Rising Rooted (2026 Cohort)
An 8-Week group coaching initiation into self-authored leadership for Black founders and professionals navigating greater responsibility, influence or ambition.
Alignment between what you say is important and how you actually move in the world isn't a personal luxury. It's a necessity.
There's a moment ambitious Black leaders and professionals reach where clarity on direction and purpose meets responsibility, vision and complexity at a level that requires upgrading how you think, make decisions, and act. The skills and expertise that got you here remain intact. But the inner architecture required to hold greater influence, visibility, and impact—while staying rooted in what matters—requires deliberate development.
Over eight weeks, we work on self-authored leadership: the capacity to author your own meaning, move decisively, and act with integrity even under pressure.
This is how you shift from a centre of gravity defined by reaction and inherited scripts to one defined by expanded perspective, relational intelligence, and consistent movement with integrity.
You will develop:
Character:
Deliberate, continuous shaping of the internal standards that govern how you work toward vision, wield influence, and navigate responsibility. Not moral posturing, but the clarity to know what's actually non-negotiable for you — and the ability to hold it under pressure.
Capacity
Strengthened ability to metabolize complexity, hold contradiction, absorb visibility, and adapt without fragmenting. This is nervous system regulation, cognitive sophistication, and emotional stamina built intentionally. It's the foundation for thinking and leading from a steadier place.
Coherence
Alignment between what you say matters and how you actually move in the world. It's the capacity to make decisions consistent with your values when incentives pull elsewhere. To navigate power spaces without splitting yourself.
From these three pillars emerges something deeper: the ability to navigate with cultural and systemic awareness—to see how values become norms, how norms shape incentives, how incentives shape behaviour, and how all of this shapes the systems you move within. You stop being a passive carrier of culture and become a deliberate navigator. And rooted ambition: ambition grounded in clarity about what you're actually building, for whom, and why.
What Makes This Unique
Rising Rooted draws on rigorous research on adult development and vertical theory, focusing on expanding leaders’ capacity for complexity, perspective-taking, and self-authorship. We integrate this with Black intellectual, cultural, and developmental traditions that have long shaped resilient, generative leadership.
We will strengthening the architecture that holds your thinking — not simply add techniques and skills to your toolkit.
Key Outcomes
By the end of this 8-week coaching intensive, you will have:
- Made at least one high-stakes decision aligned with your long-term vision.
- Articulated a personal leadership protocol—the governing principles you activate under pressure.
- Strengthened your ability to decide under ambiguity without outsourcing authority.
- Practiced naming misalignment without blame.
- Held difficult conversations with greater clarity and integrity.
- Designed structures that support coherence rather than erode it.
- Built a peer cohort functioning as a long-term thinking council.
The Journey
What's included
8 weekly group coaching sessions
2 hours each, live and recorded for review. To maintain confidentiality, the recordings of live sessions will be deleted 3 months after the program is complete.
Peer Council (small group thinking partnerships)
You'll be organised into smaller pods that meet between full-group sessions for structured for integration and practice between sessions.
One Private Coaching Session (60 minutes)
Each participant receives one 1:1 coaching session with Anwulika, available during the 8 weeks or within 3 months after.
Proprietary Vertical Assessment
A baseline assessment designed to provide insight into how you currently author decisions and navigate authority, and your progress upon program completion.
Self-paced Content
You'll be provided foundational content that establishes shared language and core frameworks we'll explore in the live sessions. This enables us to focus our live sessions on discussion, practice, and real-time integration.
Optional: Ijeruka Membership
Rising Rooted can be taken as a standalone program ($2,750), or combined with an optional Ijeruka membership during or immediately following the program ($3,500 total).
Membership provides ongoing support for your development: access to quarterly Dilemma Labs (live forums where you bring real, high-stakes decisions for collective thinking), connection to our broader village, and access to our full library of resources for continuous development. For full details on membership, visit ijeruka.com/membership.
This Journey is for you if...
Founders or independent operators
You're building something you believe in, but conscious that the versions of yourself required to thrive, scale, and navigate different stakeholders are fragmenting your centre. You want to build from coherence, not from compartmentalization.
Rising stars navigating promotion or expanded influence within organisations
You're moving into leadership roles where inherited ways of operating are hitting their ceiling, and where decisions affect systems beyond you.
Leaders managing institutional complexity
Often "first, only, different" in the rooms you move through, you find yourself being hyper-vigilant and managing the weight of expectations. You are now serious about moving from reaction and outsourced authority to strategic agency and grounded, values-aligned decision-making.
High-performers outgrowing hollow victories
You have ticked all the boxes and achieved the milestones, yet you're at an inflection point. You're tired of performing excellence and want to practice flourishing in your life and career from a place of personal clarity and integrity.
Purpose-driven professionals
You already conscious, values-aligned, and moving with purpose, but recognising the heavy cost of sustaining it as you advance in your career. You need sophisticated ability to articulate your complex reality with depth, and to strengthen your foundations for longevity.
Hosts / Contributors
Key Information
What to Expect
This is a high-intimacy container. Admission includes a conversation to ensure alignment and readiness for the work.
This work requires honest self-inquiry and a willingness to sit with some discomfort. You will examine how you currently make decisions, negotiate authority, and respond under pressure, and the ways inherited scripts might be shaping your choices.
It takes a village.
Make ours your advantage.
Grow your circle of collaborators, mentors and champions. Join the purpose-driven Pan-African community maximising their impact by learning, growing and rising together.
The Ijeruka Space and platform felt like coming home. The sessions were well organised, the online platform was very interactive, and they provided multiple modes of learning.
It’s been a long while since I’ve joyfully anticipated showing up for collective study, eager to listen and reflect with others. Each session felt like a communal gathering, which takes skill and trusted intuition to facilitate through virtual spaces. I’m continually grateful for the many resources, questions and frameworks woven throughout that I know I will return to again and again.
The best part of the Ijeruka for me was being in community with people across the Diaspora, hearing their perspectives, and understanding our shared and stratified histories. I will always carry this particular experience with me.
Anwulika and Gabby were excellent facilitators, and brought so much space and life to the exploratory discourse. I enjoyed and learned so much from every rockstar presenter, and everyone's contributions to the resources that underpin their work.
The organisation, as well as the speakers that were invited were varied, interesting and enlightening in thematic scope. For me, the course opened up a new world of ways of living, doing, and understanding that is so necessary for these transition times we live in. Thank you so much, Anwulika, and your team.
I wish this existed years ago! I feel so happy for the younger black generation. I really do!
The course was perfectly tailored and the often interactive teaching framework was great. The teachers were incredibly well versed in their subjects and a joy to engage with and learn from. This course literally changed the trajectory of my life in terms of how I plan to approach projects and relate to my immediate environment. I now have a list of books and resources that’ll take me a while to get through but I couldn’t be happier. Thank you so much for creating this very much needed platform. It is a blessing.
I am grateful for the gifts of knowledge, conversation and connection I now have from the time I dedicated to this brilliant course. Thank you to my fellow participants and major gratitude to Anwulika Okonjo for creating this space.
I highly encourage anyone curious about what Ijeruka has to offer and I promise you will not regret it! There was a great deal of engagement among like-minded individuals from different backgrounds. It was a wonderful experience to learn together, reminisce together and be awestruck by the lessons.
I cannot recommend Ijeruka highly enough! From the incredibly accomplished and knowledgeable speakers to the capacity of the facilitators to create the right environment for discussion, Ijeruka met all of my expectations. I could totally do it all over again!
Through Ijeruka I was able to challenge myself into new ways of thinking that have been very useful for the navigating some of the challenges in my professional life.
Thank you so much for a beautiful course! I was able to enrich my learning and appreciated that we heard from people based across the globe. I look forward to more courses in the future.
Ijeruka has been a joy. I came to the course seeking purposeful alignment in my work, and an alternative path to fulfillment that is not trauma-based. Through Ijeruka, I had the experience to visit different timelines, imagine and discuss alternative futures, and deepen my appreciation for Diasporic intellect, community and consciousness. I would recommend Ijeruka to anyone who is seeking futures where they exist in wholeness.
Reach out to Ijeruka
Commonly Asked Questions
How is Ijeruka different from other leadership or personal development platforms?
Ijeruka is a learning ecosystem for people who care about their inner growth and outward impact. We don’t focus on surface-level skills or motivational content. We focus on who you are becoming, how you make meaning, and the highest impact skills and mindsets, because that determines how you lead, build, relate and shape the future.
What makes Ijeruka different is that we work holistically and developmentally. We integrate evidence-based research on adult (vertical) development, leadership, and systems change with a rigorous attentiveness to African and Afro-diasporic contexts and traditions.
Who is Ijeruka for, and who is it not for?
Ijeruka is for African and Afro-diasporic professionals who are actively growing into their next level—personally, professionally, or both—and want to expand their capacity to hold the life and impact they’re building toward.
Our participants are usually already capable, driven, and in motion. What brings them to Ijeruka is the sense that their outer responsibilities, ambitions and influence now requires inward expansion to be elevated or sustained: e.g. clearer internal authority, stronger coherence, cultural confidence and better decision-making under complexity.
If you’re looking for quick fixes or credentials without inner work, this won’t be the right place. If you’re ready to engage meaningfully with yourself, others and the world, you’ll feel at home.
How do programmes and learning experiences work? What level of commitment is expected?
Our offerings range from self-paced, short-form learning and live conversations to multi-session programmes, retreats, and longer developmental journeys.
You can expect a mix of frameworks, guided inquiry, and practical application. This is not “watch and forget” content. The value comes from engaging with the material and, where relevant, with other participants.
Time commitments are always stated clearly upfront. We design experiences to be deep enough to be effective, but realistic for people with full lives and responsibilities.
Do I need to be a member to participate in Ijeruka programmes?
Some experiences will be open to the public, while others will be reserved for members or offered first to our community. Membership is designed for people who want ongoing access to learning, dialogue, and a values-aligned peer village.
Becoming a member signals a deeper level of commitment to your own development and to being in community with others on a similar path. Membership details, benefits, and pricing will always be transparent before you’re asked to join.
You can engage with Ijeruka without becoming a member, but membership is where the full ecosystem comes alive.
How do you handle safety, confidentiality, and trust in group spaces?
Psychological and cultural safety are non-negotiable for us. While Ijeruka is not a therapeutic service, our spaces often involve honest reflection and meaningful personal insight. We set clear community agreements around confidentiality, respect, and responsible participation. What’s shared in closed sessions stays in the room unless explicit permission is given. We curate group experiences intentionally and design them to support depth without exposure for its own sake.
Contact Us Directly