Leadership Essentials for Social Innovators Program (India)

Deadline: 29-Jul-22

The Acumen Academy is accepting applications for its Leadership Essentials for Social Innovators Program, India’s first 10-week leadership accelerator designed to equip you with the character and competence to innovate, build solutions, and lead the charge to work in the complex problems of your sector.

This will be an enriching group learning experience that will bring together a cohort of experts in these fields to exchange knowledge, build community, and increase collective impact. During these 10-weeks, you will take part in individual and group activities towards identifying your leadership gaps, learning how to move a system forward and reflecting on your values and decisions.

What Will You Learn?

Their core curriculum is made up of three key components:

• Adaptive Leadership: Based on the work of Ron Heifitz, Adaptive Leadership is a practical leadership framework that helps organizations and individuals adapt and thrive in challenging environments. The content supports your ability, both individually and collectively, to catalyze and embrace the gradual and meaningful process of creating change.
• Managing Polarities: Developed by Barry Johnson, Polarity Management empowers you to embrace competing goals and navigate the tensions between them, a crucial skill in an increasingly interconnected world.
• Good Society Readings: The Good Society Readings explore the meaning of a just society and the moral and historical foundation of social change through a series of curated readings by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Nelson Mandela. You’ll reflect on core human values, seek common ground, and cultivate a richer understanding of your social change work by situating it in a broader historical context.

Eligibility Criteria

• Participants can come from all areas of work within the agriculture or workforce development space. Workforce development includes organisations that enable informal workers, are skill-development initiatives, create platforms for artisans and other micro enterprises, enable financial inclusion or work with MSMEs that create jobs.
• They’re looking for leaders building new and radical solutions that ensure dignity and economic prosperity is reached. Solutions could range across new business models that serve the poor, corporate initiatives to disrupt traditional farming industries, innovative public sector programs, and nonprofit livelihood solutions for the poor.
• Participants are typically on one of the following paths:
  • Social Entrepreneur: scaling innovative business models that use market-based solutions to tackle poverty and inequality within agriculture or workforce development
  • Public Sector Leader: leveraging the government machinery to enable dignity and economic prosperity for people in either sector
  • Nonprofit Leader: building solutions to ensure those most in need are equitably served in the agricultural and workforce sectors
  • Corporate Intrapreneur: driving initiatives within large corporations to create inclusive and sustainable corporations
• To be eligible for this program, you should:
  • Have 5+ years of work experience
  • Be in a position — or moving into a position — to influence and affect change in your company, department, organization, or social enterprise
  • Want to become better at leading through uncertainty and navigating the systems around you
  • Be ready to show up for yourself and for others, and to challenge yourself to learn and think in new ways. This won’t be easy.

For more information, visit https://app.acumenacademy.org/leadership-accelerator-agriculture-workforce-india