Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!
***
What do you do for a living nowadays?
I am the CEO and Founder of On Purpose, a social enterprise that is a leadership programme for professionals seeking to transition into the social enterprise space at a relatively early point in their career. We believe that the way capitalism works is changing and that equipping as many as possible of the very best talent to work on new models of how society works is a critical mission.
What that means in practice is that I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to develop people, helping them get used to working in new ways and/or organizations, modeling behaviours and exposing them to others who model useful behaviours and a lot of networking and network sharing. Beyond that, I also have to run the nuts and bolts of the organization and the actual programme (now together with my colleague Kate Richardson).
The programme runs for one year, full time and we recruit high-calibre professionals (from any sector) who have at least several years’ work experience. During the programme these “Associates” do four things:
- Work for six months each in two organizations that are combining social (or environmental) and commercial ways of working (for which the Associates are paid a living allowance)
- Attend half a day a week of training covering the most important topics from both the social enterprise and commercial worlds
- Meet once a fortnight with a mentor who helps them add as much value to the organization they are working for as possible
- Talk to a coach once a quarter about their personal goals, their career and how they are transitioning into social enterprise
