Portland, Oregon. Civil Strategies today launched The CIVIL Executive Series™, a foundation-funded program that helps senior nonprofit teams build the institutional strength their missions now demand. The pressures on nonprofit institutions have rarely been greater, or less predictable, and strong nonprofits deserve structures built to hold them. Series I opens with a limited number of city-based cohorts beginning in the fourth quarter of 2026 and running throughout 2027. It is the first of many, with future series extending the program to new cohorts over time. The enrollment waitlist is open now.
Nonprofits are doing challenging work, led by committed and capable leaders, in a volatile political and funding landscape where support can shift or contract with little warning. What lets an organization hold steady under that pressure is often institutional structure, not talent or resolve. With it, external shocks are absorbed; without it, decisions stall, resources stretch, and accountability blurs, usually long before the strain appears in any report.
Designed and led by Civil’s Founder and CEO Midy Aponte-Vargas, the Series gives senior teams a structured way to see those conditions clearly and act on them early, with the clarity and time to respond on their own terms. It is grounded in The CIVIL Framework™, Civil’s proprietary methodology developed over more than two decades with foundations, nonprofits, and mission-driven enterprises.
“Having advised this work as a public-interest practitioner and lived it as a founding executive director inside a fund, I know how much vital work is built on borrowed ground. The Series exists so that senior teams have ground of their own to stand on,” said Aponte-Vargas.
What Series I covers
Three 12-week intensives, each aimed where strain shows first:
Operating foundation and structure. Sharpens decision-making, accountability, and execution so teams reduce avoidable friction.
Program architecture and resource discipline. Aligns program design with the people, funding, and capacity required to sustain it.
Relational communications and institutional voice. Builds communication grounded in how the organization operates.
These are three of the eight institutional functions defined in The CIVIL Framework™: operations, programs, and communications. Future series will address the remaining functions, so the program covers the full framework over time.
How it works
Each intensive moves through three stages: a proprietary diagnostic, a facilitated, in-person two-day executive retreat, and a period of guided implementation with Civil Of Counsel executives. Foundations can sponsor a single nonprofit or up to a full ecosystem cohort of four, to attend one, two, or all three intensives. A nonprofit can also pursue the Series on its own, and Civil will work alongside it to support its request to funders.
Where and who
The Series is built for senior leadership teams, with three leaders per nonprofit, typically the executive director and two others from the executive team. It runs from the fourth quarter of 2026 through 2027 in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Sponsors may also request additional cities.
About Civil Strategies
Civil Strategies is an interdisciplinary systems design and advocacy communications firm that helps nonprofits, foundations, and mission-driven enterprises align what they stand for with how they operate. Uniting business, communications, finance, policy, risk management, and research in one integrated practice, Civil works where strategy meets structure to strengthen the institutional systems behind effective programs. The firm’s work is grounded in The CIVIL Framework™, its proprietary methodology for institutional analysis and design. To learn more, visit civil-strategies.com.