It’s Time to Invest in the Talent Building a Fairer Society
Written by Benjamin Lane (UK Acumen Academy), David Bryan (Social Enterprise Academy) and Harriette Tillot (I.G. Advisors). We are invested in working together to ensure more underserved social leaders have access to high-quality support.
A jockey riding a horse during a race.
Anyone who follows horse racing knows it’s not just the horse that’s important, but the jockey and the team, too. The same goes for Formula 1 - the car is key, but a superbly skilled driver and a top-notch crew are non-negotiable. In those fields, no one would question investing in developing the people in the ‘hot seat’.
So why is it different in the world of social enterprise & impact?
In our sector, resources overwhelmingly go to programme delivery, not to developing our most important asset: our people. Yet in the corporate world, spending on leadership & development is seen as essential, because they know it drives better outcomes. So why does leadership & development in the social impact space have such low visibility to funders, philanthropists, corporates and even social entrepreneurs themselves?
What If We Changed That?
Late last year, as part of the Collective Leadership Group, a small group of us from organisations that support social leaders began exploring how GenAI could be trained to understand leadership & development in the social impact space. We started by identifying a range of leadership, learning and development products, and fed their details into GenAI. We then began asking it with questions and queries, as if we were an early-stage social entrepreneur, an established charity CEO or a corporate social intrapreneur looking to deepen our skills and impact.
We noticed it understood the particular challenges of social leaders. It began to find other learning products that we didn’t know about, but were genuine and relevant. The potential of this tool to make a real difference to underrepresented and underserved social entrepreneurs & leaders had dawned on us.
What’s Next?
This is just a prototype - so far powered by passion and discretionary energy. We believe the potential is big. More work needs to be done to ensure more underserved leaders and organisations can access the learning & development they need to realise their vision:
We need to collect more feedback on what social leaders find valuable and what’s missing.
We want to ensure more opportunities are included, especially those high-quality but lesser-known learning opportunities.
We need to find a way for providers to update the tool with their ever-evolving product base.
We need to work out how to make it more accessible, removing friction points such as the need for a login.
We also need to get this in front of potential partners, investors and philanthropists, and start conversations around the utility of combining investment in the ‘jockey as well as the horse’.
Get Involved
What we do know is that by increasing investment in learning & development for social leaders, we can scale impact and change communities for the better. If this motivates you as much as it does us, then join us, and let’s see where this might take us….
Are you a Programme Provider -> Check your amazing programmes are included and up to date
Do you know Social Leaders -> Share the tool with those in your network who might benefit from learning more
Are you a Social Leader -> Dive into the tool and share your feedback on what you value and what is missing to inform version 2.0
Do you want to get more involved? Get in touch if you want to explore how to work with us to take this work to the next level (blane@acumenacademy.org, david@socialenterprise.academy, harriette@ig-advisors.com).
