Widening Access to Leadership
Between August and mid-September 2026, I spent six weeks volunteering as a Director on
the Operations team at EveryLeader, a youth leadership non-profit. The role was fully
remote, and our team met once a week to review progress and set tasks for the week ahead.
Our aim was to strengthen EveryLeader’s internal procedures, such as properly documented
onboarding and offboarding, and to keep its programmes running smoothly. In this essay, I
describe my role, the projects I delivered, the challenges I faced and what I learned from
them.
EveryLeader offers completely free online leadership training to young people, and it exists
to solve a simple problem. The average leadership skills course costs around £2,000, and
many programmes also screen applicants on their academic performance, so the students
who might benefit most are often shut out. By removing both of these barriers, EveryLeader
makes leadership training available to anyone, whatever their financial or academic
background.
This mission resonated with me because the placement felt like a way of giving back what I
had received. Leadership training was a central part of my two-year Laidlaw Scholarship,
and I now use those skills both in leading an e-commerce startup and in my personal life.
Yet I knew I had only accessed that training because I studied at UCL, could afford the fees,
and had the academic record to pass Laidlaw’s selection process. When a Laidlaw colleague
introduced me to EveryLeader, I saw a chance to widen access to the same kind of training
for people who did not share those advantages.
To understand the work I did, it helps to understand how young the organisation is.
EveryLeader was founded in early 2026, around eight months before my placement began,
and operates across the UK and Australia. In that short time it has grown to around 35 team
members across seven departments: Communications, Operations, Programmes, Marketing,
Technology, Strategy and Legal. Its leadership programme currently serves young people in
the UK and Australia, and it aims to bring its courses to students worldwide. Everyone on
the team is a volunteer, and many are full-time university students.
Within this structure, Operations sits at the centre. Our team had five members, a Head of
Department and four Directors including myself, and our job was to make sure the
organisation could keep functioning as it grew. In a new non-profit, much of the early work
happens informally, through goodwill and personal knowledge. That works while a team is
small, but as more volunteers join and leave, undocumented processes become a real risk:
tasks get lost in handovers, new members take longer to become useful, and former
members can keep access to information they should no longer have.
The way we worked reflected this volunteer setting. Rather than keeping set “business
hours”, each team member left our weekly one-hour meeting with a list of actionables to
complete before the next one. I committed around 20 hours per week, working remotely and
communicating with other departments mostly through written messages. This gave me a
great deal of freedom to organise my own time, but it also meant that progress depended
heavily on self-discipline and on how responsive colleagues in other departments and time
zones were. Because the placement was my main focus for those six weeks, I could give
EveryLeader far more time than most team members, who fit their volunteering around
studies and jobs, and this shaped how much I was able to take on.
The first thing I took on was designing EveryLeader’s onboarding and offboarding
procedures from scratch. I wrote both as step-by-step PDF guides for the Head of
Department that a member is joining or leaving, so that any department can follow the same
process without needing help from Operations. For offboarding, the main issue was
continuity, so I created a form for the departing member to fill in, describing their
responsibilities, the status of their tasks and anything left unfinished. This allows their
replacement to pick up the work without losing momentum. I also worked with the
Technology team to add a data-security step, so that once a member leaves, their access to
the company portal and internal information is removed. For onboarding, I designed a form
that collects a new member’s background and availability, together with guidance
introducing them to their day-to-day tasks and main points of contact, so that new
volunteers feel settled from their first week rather than learning by trial and error.
Once these procedures were in place, I moved on to my largest project: creating
EveryLeader’s first e-newsletter. Before starting, I broke the project into steps with
deadlines so that the first issue would be ready on time. I then designed its structure,
deciding which sections it would include and how long each should be. The first issue
opens with a Young Leader of the Month profile and an article on recognising poor
leadership, followed by an Opportunities Board listing events in the UK, in Australia and
online, the programme schedule, a Volunteer of the Month feature and a reader Q&A. I
wrote all of the articles myself and designed the template in Canva, which I had never used
before. To make sure the newsletter could continue after my placement, I also wrote
recruitment briefs for two new volunteer roles, a newsletter writer and a newsletter
coordinator, and worked with the Marketing team to publish them on EveryLeader’s
LinkedIn page. Alongside this, I worked with the Programmes department to write a brief
for one of the leadership programme’s sessions, which was sent to participants beforehand
to build interest and help them prepare.
None of this work came without difficulties, and the hardest part of the placement was
completing tasks that depended on other departments. Many of our members are full-time
students in Australia, and my placement coincided with their exam period, so they had
much less time for EveryLeader. Communication was already entirely by text, so there was
no faster channel to try. I raised the problem with my Head of Department and the CEO,
who contacted the unresponsive members directly, but I still received no replies. I was not
originally meant to write every article or design the template, but without other people’s
contributions, the newsletter would have been delayed by at least two months. I therefore
took on both tasks myself, and the first issue was finished on schedule. This taught me that
when a deadline is at risk, the most reliable option is sometimes to take full ownership of
the work. At the same time, it showed me that doing everything yourself is not sustainable,
which is exactly why recruiting dedicated newsletter volunteers became part of the project.
The second challenge was a more personal one. I do not see myself as naturally creative,
and design tasks have always been difficult for me. I practised in Canva and watched many
tutorials until I had produced an organised, stylish and professional template, which my
Head of Department approved.
Looking back at what these projects achieved, it is important to recognise that, because
EveryLeader is so new, many of my contributions are foundations for the future, and I do
not yet have data on their reach. Even so, their early impact is clear. The offboarding
procedure is already in use: it has been carried out with two departing members exactly as I
designed it, and the Technology team readily adopted the access-removal step. As a result,
work was handed over in an organised way and former members no longer keep access to
internal systems. The onboarding procedure, meanwhile, means that every future volunteer,
in any department, will start with the same clear introduction to their role.
The newsletter’s impact is still to come, as it is due to go out to members shortly after the
end of my placement. It is designed to increase engagement across a team that is spread
over two continents and rarely meets, by celebrating members’ achievements, sharing
opportunities and giving everyone a common point of connection. By profiling young
leaders and making leadership topics accessible, it also shows EveryLeader’s mission in
action, and thanks to the recruitment briefs, future issues can be produced by a dedicated
team rather than a single person. Taken together, these contributions support EveryLeader’s
wider mission, because free training can only reach young people reliably if the
organisation behind it is stable, well run and able to keep its volunteers.
The feedback I received suggested that this work was valued. My Head of Department told
me I was performing incredibly well and pointed out that I had completed 100% of my
deliverables on time. My newsletter writing, the template and the recruitment documents
were all praised.
Beyond these outcomes, the placement also changed me in several ways. The most valuable
skill I developed was project planning, especially setting realistic timelines. Planning the
newsletter before starting it forced me to break a large, vague goal into small steps, each
with its own deadline. This made the project far more manageable, and it is the reason the
first issue was finished on time despite the setbacks. I also gained skills I had not expected
to, including graphic design, writing for a wide audience, and designing processes that other
people can follow without me there to explain them.
Just as importantly, the experience changed how I see volunteer-run organisations. I noticed
a clear difference between volunteers and paid staff in accountability, hours worked and
dedication. This is understandable, since when volunteering is one of several commitments,
it is often the first thing to slip. My Head of Department and our CEO, however, were
striking exceptions. Every week they showed remarkable initiative, completed a large
volume of work and brought real passion to the project. Seeing this inspired me, and it
taught me that in a volunteer organisation, leadership comes less from authority and more
from setting an example that others want to follow.
The placement also connected closely with my personal values. My startup exists mainly to
generate profit, whereas EveryLeader is focused on society, and working there felt more
purposeful in a way I had not expected. It also brought my reflection on Laidlaw full circle.
I had received leadership training partly as a reward for advantages I already had; through
EveryLeader, I was helping to build an organisation that offers that same training to young
people without those advantages. Finally, the placement pushed me outside my comfort
zone, and taking on design work I felt unsuited to, as well as choosing to carry more of the
newsletter myself, showed me that I am more adaptable than I had assumed.
Ultimately, my six weeks at EveryLeader showed me that widening access to leadership
training depends on more than running good sessions. It also depends on the unglamorous
systems behind them, from onboarding forms and handover procedures to a newsletter that
keeps a dispersed team connected. For this reason, I have chosen to stay on at EveryLeader
indefinitely. My deliverables have become a significant part of the organisation’s output, I
can see how much the work matters, and I genuinely enjoy it. I will also bring what I
learned back to my startup, in particular the habit of mapping projects in a spreadsheet as
small steps with clear timings, which makes even large projects feel achievable.
If I could offer one piece of advice to anyone starting a similar placement, it would be to go
in wanting to do as much as possible in the time you have. Most volunteers fit their work
around other priorities, so a placement student whose main focus is the organisation can
achieve a great deal in a short time. You will be a real asset to the organisation, so act on it.
