Preparatory Leadership Collaborative FAQ

We are currently located in Brooklyn, NY. As we launch the incubator, we will be focused on serving students in the New York metropolitan area.

If you live outside the greater NYC area and would like to learn more about the potential for our future expansion, please do not hesitate to reach out using the “contact us” link.

We are seeking a diverse body of leaders from a variety of positions and levels within the education sector.

Our ideal cohort will be comprised of leaders from all walks of life, spanning from operations to academia, to C-Level positions, and whom all have a desire to ensure that educational equity is a priority well beyond the students we serve.

The ideal candidate is secure with their position within education, recognizes the potential for impact through collaboration, and seeks to disrupt current hiring and teacher development practices that hinder nontraditional educators from being successful within PK-12 schools.

We require collaborative members to attend 1 (one) 3-hour collaborative think-tank meeting each month. This meeting will include pre-work activities that can be completed on your own time, and will require no more than one-hour of your time.

Much of our work will be developed together as a collaborative, but practiced within our roles at our schools. Collaborative members should have a strong desire to ensure that the work that we do together becomes a living and breathing element of your school and staff culture.

As experienced school leaders, we recognize the sometimes unpredictable nature of your role within your school. FLI will ensure that all PLC schedules are shared with members as early as possible, and at ideal times for leaders to convene.

If you know of potential conflicts now, please indicate it in your application under the “additional comments” section – that way we can avoid conflicts when we finalize schedules.

We require that candidates discuss this opportunity with their supervisors before applying to avoid any potential conflicts.

This should not automatically exclude you from candidacy for the PLC. We believe that all school leaders have the potential to influence the issues that impact our students each day, especially when it comes to the teachers that are in front of our kids!

We encourage you to confer with your school leader about this potential opportunity to see if this would be a good fit in terms of your long-term professional development plan.

Please apply. Our approach to tackling challenges prepare you to go back to your school community and tackle other issues with your team and staff. Each of us is responsible for being a positive agent of change within our roles; we will help you think about the change that is needed in a productive and transformative way.

If you are not a current school leader, you cannot join PLC.

We encourage you to consider applying to join the FLI Educator Project; on a case-by-case basis we will accept members in different stages of the program to best fit their current career accomplishments and long-term ambitions.

No. We are an equal-opportunity collaborative. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, creed, gender, gender expression, age, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, military status or any of its activities or operations.

Absolutely! If your personal passions and desire to have a lasting impact in education reform are aligned to our work, we would like to get to know you! We believe that the best leaders learn and grow, and we want to be a part of that process with you. Please do not hesitate to reach out during the next round!

FLI is a nonprofit organization that is seeking ways to fund change in urban education.  We are working on the process to secure grants that will allow us to provide our support free of charge to collaborative members, but do need to charge partner schools for our consultancy services.  At this time, we are not charging any fees to our collaborative members who intend to attend our monthly think-tank meetings. We ask that school leaders come prepared to help us to solve some of the greatest, and most divisive issues that plague urban education leaders, and to pilot them as leaders of their schools.

If you are in a position to donate to support our work, please contribute though a tax-deductible donation.

We will consider this request on a case-by-case basis and may be open to alternative programming to meet your needs; though this would generally be done through FLI YOU’s Personalized Consultancy services. Through this service, we can support leadership teams through tailored professional development, outside of the think-tank and at school sites for nominal fees.  Contact us anytime with any questions about which of our services is right for you!

The launch-date for PLC monthly think-tank meetings will vary each year. Please contact us for more details about the upcoming PLC cohort.

All PLC applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

We anticipate having a single PLC think-tank cohort each school year, dedicated to working deliberately to make an impact at their school sites. Calendars and schedules will be shared with applicants after they have been accepted into the PLC.