In November 2025, the Global Leaders Institute and Comfama co-hosted The Art FWD Summit in Medellín and Jericó. The gathering brought together GLI Fellows from across the world alongside leaders from Comfama’s Culture and Education areas.
For more than seventy years, Comfama has worked with families in Antioquia to expand opportunity and strengthen the region’s middle class. Today, culture stands at the heart of its mission. Through libraries, cultural centers, festivals, and editorial initiatives, Comfama creates shared spaces for reflection, learning, and dialogue, positioning culture as a catalyst for inclusion and social cohesion across the region.
The Art FWD Summit unfolded within that ecosystem.
Medellín offered a context shaped by decades of public investment and urban experimentation, alongside strong civic and private-sector engagement. Participants visited cultural centers and public spaces that reflect the city’s approach to social transformation. Jericó provided a different rhythm. Known for its literary life and mountain setting, the town’s plazas and cafés became informal extensions of the program.
The Summit’s academic core focused on Adaptive Leadership. Lead Facilitator Diego Rodríguez, a professor of leadership trained with Ronald Heifetz and Robert Kegan at Harvard, guided participants through questions of authority, resistance, and institutional change. Conversations continued outside formal sessions, in exchanges between GLI Fellows and Comfama’s teams.
The cohort represented more than twenty countries and a wide range of cultural institutions. Within that international group, Comfama’s leaders participated as peers, sharing their work and engaging directly with the network. The week created sustained contact between Antioquia’s cultural network and GLI’s global community, which spans more than forty nations through the Global Arts MBA and its institutional partners.
In his closing reflection, Rodríguez spoke about leadership as the capacity to remain present to competing pressures without seeking premature resolution. The conversations throughout the week echoed that idea. Participants examined the tensions between artistic ambition and public accountability, between institutional stability and experimentation, between local responsibility and global exchange.
The Art FWD Summit strengthened relationships among GLI Fellows. It also placed Comfama’s cultural model into direct conversation with arts leaders working in North America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Antioquia served as both host and reference point.
By co-hosting The Art FWD Summit, Comfama connected its cultural ecosystem with an international field of practice. The week highlighted its role as a regional institution engaged in global conversations on culture and social change.
