Meeting the world's hardest challenges — from poverty to conflict to disaster — requires bold, community-rooted leadership. Yet the leaders with the most potential to transform their communities receive the least investment, and talented local leaders are too often locked out of the training, mentorship, relationships, and resources they need to grow their impact.

 

Just as an economy needs strong physical infrastructure — roads, power, water — a community needs strong "human infrastructure": the inner capacity to lead its own development and flourish. A community with strong human infrastructure has six mutually reinforcing assets — the same six assets every transformational leader needs to thrive:

 

• Abilities — the right skills and knowledge to solve problems

• Relationships — trusted mentors, peers, and networks to draw on

• Mindsets — the confidence, values, and resilience to act

• Activities — taking the most impactful approach to create lasting change

• Places — doing the work in the places that matter most

• Power — the power to shape one's own destiny

 

We invest in transformational local leaders and equip them to strengthen these six assets across their communities. Stronger leaders build stronger communities, which in turn produce the next generation of leaders — a self-reinforcing flywheel. We cultivate human infrastructure through fellowships, custom leadership programs, and — in future years — field building, policy advocacy, academic research, and media.

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Mountaintop credits Isata Kabia, a former minister and parliamentarian in Sierra Leone, for the term "human infrastructure" and for much of the related framework.​