Zahar Nahar-Moore

Zahra Nahar-Moore, Associate General Counsel, Blue Shield of California, Emerging Leaders
Program

When Zahra Nahar-Moore left her litigation career at a New York City law firm in 2012, she was ready for a change. After more than four years handling internal investigations and white-collar criminal defense work, she moved to Santa Barbara with her fiancé and began exploring what had long interested her: a career in public service.

“I’d been drawn to mission-driven work for a long time,” Zahra recalled. “Leaving the firm in New York and coming to a new place gave me an opportunity to explore the nonprofit world.”

She landed at the Central Coast Collaborative on Homelessness (C3H), a startup collective impact nonprofit addressing homelessness throughout the county. As Zahra navigated the transition from structured corporate law into the nimbler, mission-driven social sector, her introduction to Leading From Within’s Emerging Leaders program in 2014 offered ideal timing.

What she learned in that year-long program would shape not only her career trajectory but how she approaches leadership itself—even more than a decade later.

“My experience at Leading From Within was foundational at that point in my career, particularly transitioning from for-profit legal work into public interest work,” Zahra said. “Emerging Leaders helped me identify my values and empowered me to lead from this place—not just in the conventional sense of leading a team or leading at work, but how I engage with the world professionally and personally. Being really clear about what my values are and then bringing that to every dynamic.”

For someone trained at Columbia Law School and large corporate firms, this values-driven approach marked a meaningful shift in how she defined leadership.

“Putting values first and really doing the work to have self-knowledge isn’t something that is emphasized in law school or most other spaces in the professional world,” she said. “I haven’t encountered anything like Leading From Within, where there’s such a deep investment in professionals as people.”

“Leading From Within offers a different approach to leadership than what tends to be taught, like hard skills,” she explained. “Their programs are very much about going deep and inward. There’s a part of it that felt therapeutic, helping us grow in a more three-dimensional way.”

More than a decade later, Zahra serves as lead pharmacy attorney at Blue Shield of California, where she works to increase access and affordability to prescription medications for members and help lower prescription drug costs. Her path since C3H has included a stint at the Downtown Organization of Santa Barbara and nearly eight years at Direct Relief, where she bridged her legal background with her public service interests.

The lessons from Emerging Leaders continue to serve her—even in unexpected ways. Working remotely at Blue Shield, Zahra found that the program’s training translated across distance and through a screen.

“Community looks different when it’s at a distance, but I’ve been able to maintain continuity as a leader in ways that would have been harder had I not gone through Emerging Leaders,” she said.
Zahra also points to two other lasting gifts from the program: the relationships formed within her cohort and the broader Leading From Within network.

“I built lasting friendships and connections in the nonprofit community through the program,” she said. “But equally valuable is the broader Leading From Within network—that sense of connectedness from having shared the experience of participating in a Leading From Within program, and that focus on wanting to do the right things for yourself, your organization, and your community. There’s this alignment I feel when I’m in the room with other Leading From Within people that is pretty unique.”

Twelve years on, the values Zahra identified in 2014 still inform how she shows up—in boardrooms, in her community, and in her life.