Ms Jackson was reluctant to use the cliches pivot and resilience for an LBWR program unlike any other in its 15 years challenging perspectives of the region's emerging leaders.

She said it was a challenge that tested the group's commitment to themselves, to each other and to their learning development - but a lot of that was what leadership was about.

"Graduation is not just about celebrating but welcoming this group to the alumni in Ballarat, of which there are about 400 now...It's about finding ways in connecting and collaborating and working together on community goals," Ms Jackson said.

LBWR20 marked graduation in an outdoor ceremony with learning partners and community sponsors at Mars Stadium on Thursday evening.

This follows a tumultuous year for the program in which the group started out with an opening retreat in Hepburn and early program days, like taking in a council meeting at Ballarat Town Hall, before moving to video conferencing platforms.

The forum briefly reconnected on site between lockdowns with Ms Jackson, a seasoned workplace psychologist, taking up the program's lead role.

Ms Jackson said participants might have been unable to take up experiential sessions of past programs, like parliament house in Canberra and Hopkins prison, but video conferencing opened up new opportunities. The group connected with other leadership groups in the state for a forum with federal politicians and could access leading thinkers, such as investigative journalist Jess Hill who wrote groundbreaking family violence text See What You Made Me Do.

Participants were able to meet Hopkins' prisoners via video link in small groups.

Graduate Tara Leaf such experiences still managed to unsettle her preconceived notions and feelings.

"It was challenging on a couple of levels. The first was I didn't want to say anything to lead the conversation in the wrong direction and the second was it gave me such a different perspective to social issues," Ms Leaf said

."...When we spoke to members of parliament, there was a real difference between people presenting. A couple were really inspiring and a couple made you think the reason why stereotypes exist."

Fellow graduate Wiz Rennie said the chance to watch City of Ballarat councillors in action was a highlight, particularly heading into pandemic lockdowns.

"Then you're watching governments around the world this year, what they had to do," Mr Rennie said. "We also had a lot of people with idle time at home perhaps getting more involved in the community because people perceived they had a lot more time. Later we could consider the local council elections, so we could follow the whole process. It was an interesting time to study leadership."

Mr Rennie said it was a strange feeling to be finishing and graduating from such an intense journey, right when the rest of the nation was only really starting to open up. In this there were also opportunities.

LBWR and Committee for Ballarat have been working to engage the graduating class in some face-to-face sessions with next year's new leaders forum. Work has already begun to revitalise the alumni program to better improve connections and opportunities for alumni and partner organisations to tackle community issues.