Our story
We connect emerging leaders with experienced executive coaches. The coaching is donated. In return, the person coached gives directly to a nonprofit partner they choose — and we never touch the money.
GrowForward Circle started from a plain observation: experienced executives are often willing to coach, and emerging leaders are often unable to pay for coaching. The usual way to close that gap is a fee, discounted or waived. We closed it differently.
A generation of leaders who were coached by someone with nothing to sell them, and who funded a child’s education by accepting the help.
The part people ask about
The moment an organization holds donations, it has to be trusted to pass them on, audited to prove that it did, and staffed to handle the difference. We removed the problem instead of managing it. Your donation goes from you to the partner. We store an image of the receipt and three numbers.
A coach who is not paid by you, and an organization that does not profit from your gift, have nothing to sell. That is unusual enough to be worth structuring for.
Sessions are never gated on giving. There is no threshold to clear, no paperwork to settle, and nothing that stops working if you have not given yet. The platform keeps both people informed of where things stand, and that is all it does.
In practice
Executives donate expertise, not money.
Our coaches are senior operators who give something they have more of than cash: judgement earned over decades. It costs them time, which is the scarcer thing.
A structured engagement, not a single conversation.
About 10 sessions over roughly 5 months. Long enough for something to change; short enough to finish.
Every coach is trained in Dr. Martin Seldman's framework.
Coaches are vetted, then trained in a single shared method — so the experience does not depend on which coach you happen to be matched with.
Every figure is visible to the people it concerns.
Coach and mentee see the same progress view. Public impact figures are aggregate. Nothing about how the money moves is hidden, because the model only works if it is legible.
We store the structure of the programme: who is matched with whom, when sessions happened, and the amount, date, and receipt for each donation. We verify receipts and report totals in aggregate.
We do not read messages between a coach and the person they coach. Message content is encrypted and readable only by the two people in the conversation. If someone reports a concern, they choose which messages to share with us, and only those are shared.
Saying this precisely matters. It would be easier to write that we can access anything for safety reasons, and it would not be true — an organization that overstates what it can see has to be believed twice.