--- title: 'The Build Cohort' url: 'https://www.dadsforall.com/buildcohort' markdown: 'https://www.dadsforall.com/buildcohort.md' date: '2026-09-18' description: "The Build Cohort You've got a very particular set of skills. Maybe it's the thing you do all day and rarely get to aim at something you love. Maybe it's a side of you your job never asks for. Maybe it's an idea you've floated once or twice and never had the room to test. The Build Cohort gives four people that room. Three months. A stipend. Access to a live national network of dads. And the freedom to build something real and put it in the field. Dads and allies both. If you're carrying Big Dad Energy, you're who we're talking to. Why Now Last spring, Dads for All put chapters on the ground for Dads Stand Up. Dads built beds for kids who didn't have one. They spent a rainy Saturday clearing decades of litter off a Pittsbu" --- # The Build Cohort ## You've got a very particular set of skills. ![dads_skills.png](https://www.dadsforall.com/user/media/dads_skills.png) ### Maybe it's the thing you do all day and rarely get to aim at something you love. Maybe it's a side of you your job never asks for. Maybe it's an idea you've floated once or twice and never had the room to test. ### The Build Cohort gives four people that room. ### Three months. A stipend. Access to a live national network of dads. And the freedom to build something real and put it in the field. ### Dads and allies both. If you're carrying Big Dad Energy, you're who we're talking to. ## Why Now #### Last spring, Dads for All put chapters on the ground for Dads Stand Up. #### Dads built beds for kids who didn't have one. They spent a rainy Saturday clearing decades of litter off a Pittsburgh block so a Juneteenth celebration could go up. They learned to braid their daughters' hair. They moved bark and pulled weeds in downtown Benicia with their kids beside them. #### And then dads told us, overwhelmingly, that they wanted more of it. #### Dads said they were looking for community and didn't know where to turn. They wanted low-stakes, practical, useful ways to be with other fathers. They wanted to do something visible for the places their families live. They showed up for it and they asked when the next one was. #### What we're building now is the support system underneath it. Call it got-your-six among dads: the thing that lets a dad anywhere become a local changemaker on his own terms, in a community he didn't have last year, without having to invent it from scratch. #### Four builders. Four lanes. Three months. Design it, test it live, and leave behind something the movement can run on. ## The Four Builders #### Each lane comes with a destination, not a set of instructions. You'll design the approach, pilot it in the field with real chapters and real dads, and hand off the playbook. ### The Brand Builder #### **The opportunity.** We're one of the only groups in this space leading with abundance instead of crisis. Big Dad Energy is uncontested territory and it deserves a much bigger megaphone than it has. #### **What you'd build and test.** A repeatable pitch engine: positioning, a prioritized target list of outlets and stages, pitch templates. Then you run it. Real pitches, real placements, real speaking slots in motion before you finish. #### **What you leave behind.** A positioning and media playbook a lean team can run without you. ### The Storytelling Builder #### **The opportunity.** Our chapters generate remarkable moments constantly. Almost none of them get captured, and the ones that do land hard. #### **What you'd build and test.** The always-on engine across social, Substack, and YouTube. A calendar, templates, and a sourcing pipeline that pulls stories out of chapters without a leader having to think about it. Then you publish on a real cadence for two months and see what moves. #### **What you leave behind.** A storytelling playbook plus a clear answer to who runs it next. ### The Infrastructure Builder #### **The opportunity.** Chapter leaders named this as the single thing they most wanted from us. One put it plainly: it gets messy past a hundred emails. #### **What you'd build and test.** A working system for staying in touch nationally and letting chapter leaders manage their people, timing, and events. New CRM or existing organizing tools, your call. Then you onboard active chapters and get it actually used. Adoption over features. #### **What you leave behind.** A documented setup, an admin playbook, and a chapter-leader quickstart. ### The Partnership Builder #### **The opportunity.** We sit inside a wide landscape of local dad-serving organizations and national allies like Movember, Moms First, and the National Parents Union. There's an approach here that lets us genuinely support allies and move the ball down the field on the issues dads care about, instead of living in permanent crisis-response mode. #### **What you'd build and test.** A partnership approach with real criteria, a mapped landscape of who's doing what, and then one or two live partnerships advanced through your own process to prove it works. #### **What you leave behind.** A partnership playbook: criteria, target map, outreach templates, tracker. [Apply](https://forms.gle/iLKcj9BLAG1MsNEQA) ## Bring Your Own #### If you've already been building something that belongs in one of these lanes, bring it. That's often the best version of this. #### In true Big Dad Energy fashion, we're all building something with real legacy here. You'd be doing something special right now, and creating something that fuels our growth and impact through 2027 and beyond. You keep the portfolio piece, the proof it worked with real users, the case study, and the relationships. Dads for All gets a system that keeps running. ## What You Get #### **Access.** This is the part nobody else can offer you. - A warm, active portfolio of chapter leaders and chapters to test with - Our communications channels and lists - Our scoreboard data - Our proprietary national expansion playbook - Mohan and Justin (our co-founders) as partners and connectors, not supervisors - Potentially additional budget for testing products or services, to be discussed #### **A stipend.** $2,500. #### We're not going to dress that up. This is real work and $2,500 is not a salary. We're saying it out loud because we'd rather you decide with clear eyes than discover it later. What we can tell you is that the last group of people who took on a project like this with us came out of it with something they didn't expect. > "It allowed me a space to lead publicly with my identity as a dad and gave me the freedom to take some small risks and try new things." > > — Dads Stand Up chapter leader, Spring 2026 #### One leader, new to his community, went from this work into a pro bono consulting engagement, a seat on a county board committee, and a nonprofit board he's now considering. #### **A room.** Monthly full-cohort sessions with the other builders, with chapter leaders invited. Our leaders rated these among the most valuable things we gave them, for the culture and for their own development. You'll have people reacting to your work while it's still changeable. #### **A stage.** A showcase in mid-January where you present what you built to the community, to partners, and to funders. #### **What comes next.** This is the first cohort. What gets built here seeds the infrastructure Dads for All runs on, which we expect to mean more substantive paid roles and deeper volunteer leadership as funding lands. The people who build it are the people we'll want in what follows. We can't promise you a job. We can tell you where this is going. [Apply ](https://forms.gle/iLKcj9BLAG1MsNEQA) ## What We're Asking #### **About five hours a week.** More/less in some stretches than others. Building something and testing it doesn't spread evenly. > "It took extra effort on top of my job and family responsibilities. It paid off and provided a real shot in the arm for me personally when I was craving real community." > > — Dads Stand Up chapter leader, Spring 2026 #### **Self-direction.** You'll have partners, not managers. Monthly cohort sessions, Mohan and Justin available to you, and otherwise the lane is yours to run. #### **A finish.** Something built, something tested, something documented, presented in January. ## Who This Is For #### This is the embodiment of Big Dad Energy: channeling your passion and expertise into rolling up your sleeves and getting things done. Without excuses. With curiosity. In community with others. #### We're taking one builder per lane, and we'll launch a lane when we find the right person for it. That means we're being selective, and it means timing will vary. #### You don't need to be a professional in the lane you pick. You need to be someone who finishes. ## The Process ### 1. **Apply.** Tell us which lane, what you'd build, and what you'd want to test. If you're bringing your own idea, tell us that instead. ### 2. **Talk.** A conversation with Mohan or Justin about the build, your capacity, and whether the fit is real. ### 3. **Launch.** We finalize the brief together so you start with a destination and a finish line, not a vague assignment. #### Applications open: September 9th. Applications close: October 2nd. Cohort kicks off early October. Build and pilot: October through mid-December. That window runs through Thanksgiving, which we've accounted for. Reflection and recommendations: through the end of the year. Showcase: mid-January. > "The deadlines created a helpful container. They pushed me to take action, make decisions, reach out to partners, and trust that the next steps would become clearer as I moved forward." > > — Dads Stand Up chapter leader, Spring 2026 [Apply ](https://forms.gle/iLKcj9BLAG1MsNEQA) #### If your lane is already filled or hasn't launched yet, apply anyway. This is the first cohort, not the last one. --- ## Navigation - Previous: [Our Substack](https://www.dadsforall.com/substack.md)