Board Readiness Intensive: Your First NED Seat

An intensive working session for senior African and African-diaspora women preparing for their first independent board seat. The structural data on Black women in board positions across public companies, private companies, nonprofit organizations, and foundation boards continues to show under-representation. The pipeline of qualified senior women is real and growing; the matching to specific board seats is the harder structural problem.

This intensive is built around the proposition that board-readiness is a structured project that can be completed across a six-to-twelve-month period of deliberate work. The session covers the framework for that project: the operating-experience documentation, the governance-skill development, the board-portfolio construction, the search-process navigation, and the first-board-seat execution.

The session structure is a two-day virtual intensive with four three-hour sessions. Day one morning: operating-experience documentation and the board-bio construction work. Day one afternoon: governance-skill development including the audit-committee, comp-committee, and nominating-and-governance-committee specifics. Day two morning: board-portfolio construction including public-private-nonprofit balance and the time-allocation discipline. Day two afternoon: search-process navigation including the formal-search-firm interactions, the network-driven-search-process interactions, and the interview-and-onboarding sequence for first board seats.

Each session is led by a senior woman from the platform's membership who currently serves on multiple boards. The facilitator rotation across the four sessions provides different perspectives on board work from across industries and across board types. Attendees benefit from the variation in vantage points.

Who this is for: senior African and African-diaspora women in executive-level corporate positions (VP, SVP, C-suite), founder-track positions (post-Series B founders, exited founders), and senior professional-services positions (law-firm partners, accounting-firm partners, consulting-firm partners) who are preparing for their first independent board seat across public, private, or nonprofit boards.

What attendees will leave with: a complete board bio ready for search-firm distribution. A board-readiness self-assessment with specific gaps identified and specific development plans. A board-portfolio target structure aligned with the attendee's time-and-financial constraints. Specific contacts at major board search firms and within the platform's broader board-seated membership.

Logistics: virtual via the platform's event infrastructure across two consecutive days. 12-hour total duration spread across four 3-hour sessions. Capacity 40 due to the intensive small-group structure; registered count tracked at the platform-event-detail level. Recording available to registered attendees only.

Pre-event prep: attendees receive a structured pre-event briefing document including the operating-experience documentation template, the governance-skill self-assessment, and reading on first-board-seat preparation. Pre-work completion is expected before the intensive begins; attendees who arrive without completed pre-work will not be able to benefit from the intensive structure.

Post-event continuation: a quarterly cohort follow-up across the year following the intensive, with rotating member-facilitators and a specific structural-question agenda per session. Individual mentor sessions with the intensive facilitators are available for attendees with active board-seat conversations.

Cost: tiered ticket pricing reflecting the intensive's depth and the structural infrastructure behind it. Scholarships are available for attendees for whom the ticket cost is a barrier; the request is at the bottom of the registration form.

This intensive has run multiple times across the platform's events program. Attendees from prior cohorts have reported specific outcomes: first-board-seat appointments at public companies, private-company board appointments, and nonprofit-organization board appointments. The structural integration of the intensive with the platform's broader board-readiness infrastructure and with individual mentor sessions represents a coherent investment in expanding the Black women's board-pipeline across multiple sectors.

The platform's broader board-readiness infrastructure supports the intensive. The platform maintains relationships with major board-search firms, including specific senior-search-firm leaders who participate in the post-intensive cohort sessions and provide direct introductions for cohort members. The intensive is one component of a broader board-readiness pipeline that the platform has built over multiple years.

The first-board-seat conversation has historically happened informally among senior women who already had board portfolios. The intensive format democratizes the knowledge that those informal conversations produced and makes the framework available to senior women who do not have existing access to board-seated peers. The intensive's pipeline-expansion goal is explicit.

Registration opens eight weeks before the event date to support the pre-event preparation work and typically reaches capacity within four weeks. Cancellation up to two weeks before the event refunds the ticket cost minus the platform's standard processing-fee deduction; later cancellation transfers the registration to a subsequent cohort.

Accessibility provisions include live captioning of all four sessions, recorded captions on the post-event recordings, scheduled-pause-points in each session, and ASL interpretation available on request submitted at least two weeks before the intensive. The intensive's two-day format requires specific attention to attendee energy and scheduling; the platform accommodates time-zone considerations for attendees outside the primary facilitator time zone by recording sessions and providing asynchronous engagement options for the pre-work and post-work components.

The intensive has evolved across multiple iterations. The early iterations were single-day sessions; attendee feedback consistently surfaced the need for more depth on each segment, leading to the current two-day structure. The current iteration is stable and represents what the cohort has surfaced as the right depth for the first-board-seat preparation work.

The intensive is one component of the platform's broader board-readiness infrastructure. Adjacent programming includes the quarterly board-portfolio review session for intensive alumna, the annual board-leadership retreat for senior board members, and individual mentor sessions with intensive facilitators for attendees in active board-seat search conversations.

The intensive has produced a sustained alumna network of senior women now serving on boards across public companies, private companies, nonprofit organizations, and foundation boards. The alumna network is a primary referral pipeline for subsequent board-seat opportunities, with senior board-seated alumna often serving as the relationship that introduces newer alumna to specific board-search opportunities.

The platform's event registration confirmation for the intensive includes calendar invitations for both days, the platform's video-conferencing access details, and the structured pre-event preparation document and worksheets. The platform's broader confidentiality framework applies. Specific employer details, board-search-firm conversations, and personal-situation specifics shared in the intensive do not leave the room.

The intensive participates in a broader board-readiness ecosystem for senior Black and African-diaspora women. Adjacent organizations and programs that the intensive alumna engage with include the Board Director Network, the Black Corporate Directors Conference, the Black Women's Executive Search Network, and several geographic-specific board-pipeline programs. The platform's intensive is one of multiple infrastructure investments in the broader pipeline.

Members of the platform's board-readiness cohort are encouraged to engage with the broader board-readiness ecosystem alongside the intensive and its post-intensive follow-up structures. The platform's cohort thread shares specific external-program registrations, conference details, and board-search-firm relationship intelligence that cohort members report as useful for their broader board-readiness work.