Future Earth is excited to share some big news that will advance research and leadership in global sustainability! The Leopold Leadership Fellow has been 20 years in the making, and through a new partnership with Future Earth and a new model for growth, it is now ready to re-launch in North America, and expand internationally. The Leopold Leadership Program (LLP) is becoming the Earth Leadership Program, and is aiming for scale and impact.

After 20 years and over 200 fellows, the LLP is clearly the strongest academic network of environmental leaders in North America. Our partnership with the LLP, now the Earth Leadership Program, will continue to build on this success and will welcome and support new cohorts, both here in North America, and around the world.

The Earth Leadership Program’s aim is to support regional networks of collaborative academic leaders around the world, as well as in North America, and to connect these networks under a common purpose. To do that work with credibility and legitimacy internationally, a global banner has been developed under which we can all gather. It was from this starting point that the Leopold Leadership Advisory Board, working closely with the Future Earth Advisory Committee, landed on the Earth Leadership Program. The Earth Leadership Program remains committed to the fundamental principles that have made the LLP so transformative: interdisciplinary learning, building future leaders empowered to collaborate and innovate, and strengthening the connections among all of our scholars – past, present, and future – in the service of solution-focused, engaged sustainability research.

Through the Earth Leadership Program, we can scale the impact of academic researchers to solve sustainability challenges by co-designing and making our leadership training global. To guide this effort, we are pleased to announce Sharon Collinge as the new Executive Director of the Earth Leadership Program. As a 2004 LLP fellow and full professor in the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Sharon will provide a new type of engaged leadership–supporting the growth of the program in North America and around the world.

As we look toward 2030, the Earth Leadership program is focused on what we can do together here in North America, and around the world, as a network of regional cohorts, learning with and from one another, amplifying each-others research and impact, and actively transforming our world!

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