To Our Dearest Fellow YLG’ers,

It feels like just yesterday we were all together at Fifth Arrow celebrating our collective aspirations for 2020 at the Young Leaders’ New Year Kick Off. My, how much can change in such a short time.

As Co-Chairs of our beloved Young Leaders’ community we wanted to reach out to let you know you are in our thoughts, and that despite the global pandemic and the shelter in place and social distancing orders we are experiencing, we, as a community, are still very much here.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve unfortunately had to postpone or cancel many of our signature events like the planned DeTour of Oakland’s Jack London Square and the closing happy hour for our flagship Mentor Program.

With the reality of our new world settling in, we want you to know that we are hard at work moving as many of these events to an online format as possible. While this will be a definite shift for certain events (like our annual sold-out, roundtable event, Learn From the Best) we believe it will allow us to continue providing valuable educational and relationship-building opportunities to further our goals and foster our professional growth.

To remind us of the good old times, we’ve also recently uploaded photos from the 2020 YLG Kick Off party. 

As much as we all like to reminisce, we are ready to launch a new chapter of YLG in a COVID-19 world with a free, virtual happy hour for our members next Wednesday, April 29th from 5:00-6:30PM! Bring your drink of choice to the screen as we kick off the event together as a group before breaking out into smaller conversations. We’ll share how we have been impacted, provide an opportunity to ask for support in the areas where we face challenges, and as always, enjoy each other’s presence and casual conversation.

Additionally, many efforts to keep the broader ULI membership connected are already being made at the ULI national and district council levels:

• Nationally, ULI is hosting a variety of free online panels and education programs.
• The ULI SF District Council has also been hosting webinars and sending bi-weekly emails from member leaders (including your two trusty co-chairs, Alexandra and Scott, over the past month!).

We truly pride ourselves in being a community of mutual support. We continue to be focused on providing the key relationships and insightful resources our members need to advance their careers and further ULI’s mission – which in the coming months and years will become more important than ever. During this time we are even closer and more connected to the other district councils around the globe. So stay engaged, lean in even further, and reach out to fellow members and the leaders among our YLG Steering Committee for help. We are here for you!

We look forward to a time where we can come back together in person, but for now, we plan on enjoying our “content and cocktails” mantra digitally.

Sincerely, Your Young Leaders Group Co-Chairs