2025 Annual Conference & Meeting

The Annual Conference Committee has planned an outstanding program for independent school Business Officers, staff, and other school leaders. Join us for valuable perspectives and information to propel your school's strategic thinking and support the team in facilitating  smooth and successful daily operations. Connect with your California colleagues to share experiences and insights and nurture relationships with other independent school professionals navigating our state's unique regulatory, legal, and economic environment.

Conference Topics

The conference features compelling topics such as:

• Listserv Live: Bring your questions for an interactive session!
• Top 10 Financial Mistakes and Control Deficiencies in Private Schools: Prevention and Solutions
  
• Emerging Legal Issues for California Independent Schools
• Impactful Budgeting and Dashboard Strategies for Schools
  
• Financing Developments: Schools Large and Small Navigate a New Market
  
• The ABCs of Boards Leading Schools to Success
  
• AI in Education: A Guide for Business Officers
  
• Take it to the Bank: Elements to Evaluate when Choosing a Bank
  
• Navigating the Aftermath of a Disaster: Lessons Learned and Future Preparedness

General Session Keynote

Urgent Optimism with Jane McGonigal

How often do you think about the future? Is what you imagine sunny or quite bleak? Or perhaps just a blank space, a void?

Futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal wants you to think about the future with intention and become resilient in the face of uncertainty through urgent optimism. Urgent optimism is not a fixed personality trait that only the lucky are born with. It is a mindset that can be built in even the world’s most anxious pessimists with practice and the proper tools.

In this high-energy, interactive talk, Jane will introduce you to the concepts of mental flexibility, realistic hope, and future power so that you can “unstick” your mind, find balance in the ups and downs, and discover the agency you have to make change. Through science-backed games designed by McGonigal herself, you’ll be asked to think about what could be different in the future and assess whether you are prepared for it.

You’ll learn fascinating insights on why our brains have such a hard time anticipating certain kinds of futures and the neuroscience behind removing those mental blocks in order to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable so you can be ready for the next great disruption.

Meet Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future

Jane McGonigal is a futurist, game designer, and bestselling author. As the Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future, her research focuses on how games are transforming the way we lead our real lives and how they can be used to anticipate hard-to-predict futures, ready ourselves for any future scenario, and increase our resilience and well-being. 

Her games have been used by organizations including the World Bank, the New York Public Library, the International Olympics Committee, and the American Heart Association. Combining decades of psychological and neurological research with extensive gaming expertise, Jane’s books bring to light the power that games have on us and the world at large.

Her newest book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything – Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, teaches us how to train our brains to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable using the same tools she used to predict the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Jane is a two-time winner of the Association of Professional Futurists’ Most Important Futures Work of the Year award and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. She was named one of 50 people making the biggest impact in games by Game Developer Magazine and one of 20 most inspiring women in the world by O Magazine. She received her PhD in performance studies from University of California at Berkeley.

Annual Corporate Sponsors
Cal-ISBOA thanks its Annual Corporate Sponsors for their generous support that helps underwrite the cost of providing Cal-ISBOA members with affordable access to up-to-date professional development opportunities in a relaxed, collegial environment.