step into this leadership, and it’s already taking off.”
—Ledama Masidza, ORG
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“Use the fellowship not only to strengthen your own leadership, but to build an army of connected leaders who learn collectively, and have the courage and relationships to strategically organise and act together.”
—Evans Okinyi, ORG
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“The fellowship helped me step into their shoes… This shift has made my communication, the spaces I curate, and how I engage more human and inclusive.”
—Beverly Ndege, ORG
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“Practices such as holistic attention, listening, healing, play, and reflection helped me realize that flourishing must also include myself as a leader and practitioner.”
—Nate Harding, ORG
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“This is a brilliant, unique, and timely fellowship that builds the skillsets that any leader needs.”
—Elizabeth Howard, ORG
Why This Work Matters Now
Our human and planetary crises are entangled. We can’t solve them one at a time, and our ability to respond is only as strong as our capacity to collaborate. Collaboration moves at the speed of trust. To move forward, we need leaders who can build trust, foster collective learning, and coordinate action.
Our hardest challenges live between sectors and systems, where government, education, health, economy, agriculture, and more intersect. Relational challenges call for relational skills. Real cross-sector collaboration takes stamina for difficult conversations across differences in power, culture, and generation.
When problems compound and we’re in new territory with old maps, we need skillful navigators. Inner capacity matters as we move through uncertainty, loss, and failing systems. We need leaders who can hold steady while hosting spaces where communities engage, learn, combine ideas, and act together.
Bopa DiPeo’s depth education develops grounded, caring leaders who can orchestrate collective responses equal to this moment. We build practical skills for seeing relationships and coordinating adaptive action in a changing world.
Networks are the infrastructure of our collective capacity to navigate change. Relational leadership is the missing capacity of our time.
Let’s invest in leaders who can bring people together across differences.
Let’s cultivate capacities to help communities learn their way through, together.
Let’s multiply mentoring until relational practice becomes relational culture.
Let’s diffuse relational culture as coordination capability and experience collective flourishing.
It’s time. Let’s go!
If you believe in collective action, shared power, and new ways of working, we’d love to hear from you.
I’d like to…
Become a fellow?
Add your name to the waitlist. You’ll also get invitations to our monthly free Pop Up Talk Shops, open conversations for network practitioners.
Learn more about what we learned?
Let’s talk. Let’s connect to explore the insights together, or invite us to share them with your organization, on your podcast, or at your conference.
Invest in the next cohort?
We’re looking for co-funders, travel sponsors, and convening hosts. Tell us a bit about yourself, and we’ll set up a time to explore partnership, or reach us directly at nono@circlegeneration.org .
We do this together.
The pathway is clear. The methods are here.
What comes next, we weave together.
The ripple continues… Our next cohort is already taking shape. Say hello to the next wave of Bopa DiPeo Fellows:
Joshua Adedeji, Market System Development Lead, Mastercard Foundation
Rose Bwire, [Title], HelpAge International
Rouguiétou Khady Sow, Program Officer, TrustAfrica
Antonio Bweme, Senior Guest Contributor, [Org]
Will you be next, or will you help someone else get here?
There’s room in the circle for future fellows and for the partners who make their journey possible.
With deep gratitude to our inaugural cohort partner Small Foundation and our fellowship advisors, who helped bring this vision to life.