After 18 years, Linda Dulye has ended the Dulye Leadership Experience.
PROVIDED BY LINDA DULYE
PITTSFIELD — After 18 years of retreats, networking sessions, workshops and community conversations, the free Berkshires-based Dulye Leadership Experience came to an end on Friday.
“It’s bittersweet,” said Matthew Keator, principal of the Keator Group and a former DLE speaker and faculty member. “[Linda Dulye] spent a tremendous amount of her own personal time and money into this endeavor.”
Dulye, the program’s founder, said the closure comes amid a “change in commitment to show up” and the rise of artificial intelligence. The closure does not affect the operations of her Pittsfield-based consulting business. Dulye has underwritten the pro bono program since its inception in 2008 during the Great Recession in partnership with Syracuse University.
“The market was horrific,” she said. “There was no curriculum that helped near-term grads — juniors and seniors who are not going to grad school — transition into the workplace.”
So she created her own. It started as a three-day retreat for Syracuse students in the Berkshires — in the program’s early days, about 300 students would apply, and only 25 would be accepted. She recruited business leaders to serve as faculty and intentionally selected students from a wide range of courses of study.
Participants celebrate the opening of the Dulye Leadership Experience at Syracuse University in 2008. Though it initially targeted Syracuse students, it organized a yearly retreat in the Berkshires.
PROVIDED BY LINDA DULYE
“I wanted it to be competitive,” she said. “Representative of all majors at Syracuse. … I wanted to be a magnet for talent.”
The retreats took place at venues like the Cranwell and the Proprietor’s Lodge and mixed practical workplace lessons with networking and team-building exercises. Sessions covered everything from financial literacy — which Keator taught for the program’s first decade — to entrepreneurship and business dining etiquette.
“What happens when you’re invited to that first dinner with a client or dinner with your boss?” Dulye said. “What fork do you use? What plate do you use? What glass do you lift?”
Dulye Leadership Experience retreat participation in the third day of activities near Pontoosuc Lake in 2019.
PROVIDED BY LINDA DULYE
In 2016, the program became independent of the university and Dulye retooled it to serve young people who lived in the Berkshires.
“We needed to get young people to come here, grow here and build careers here,” Dulye said.
DLE expanded to include weekly coffee meetups at Otto’s Kitchen & Comfort and Dottie’s Coffee Lounge. The organization also hosted culture chats, improv workshops, networking breakfasts and community forums with local officials.
Dulye stressed the importance of human connection.
Residents attend a Dulye Leadership Experience culture chat at the DLE office on North Street in Pittsfield in 2024.
LINDA DULYE
“When you’re in college, everyone is pretty much the same age as you,” Dulye said. “Now you’re in a multigenerational workplace and you got to be friends — or at least make strong connections with these people that you didn’t pick that are on your work team.”
The Berkshires itself was initially an important early teaching tool; Dulye said the unfamiliar setting was beneficial for Syracuse University students.
“The Berkshires offered to me an incredible venue,” she said. “Nobody had an upper hand here.”
Keator said that a handful of DLE Syracuse alums moved to the Berkshires afterward, and several visit the region regularly.
For Lyndsey Wadsworth, a systems engineer for General Dynamics who moved to the Berkshires in 2019, those later DLE programs were a valuable networking tool. She attended the program in 2022, when it included weekly in-person meetings, and later volunteered to help organize them.
“It’s very difficult for young professional adults to network in the Berkshires for some reason,” she said. “It was a great opportunity to learn about other people’s experiences in their line of work.”
Wadsworth is one of 19 DLE alums to receive a 40 Under Forty award in the Berkshires.
“I learned a lot,” Wadsworth said, including the fact that “not everyone is going to be tackling the same problem the same way.”
One of the goals of DLE, Dulye said, was to get people out of their comfort zones.
Dulye Leadership Experience volunteers participate in the 2025 Downtown Pittsfield Cleanup in May 2025.
LINDA DULYE
“You had to be involved in the conversation,” she said. “Showing up wasn’t enough — actively contributing an idea or insight was the standard.”
Anthony Telladira, a member of the Pittsfield High School class of 2022, has attended DLE events since 2021. It helped him secure a spot in a three-year training program at General Dynamics after he graduates from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst this year.
“She made a real impact on the workplace,” he said. “It’s sad to see DLE go.”
Dulye learned the importance of networking early; she grew up in a newspaper family. Her parents Ann and Ray Dulye ran the Walden Printing Co. in New York, which printed a handful of weeklies her father oversaw as editor and publisher — including the Walden Citizen Herald.
“I worked for my parents’ business from the time I was 8,” she said. “My dad, being an editor and publisher, was always talking to new kinds of people. I knew you always had to be meeting new people and growing that. And then it became a necessity for professional growth.”
After she graduated from Syracuse in 1977, she worked as a reporter at Philadelphia-area newspapers, including the Daily Local News and the Philadelphia Bulletin, which shuttered in 1982.
She pivoted to corporate communications after losing her job.
“I saw an enormous translation of my skills as a reporter,” she said. Through her practice of “constant learning, constant inquiry,” she said she feels like she’s “never stopped being a reporter” and understands that it takes “constant reinvention” to be successful.
DLE itself went through two major evolutions: first in 2016, and again during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it shifted to digital programming in a week. She said COVID led to a surge of participation, with 75 to 80 people regularly tuning into its weekly meetings.
“People were starved” for communication, she said.
However, that enthusiasm tapered off in recent years, she said, with many people signing up for events but failing to attend.
“Fifty percent attrition is not unique,” she said. “What do you hear? ‘I’m really busy.’”
Dulye believes AI and on-demand digital learning are changing how people approach professional development.
“AI has created the ability for you to create a customized learning program geared specifically to something you want,” she said. “Now I’m not telling you the quality is good — and it’s going to be generic. But there’s something for getting on-demand access.”
Despite this, Wadsworth believes there will be a time when people will need DLE’s human-centered approach again.
“I hope someone is able to put something on like it again for the community,” Wadsworth said.
Dulye said she would support an effort to bring it back.
“Who knows? Maybe someone will want to revive it,” Dulye said. “And I’ll gladly help them in the wings.”
For now, the program’s legacy lives on through the people it connected and challenged over nearly two decades.