The Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI) was launched in 2013 as a two-year fellowship for rabbis focused on organizational leadership, change management and institutional transformation. CLI’s target audience has been rabbis of all denominations who are between years 5 and 15 of their rabbinic tenure. Most have been congregational rabbis though each cohort has included a handful of rabbinic entrepreneurs who were seeking to develop entirely new models of spiritual community. Integrating the disciplines of adaptive leadership and the work of the synagogue transformation field that has developed over the past 25 years, CLI Fellows were supported to develop innovation projects that could inspire deeper engagement on the part of both members and potential members. For more than 10 years, CLI has also sponsored a monthly Synagogue Innovation Blog, distributed widely in partnership with eJewishPhilanthropy, documenting some of the most innovative work happening in spiritual communities throughout North America.
In June 2025, CLI-6 Fellows will finish their program and it will bring the total number of CLI alumni to approximately 120 rabbis. Instead of recruiting a seventh cohort, the decision was made to focus CLI’s work on the pool of CLI alumni. The plan is to leverage the work we have done in the first phase of CLI to create a larger “return on investment” (ROI) for the CLI program. Each alumnus was the beneficiary of strategies and a “toolkit” related to spiritual leadership and transformational change. CLI 2.0 will be dedicated to working with a select pool of alumni to leverage the CLI training.
The centerpiece of CLI 2.0 will be personalized, executive coaching that will be provided by Rabbi Sid to a select number of alumni, paired with a scholar in residence weekend visit (SIR) culminating in a Board retreat designed to take your congregation to the next level of engagement in conjunction with your innovation project. Complementing the work done with Rabbi Sid, each rabbi selected for CLI 2.0 will be part of a diverse, 4-person, community of practice. Similar to the COP experience of CLI, the monthly meetings of the COP will be an opportunity to experience peer consulting from colleagues who bring to the table varied ideologies and Jewish practice.
CLI 2.0 will be a two-year program with one, in-person retreat, taking place each year. Applications for the program will be sent out in January and reviewed on competitive basis. The program will commence in late August, early September.
If you are interested in applying to be part of the CLI 2.0 executive coaching program in 2025-26, be in touch with Rabbi Sid. Applications will be available in January 2025.
As of January 2025, you can access the CLI 2.0 Application here.
