It all started on May 10, 2009, over Sunday brunch at a riverside cafe in Phnom Penh. Micaela, Director of Oltre Venture (recently renamed to Insitor Fund) lamented the dearth of management talent in the social enterprise sector in Cambodia. There existed a steady supply of professional volunteers, but these volunteers were available for varying durations, most of which were too short to deliver tangible value to the social enterprise. This created a revolving door of talent for the social enterprises, a classic human resource challenge. A quick validation with our friends Pierre at Hagar and Jeremy at Digital Divide Data confirmed this challenge, and subsequent conversations with other social enterprises reiterated this sentiment.
At the same time, there is a segment of these professionals who are seeking to seriously invest personal time and resources to understand at a deeper level what it takes to create a successful social enterprise and how they can contribute to this process. Some are looking to make a complete career switch in this direction and if “young” enough, have taken the path of business or graduate school to reboot their careers. Others who are “older” and committed with families have tried dipping their toes in social enterprise and offered pro-bono help, but for limited duration because of concerns around whether a career in this direction would be for them. Both of these groups faced the same hurdle that despite having strong professional backgrounds, they had little experience in the social impact realm and could scarcely make a career out of it. This only exacerbated the revolving door problem of the social enterprises.
The way we saw it, there was clearly demand (social enterprises still seek management talent) and there existed supply (professional volunteers were prepared to invest on this path), but somehow the two parts were not coming together. What appeared to be lacking was a common platform that will bring these two constituencies together. The Volans Year program was thus created, and for it to successfully meet the collective needs of professionals and social impact organizations, it had to include elements of executive education specifically geared towards training managers in this field, it had to include a one-year secondment to facilitate on-the-job training while delivering professional value to the social impact organization, and it also had to include community-building and peer-learning among the cohort given how professionals need to support one another in these early stages of the social enterprise sector.
Four months later, we have brought on board eight established social impact organizations and continue to have active conversations with many others. We have also assembled twelve international faculty members who are expert practitioners or academics in the social impact realm, all keen to bring this idea to fruition. We have tested this concept with countless friends of friends of friends and have yet met a person who said this is not worth doing. The primary point of contention is around the price of the program, some believing it is too expensive and others thinking it is too cheap. Our target audience is instinctively the group that thinks it is too cheap, but we are seeking to make the program affordable to everyone who is qualified and committed to serve this field. And to this end we are applying to various organizations for some amount of grant funding. We hope that prospective candidates see the value of the program and how it aligns with their life goals and for these individuals, we are being open to exploring funding options together.
This is but the first step into what we envision as the creation of a community of leaders that are passionate and equipped with a strong set of skills to weave social and environmental responsibility into the organizations that they run.