Each year, hundreds of attendees—including partner CEOs, staff, participants, and alumni; global organization staff; supporters from across the network, external experts; local leaders and community members; and local and international students (the most popular guests)—gather to share the experience of deeply exploring a critical theme while being immersed in a partner’s local context.  Past Global Conferences have been held in  Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria; Auckland, New Zealand; Puebla, Mexico;  Yunnan Province, China, PRC; Santiago, Chile; Mumbai, India,; London, England;  and Chicago, USA.  Collective Leadership, Reimagining Education, Further Together, Leadership for Change, and  Learning and Reflection are among the themes our global community has explored.

In October 2017, 400 members of Teach For All's global community gathered in Bogotá, Colombia to explored the theme of Collective Leadership together. We asked ourselves and each other critical questions—How do we define collective leadership? Why is it important? What can we do to develop and sustain it?—and considered how these questions, and their answers, will impact the future of our work. 

We also learned from the staff, participants, alumni, and students of our host partner, Enseña por Colombia, about the challenges and opportunities facing the communities in which they work, and from representatives of diverse regions of Colombia about the country's evolving peace process and the decades of violence that preceded it. Embedded in each of their stories—and in many others from across and beyond the network—was a powerful lesson about how much more progress we can make when we work with rather than against or alongside each other.