Deadline: 11-Jan-22
The Acumen Academy is currently seeking applications for the Acumen Pakistan Fellowship to develop a community of leaders who challenge the status quo, work across lines of difference and inspire their communities to believe in a brighter future.
The Fellowship is the start of a journey towards mastering the skills, attributes, and values of moral leadership: a combination of empathy, immersion, understanding, and action. What binds their Fellows is shared values, a common commitment to a world beyond poverty and injustice, a pledge to accompany one another, to help and celebrate one another, and to hold each other to account.
The Fellowship is designed for individuals who are currently leading or are an integral part of building an initiative whose mission is to eradicate poverty or injustice. Their Fellows are of all ages, come from diverse cultural, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds and work across multiple sectors.
Acumen Fellows understand that poverty extends beyond income levels, and that the opposite of poverty is not income: it is dignity. Dignity is freedom. It is having control over decisions that affect the lives.
What makes a fellow?
The fellows are extraordinary leaders who dare to embrace the difficult journey of social change. Here’s what they want from you—and what you can expect from your cohort.
- Entrepreneurs: Leaders of both for-profit and nonprofit organizations providing critical goods or services to the underserved.
- Intrapreneurs: Leaders who are bringing to life new initiatives or approaches within the organization. The focus is on designing, testing, incubating and implementing ideas that enable the organization to pursue its purpose.
- Organizational Builders: Leaders who play an integral role in building the organization. The focus is on building the internal blocks, systems & processes that enable the organization to pursue its purpose.
Benefits
In the Fellowship Program You Will:
- Learn to catalyse and embrace the gradual and meaningful process of creating change at the personal, organisational, and societal levels
- Cultivate the ability to lead effectively when opposing but interdependent values are in tension
- Understand how to lead diverse stakeholders through recurring and complex challenges
- Develop the capacity to tell meaningful stories that speak across lines of difference and move others to action
- Examine your identities, values, and choices that have shaped your journey till now and cultivate a deeper understanding of yourself and your work in a broader context
- Explore the meaning of a just society and the moral and historical foundation of social change through text-based dialogue
- Navigate systemic problems and design more effective interventions using moral imagination
- Question your assumptions and beliefs about leading effective change
- Be supported and accompanied by a cohort of like-minded peers persevering in the process of driving social change
The curriculum draws on powerful leadership frameworks, tools, and approaches, including Adaptive Leadership, Authentic Voice, Good Society Readings, Immunity to Change, and Polarities Management.
Eligibility Criteria
- Since the Fellows will become part of a global cohort of Fellows, conversational proficiency in English is a requirement to ensure Fellows are able to give and get the most from this experience.
- You do not have to be a citizen of Pakistan. However you have to be living and working in Pakistan and demonstrate a concrete connection to the region (ie. long-term employment, residency, the focus of the social change project).
- Each cohort of Acumen Fellows must be comprised of individuals who have not previously taken part in an Acumen Fellowship. This is specific to Acumen’s programs; candidates who have participated in other fellowships or leadership programs, or who have taken Acumen Academy courses, are welcome to apply.
For more information, visit https://acumenacademy.org/fellowship/pakistan/