Susana Bokobo Jr., to become a Fellow of Acumen Spain

Susana Bokobo Orcera, a research collaborator at Schiller currently working on diversity in the workplace, has been selected as a candidate to be a Fellow of Acumen Spain.

Acumen is an international NGO created by Jacqueline Novogratz that is a reference in social entrepreneurship and the fight against poverty. From its subsidiary in Spain, every year, they select 25 people to be part of a critical mass of leaders in different countries who understand what it takes to create systemic change in a complex and interconnected world. Over the course of a year, Susana will be part of a 3-seminar program, designed to connect and cultivate social change agents committed to leaving a better world than the one they found.

In their letter of acceptance, the organization highlights that “Susana Bokobo is an agent of social change who sees opportunities where others see obstacles, and who is grounded in her own values and purpose. Because of this, and everything she showed in the selection process, we are betting on Susana, and we are confident that she will prove that we made the right decision”

Throughout the year, program participants will learn and develop their skills through topics that highlight Acumen's fellowship, such as:

• Good Society Readings: explore the moral and historical basis of social change and what it means to create a just society, through a series of selected readings from great thinkers and writers. Through the discussions, Fellows reflect on fundamental human values, build an understanding of the trade-offs that often occur in society, and cultivate a richer perspective of their own social change work in a broader historical context.
• Adaptive Leadership: provides a framework for taking on and leading change, particularly in times of uncertainty, or when there are no easy answers. These sessions, which are based on the work of Harvard Professor Ronald Heifetz, support Fellows' individual and collective abilities to catalyze and understand the gradual and meaningful process of generating change. Through these sessions they identify the challenges they want to address, who the key stakeholders are and what matters to them, and how to begin to take small risks through adaptive experiments.
• Polarity Management: is based on the conviction that our Fellows must develop their ability to navigate contradictory thoughts in order to be effective agents of social change. Developing this capacity allows leaders to be more proactive and nuanced in the design and execution of experiments to address adaptive challenges. These sessions cultivate participants' abilities to identify and hold values-objectives in tension and interdependent.
• Systemic Thinking: is a series of tools, processes and step-by-step guides that help deal with problems in complex systems and create large-scale social change. Fellows learn and apply the systems thinking approach by collaborating together on a real-time challenge to analyze and find opportunities to improve a system and intervene.
• Authentic Voice: is a narrative approach based on the work of Marshall Ganz, an expert in community organizing and civic engagement at Harvard. His technique focuses on public storytelling in the service of translating the speaker's values into audience actions. Here you develop the ability to articulate your own story, the story of us, and the story of now in order to move others to action. In doing so, you gain deeper insights into your purpose and how to give and receive feedback.

The organization believes in the need for “a new model of leadership based on moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine how it could be”. They feel that the social impact sector needs more attention focused on human talent: not only people with the will to work in the most challenging areas and challenges, but also with the ability to drive and implement real change.