Rachel Johnson
Rachel Johnson
Emerging Leaders 2017, Growing Edge Leaders 2024-25
Rachel Johnson’s role as Chief Program Officer at Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) Foundation combines her passions for accessible education, the arts, and social justice. Born in Toronto, she came to UCSB for graduate school and never left. After considering an academic path and working as an adjunct professor at several colleges, Rachel transitioned to the nonprofit sector, leveraging her graduate work in art history to raise funds and develop programs for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
She returned to higher education nearly eight years ago as Director of Grants at SBCC, eventually becoming Chief Program Officer, a role she has held for the past four years. Rachel works across the college, guiding institutional grants, discretionary and emergency funding, program support, and the SBCC Promise. During her tenure, she has secured more than $3 million in grant funding and helps direct tens of millions more to programs serving students. Recently, she returned to her academic roots, teaching the Nonprofit Series at the Career Skills Institute at SBCC’s School of Extended Learning.
Rachel continues to draw on lessons from her 2017 Emerging Leaders training, particularly the importance of identifying core values that guide personal and professional decisions. “Clarifying what motivates you is powerful,” she said. “It’s made a real difference in my own life, and I incorporate values-sorting exercises with my teams.”
Rachel’s core values of curiosity, health, justice, community, and travel guide her work at SBCC. “A large part of my role is helping to strengthen the health and capacity of systems at the college so we can create and sustain a sense of abundance that fuels our programs,” she explained.
Her deep commitment to justice, she noted, stems in part from her Canadian roots. “Growing up in Canada, I felt a strong connection to a culture that values equity and community. In a smaller, diverse country, people genuinely care about how their neighbors are doing—and that shapes how I think about access, equity, and the role of community colleges today.”
Another tool from ELP training that continues to shape Rachel’s work is StrengthsFinder, an assessment that identifies and ranks individual strengths. It has helped her build well-rounded teams and focus on what energizes her most. Rachel’s top strengths of strategy and context align closely with her role shaping SBCC’s future.
Rachel is now in the first cohort of the Growing Edge Leaders (GEL) – a timely opportunity as she approaches a decade in the nonprofit sector. While she continues to draw on tools and connections from her Emerging Leaders experience, GEL offers a chance to re-engage at a new level. Nearly ten years in, she is not only learning alongside senior leaders—she’s recognizing herself as one of them.
The program revisits familiar tools with fresh applications for senior executives while introducing advanced approaches for addressing more complex, multidimensional challenges.
“It’s been wonderful to have a second Leading From Within program to support me in my professional journey,” Rachel said. “I don’t think I would have understood the importance of a professional network like this without my ELP experience. We share a common lens and language for thinking about our work in this sector.”
“It’s these connections with a cohort of leaders who inspire and remind me why we all get up every day to do this hard work,” she added. “The collegiality and relationships formed through these programs keep me hopeful.”
