Deadline: 12-Jul-21
Nominations are now open for the Acumen Fellowship which is an intensive leadership development program, designed to equip those who are working to create change in different sectors and regions across Bangladesh with the tools, mindset, and community to tackle poverty and injustice in their communities. Selected Fellows will go through transformational experience reflecting on their leadership journey, developing skills in problem solving, fostering moral imagination and building a strong community.
Objectives
- Strengthen organisations and institutions
- Foster skills and mindset of moral leadership in changemakers from across different sectors
- Bridge divides and build trust
- To build a diverse community of thinkers and doers that drives change across sectors, disciplines and geographies
- Tackle complex challenges
- Build spaces and opportunities for discourse and collaboration to experiment and develop new solutions to existing problems
What to Expect from the Fellowship?
The Fellowship develops your capacity to tackle long standing problems of poverty and injustice. You should expect an intensive leadership journey grounded in:
- Challenging your existing ideas to build new ways of thinking and problem solving
- Deepening your capacity to innovate and drive change by practising essential leadership skills directly applicable to your work
- Cohort based learning with diverse role models from sectors and backgrounds
- Facilitation and coaching that challenges and accompanies you in your practice
- Learning from Acumen Academy’s global community of social innovators.
Tools and Framework
Fellowship curriculum is centered around the principles of moral leadership:
- Adaptive Leadership: Based on Ron Heifetz’s work, Adaptive Leadership is a practical leadership framework that supports Fellows’ ability to catalyse and embrace the gradual and meaningful process of creating change.
- Authentic Voice: Grounded in Marshall Ganz’s life’s work, the Authentic Voice curriculum allows the Fellows to develop the capacity to articulate a hopeful vision, speak across lines of difference, and move others into action.
- Good Society Readings: Modeled off The Aspen Institute, the Good Society
- Readings explore the meaning of a just society, and the moral and historical foundation of social change through text-based dialogue.
- Managing Polarities: Based on Barry Johnson’s work, Polarities aims to cultivate an individual’s ability to lead effectively when opposing but interdependent and equally important values are in tension.
- Immunity to Change: Based on Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Keagan’s work, the Immunity to Change framework helps Fellows overcome personal limitations and unlock the potential in themselves and their organisations.
Eligibility Criteria
How they select Fellows
- All Fellows have demonstrated a commitment to tackling inequality and injustice through their work, and are:
- Building solutions based on a deep understanding of the issue
- Finding ways to change the system they are working in
- Influencing change in their current work, formally or informally
- Ready to undergo an intensive year-long leadership journey
- Fellows are typically on one of the following paths
- Social Entrepreneur: Founder of a for-profit or non-profit organization that provides critical goods or services to the underserved.
- Organisation Builder: Supporting the growth of institutions from within (eg. Country Director, CEO, COO)
- Intrapreneur: Creating solutions from within existing institutions (eg. Team lead, Head of Dept)
- Public Sector Leader: Working to enhance public services and/or working in or with government to create policy changes (eg. UNO, police officer, educator)
- Community Organiser: Mobilising communities and calling attention to unseen, unheard or marginalised groups or causes (eg. activists, journalists, storytellers, performers, artists).
For more information, visit https://acumenacademy.org/fellowship/bangladesh