The Broad Network

A Community of Committed Leaders

The mission-driven Broad Network includes over 900 talented leaders. Alumni are committed to the tough but critical work to ensure every child, every day, gets what they need to be successful. That’s why the network remains connected as a community and grows together long after graduation.

Group of Broad alumni at tables, listening intently

As future leaders graduate from The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management programs, the network will serve as a community that continues to provide opportunities to learn from each other and what’s happening beyond each leader’s own school system.

The first cohort of The Broad Academy launched in 2002. Since then, the Broad Network has grown to include leaders in 169 school systems as well as over 150 high-impact K-12 organizations across the nation. This powerful network serves more than 17 million students in local and state school systems. Leveraging the full network to create positive change and to accelerate and amplify the impact of individual leaders is essential in order to achieve transformative results in urban education at the system, state and national level.

The Broad Center Forum

Dean Kerwin Charles and Broad alumni turned toward each other, speaking smiling

At the start of each year, TBC at Yale SOM brings together more than alumni from the Fellowship, the Master's program, The Broad Academy and The Broad Residency in Urban Education where members of the network can share their innovative and transformative work as well as learn from other outstanding leaders in their fields. In 2023 and 2024, the network gathered in-person in New Orleans, LA.

Previous Speakers

Past Forums have featured a range of speakers, from within and outside of education, to inform and inspire the TBC community. At the most recent Forum in January 2024, keynote speakers included Laura Meckler, national education reporter for the Washington Post and author of Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity and novelist and professor Jesmyn Ward, most recently the author of Let Us Descend, a novel following the story of Annis, an enslaved woman and her journey through the deep South that draws on Dante’s Inferno and African mythology. At Forum 2023, network members heard from Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and U.S. Secretary of Education from 2009 to 2015, and members of Chicago CRED; as well as Kiese Laymon, a 2022 MacArthur Fellow and the author the memoir Heavy: An American Memoir.

Other voices and perspectives have also been featured, including authors and artists such as Claudia Rankine, Anna Deavere Smith, W. Kamau Bell, Luis J. Rodriguez, and leaders in other sectors such as Mellody Hobson, Eric Lander and Andy Stern. Broad alumni have learned from activists and community leaders such as Sylvia Mendez and Brittany Packnett Cunningham.