Commonwealth Club: Jane Wei-Skillern: Building Community through Network Leadership

Join us for this lively Transforming Our Region forum program on network leadership and building community, featuring Jane Wei-Skillern. Together, we will explore how to collaborate in ways that catalyze systems change for a Bay Area where people and nature thrive. Strong communities are built not just through programs and organizations, but through relationships, trust, and shared leadership. In this highly interactive program, participants will explore key principles of network leadership and learn practical approaches for strengthening collaboration across individuals, organizations, and sectors to catalyze systems change. Through facilitated small-group discussions, participants will experience firsthand how networks create value by connecting people, sharing resources, and mobilizing collective action. Whether you are leading an organization, community initiative, or volunteering in your community, this session will provide tools and insights to help cultivate stronger, more resilient communities across our region. About the Speaker Jane Wei-Skillern is a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a recognized thought leader on network leadership and social impact. She has spent more than two decades researching and advising leaders, organizations, foundations, and collaboratives on how to achieve greater impact through networks rather than through organizational growth alone. She is a former faculty member at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School. Jane's work has helped shape the field of network leadership by demonstrating how trust, reciprocity, shared purpose, and distributed leadership enable groups to accomplish what no single organization can achieve independently. She works with practitioners around the world to strengthen collaborative capacity and advance systems-level change.