For leaders in global health and international development, the ground has been shifting for years. Funding models are changing. Power is being contested. Public trust feels more fragile. And the familiar tools that once helped organizations move forward increasingly feel ill-suited to the moment.
Rachel Logel Carmichael and Thomas Jepson-Lay have spent much of their careers navigating exactly these kinds of transitions. Through their work across humanitarian response, international NGOs and complex global systems, both have come to a shared conclusion: leaders are operating in fundamentally new conditions without the space to rethink their approach.
In response, the pair have developed a new offering called Leadership Dialogues, a cohort-based program designed not to “train” leaders but to give them something many say is missing – self-reflective time, structured learning and peer support to help them think differently about leadership itself.
Rachel Logel Carmichael’s career began in international humanitarian operations, working overseas in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Over more than two decades, she moved between emergency response settings, fragile contexts and senior leadership teams of organizations of vastly different sizes, from small community-based groups to some of the largest international NGOs in the world.
“That gave me a real opportunity to observe how different cultures come together around decision-making, leadership practices and different ways of understanding the world,” she said. “It reframed how I think about how people show up, as individuals and as professionals.”
Working in fast-paced emergency contexts forced constant adaptation and sharpened her awareness of how organizational culture, resourcing and power dynamics quietly shape leadership behaviour.
Today, Logel Carmichael works as a consultant focused on strategy and organizational change, helping value-driven organizations navigate uncertainty. “This moment we’re in, with so much change and pressure, can feel like a burden,” she said. “But it can also be an opportunity to redefine who you are and how you lead.”
Thomas Jepson-Lay’s path followed a parallel and equally formative arc. He began his career responding to rapid-onset humanitarian crises around the world, initially as a photographer and then as an emergency response team leader. Now based in the UK, he spent the last 14 years on the ground in East Africa and other crisis contexts, including South Sudan during the outbreak of civil war in 2013.
“That was a formative experience for many of us,” he said. “I burned out. I had mental health issues as a result.” Rather than seeing that experience as an individual failure, Jepson-Lay has described it as an early signal of the limits of prevailing leadership and operating models in high-pressure humanitarian systems.
After South Sudan, Jepson-Lay joined Save the Children, first supporting famine prevention responses in Somalia and later in regional leadership roles across East and Southern Africa. There, his understanding of leadership began to shift. Instead of directing from the centre, he focused on patterns, ecosystems, influence and moving from outputs to outcomes rather than simply delivering tasks. That approach proved essential in managing complex, multi-country responses where no single model could work everywhere.
“Over time, my role evolved into leadership development, organizational strategy and coaching,” he explained. “I help leaders analyze systems, design context-specific strategies and navigate uncertainty without defaulting to rigid solutions. What I learned is that the answers aren’t in a cookie-cutter model. They’re in the individual and in the ecosystem they’re part of.”
Through their consulting work, Logel Carmichael and Jepson-Lay began noticing the same themes emerging again and again in conversations with nonprofit leaders.
“There are a lot of through lines,” Logel Carmichael said. “Leaders are grappling with diversity in perspectives, shifting power and new expectations from staff. What’s changed isn’t just the external context, but the kinds of problems they’re being asked to solve. Many of these challenges don’t have clear answers, and that’s forcing values-driven organizations to rethink how they show up in the world.”
Jepson-Lay put it more bluntly. “Overwhelmingly, people are sensing that what got them to where they are today is not what they’re going to need moving forward.” Leaders are hungry for new approaches, but they are also under pressure for quick fixes. That tension often leads to what Jepson-Lay sees as a common trap, reverting to patterned leadership behaviours in moments of uncertainty.
“It’s a psychological coping strategy,” he said. “Uncertainty feels like a threat, so people go back to what’s felt safe before, even if it’s no longer working.”
At the same time, many leaders describe a sense of isolation. They may not be able to talk openly with staff, or even friends working outside the sector. Existing professional spaces often focus on diagnosing problems rather than working through what to do with them.
“We heard over and over again that leaders didn’t feel they had a space to navigate this,” Logel Carmichael said. “Not just to name the challenges, but to move through them.”
Leadership Dialogues was designed as a response to that gap. Rather than a traditional training, the program invites participants into a six-week, cohort-based journey with 90-minute sessions focused on reflection, dialogue and application. The emphasis is not on teaching answers, but on helping leaders examine how their own leadership has been shaped and how it may need to evolve.
“It starts with the individual,” Jepson-Lay said. “Understanding your own leadership style, what’s informed it, what the biases and shadow elements might be, and then thinking about how you need to transition given the dynamics you’re facing.”
From there, participants explore how leadership shows up in relationship to others, particularly in complex systems built on partnerships, power-sharing and interdependence. There are also opportunities to practice new approaches through simulated, real-world scenarios.
A defining feature of the program is its cohort model. “We were very intentional about this not being a one-way space where Thomas and I lecture,” Logel Carmichael said. “There is a structured arc to the 6 week journey, including topics week to week, but the learning comes from being in conversation with others who are grappling with similar complexity.”
That co-learning also helps counter the loneliness many leaders describe. “This is a space for people who have self-identified that they want support to think differently,” she said, “and who want to do that alongside peers.”
Importantly, the program does not prescribe a single endpoint. “For some people, the reflection might be affirming,” Logel Carmichael said. “They might realize they’ve been leading in ways that weren’t always supported by the system, not that they were wrong.” For others, it may prompt deeper change. “Everyone’s journey will be different,” she added. “That’s why we’re not prescribing the outcome.”
Both Logel Carmichael and Jepson-Lay are clear-eyed about the broader context leaders are operating in, particularly in global health and international development.
Current aid models, Jepson-Lay explained, are the product of post-World War II and post-Cold War global norms — multilateralism, Western-led institutions and relatively stable funding environments. That structure helped professionalize the sector and saved countless lives. “But that world is changing,” he said. “ODA budgets are being cut. Global institutions are being challenged. Power is fragmenting.”
At the same time, the underlying missions of many organizations (improving health, advancing rights, protecting dignity) have never been more relevant. “The question isn’t whether the cause still matters,” he said. “It’s how you pursue it in a much more turbulent ecosystem.”
Logel Carmichael emphasized an additional layer — justice. “There’s been growing recognition of whose voices have been excluded from these systems,” she said. “Localization, power-shifting, re-centering. We’re still grappling with what that actually looks like in practice.” For leaders, that means navigating not just financial and political pressure but moral and relational nuance as well. “It’s not one challenge,” she said. “It’s the convergence of many.”
When asked where hope comes from in this difficult context, Jepson-Lay answered without hesitation. “People,” he said. “The values haven’t disappeared.”
As familiar structures shift, he sees space for humanitarianism and global solidarity to be redefined — less as something held by institutions and more as something carried by people committed to justice, dignity and care, even as the systems around them change.
For Logel Carmichael, hope is rooted in representation. “I hope we see the emergence of new voices that genuinely shift the narrative,” she said. “Voices that challenge dominant ways of defining the path forward and help us imagine something more inclusive.”
Leadership Dialogues, they are careful to emphasize, will not resolve the sector’s challenges. But the program does offer what many leaders say they are missing: a structured space to pause, think honestly about how they lead, and move forward with greater intention — together.
Leadership Dialogues will run multiple cohort sessions in 2026. The first starts on February 26th and the second on April 29th. Registration for both is open now. For more information, dates and registration details, please contact Rachel and Thomas on the below emails.
Rachel: [email protected]
Thomas: [email protected]
