Getting to Know WLS
World Leadership School, a Founding B Corp, partners with K-12 schools in order to reimagine learning and create next-generation leaders. Since 2007 our diverse community has grown to 50+ staff, instructors, teacher coaches, and country coordinators around the world.
Our US-based staff coordinates World Leadership School’s travel and professional learning programs. Our instructors are amazing, intrepid, humorous, and wise experiential educators. Our teacher-coaches partner with educators to create learner-centered, purposeful classrooms. Our coordinators live and work near our host communities and nurture the long-term relationships that are the bedrock of the work that we do.
World Leadership School has grown from the vision that K-12 schools can — and should be — the ultimate platform for creating purpose-driven youth leaders.
After working during the 1990s as a journalist in Latin America, Ross Wehner decided to stop reporting on problems like climate change and human rights and instead try to find solutions. He worked as a wilderness instructor and classroom teacher before starting World Leadership School in 2007 with the idea of using rural communities as leadership labs for youth. Erin Hawk became World Leadership School’s first employee in 2008, after having worked as a Montessori teacher, an instructor for a global travel organization, and the Director of Programs for a nonprofit serving inner-city youth.
From the very beginning, World Leadership School has also worked to improve the quality of education in our rural school partners. World Leadership Foundation, our sister non-profit, was established in 2009 and began exploring solutions for rural schools, including innovative uses of tablet technology. These efforts eventually developed into TeachUNITED, which in 2020 separated from World Leadership Foundation and became an independent 501( c )3 nonprofit (see below), TeachUNITED now supports hundreds of schools around the world and 100,000+ students. World Leadership Foundation continues to serve rural communities, and has invested over $1 million of student donations into school infrastructure projects over the last decade.
In 2016, World Leadership School launched Purpose Learning, a framework for learning as thinking, feeling and doing. At the intersection of these three domains, students can explore their unique purpose. To accelerate the Purpose Learning Movement, we began offering teacher-driven conferences in 2017, such as our Global Gatherings and our annual K-12 Purpose Summit in Boulder, Colorado.
World Leadership School now partners with over 100 independent and charter schools to bring greater purpose to learning. With these schools, we work to:
- Design and run partnership-based travel programs for over 750 students each year.
- Create professional learning experiences for over 2,200 teachers and administrators each year through our workshops, Virtual Coaching Institute, conferences and educator travel programs.
- Improve risk management in order to scale off-campus experiential learning.
Our staff, instructors, teacher coaches and coordinators convene every April at our annual instructor training in Colorado’s Arkansas Valley.
World Leadership School is proud to be a Certified B Corporation. We joined the B Corp movement in 2007 as a founding B Corp Member, and the first certified B Corp in Colorado. Today, there are over 3,100 B Corps in 71 countries, including well-known corporations such as Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s. B Corps are for-profit companies that meet rigorous, independent standards of social and environmental performance. B Corps create greater economic opportunity, strengthen local communities, and preserve the environment. Most importantly, B Corps demonstrate how capitalism can drive positive change in the world. Watch this video to understand the B Corp movement.
At WLS, we believe that market forces should be used whenever possible to drive change. World Leadership School uses a for-profit model to partner with schools in North America to transform learning. In addition to being a Certified B Corporation, World Leadership School became a Benefit Corporation in Colorado in 2016 shortly after the legislation was approved. As a Certified B Corporation, we are audited every few years to ensure best practices around social and environmental sustainability. As a Colorado Benefit Corporation we are required by law to publish an annual community impact report. World Leadership Foundation, our partner nonprofit, relies on grants and donations to drive change in rural schools. Therefore, World Leadership Foundation is a registered 501( c )3 nonprofit foundation.
TeachUNITED, an independent nonprofit, works with rural schools throughout Africa and Latin America, and a growing number of school districts in the USA.
TeachUNITED provides training, resources, and connections to pursue its mission to “coach and empower educators with the skills needed to improve student outcomes and develop each student’s full potential.”
TeachUNITED grew out of World Leadership School’s early work in rural communities and was incubated by World Leadership Foundation, our partner nonprofit, before becoming an independent nonprofit in 2020.
TeachUNITED is focused on the problem that 250 million kids around the world leave school without critical reading, writing, and math skills, which accelerates poverty, climate change, health, and gender equality. Underserved and rural areas are the hardest hit.
Explore WLS
Student travel locations
