The Transformation: Building What’s Next (Vol. 2, No. 1)

By Dahab Hagos-Fewell

The Shift | Vol. 2, No. 1 – The Unfinished Work: Pushing Forward to a Collective Future

Designing for Impact, Not Just Implementation

A few years ago, I led a project that hit every milestone on time. The work was praised in the final report, and it looked like a win, until we realized it hadn’t changed much. The system we hoped to disrupt adapted just enough to absorb our work without fundamentally shifting. That experience has stayed with me, and it’s shaped how I approach transformation today.

At LeadersUp, we’ve moved beyond simply implementing projects. We’re designing for true impact. That means we start with the system, not the service. It means asking not just what needs to be done, but what needs to be changed. It’s a shift from execution to alignment, from isolated wins to long-term resilience.

This is the work of transformation, and it’s what allows us to serve not just individuals, but entire ecosystems.

At LeadersUp, we lead projects differently because we define success differently. The end goal isn’t a completed deliverable, but a shift in how systems operate and who they operate for.

From the first project charter to the final checkpoint, every effort we lead, whether it’s a new pre-apprenticeship initiative, a research project, or cross-sector coalition building, is designed to clarify roles, embed values, and ensure every stakeholder is moving toward the same outcome: lasting systems change that increases power for BIPOC young adults.

Our projects often begin by asking hard questions: Who has been historically excluded from this process? What assumptions are we unconsciously designing around? Where are the invisible power dynamics? From there, we build infrastructure that reflects our values, shared power, normalized safety, and equitable opportunity into the process itself.

Our Approach: The Design for Equity Process

To guide this work, we use a repeatable, values-centered method called our Design for Equity process. It’s a six-phase cycle that ensures every project we lead is grounded in community voice, tested for sustainability, and positioned for systemic impact:

• Assess the landscape and power dynamics

• Discover lived experiences, barriers, and insights

• Design with, not for, those most impacted

• Deploy in partnership with stakeholders

• Learn through data, reflection, and iteration

• Amplify what's working to inform policy and scale

This framework turns big ideas into systems change and helps us ensure that our work doesn’t just start with equity, it ends with it too.

Externally, this shows up in how we engage our partners. We don’t ask stakeholders to plug into pre-set plans. We convene the right people to co-design solutions from the start. Whether we’re working with funders, school districts, employers, or policy leaders, we make the system visible, then we move it together. This can look like shared ownership of timelines and deliverables, joint checkpoints, and integrated accountability practices that create both transparency and trust.

Because we operate as an intermediary, we often hold the center between sectors that don’t typically speak the same language. Our job is to translate strategy into action, and vision into workflows that can be executed across institutions without losing the heart of why we’re doing the work in the first place.

In my role, I often think about fidelity, not to a static plan, but to our shared values. Every system we design has to reflect who we are: an intermediary committed to normalized safety, equitable opportunity, and shared power. Otherwise, we risk recreating the very systems we aim to disrupt.

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Dahab Hagos-Fewell is the Vice President, Head of Transformation at LeadersUp, driving organizational alignment and cross-functional execution across the organization’s portfolios.