As we look forward to welcoming an incoming group of Volans Year participants to Phnom Penh in 2010, there’s an expected flurry of questions and research taking place. To provide a bit of a headstart on finding answers to relocation questions and life in Phnom Penh, here’s a collection of links to get started:

Phnom Penh’s English Language newspaper: Phnom Penh Post: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/

Maps, Guesthouses, Restaurants and more information on Phnom Penh: http://www.canbypublications.com/phnompenh/ppintro.htm

Info on Happenings around Phnom Penh: http://ladypenh.com/

Another helpful resource on PP: http://www.asialifeguide.com/

UrbanLowdown on PP: http://www.urbanlowdown.com/destinations/cambodia/phnom-penh/living-abroad/

A forum on “hard to find items in PP”: http://www.expat-advisory.com/forums/hard-find-items-where-buy-things-phnom-penh.html

Expat blog: http://www.expat-blog.com/en/destination/asia/cambodia/phnom-penh/

Housing links: http://www.expat-advisory.com/forums/real-estate-cambodia.html

And http://bongthom.com/

Guesthouses:

Boddhi Tree: http://www.boddhitree.com/index.html
Blue Lime: http://www.bluelime.asia/contact.html
Frangipani 90s: http://www.frangipanihotel.com/frangipa90/

As I come across more useful resources, I’ll post them here.

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Wall Street Journal article that describes a growing trend among professionals to pursue volunteer stints in the development sector.  Some companies provide support for their employees to do this, and our Volans Talent initiative connects this trend with what is strategically important to the company, through talent development or training programs.  An example being the partnership formed between PricewaterhouseCoopers and Hagar International.

For professionals  seeking to invest in a future career within the social impact realm, we have put together Volans Year - a one-year program that includes a secondment to an organization in the social impact realm, accompanied by executive education, transformational leadership coaching, and structured peer learning. 

Volans Year is particular well suited for individuals with at least 4 years of private sector experience, seeking to attain high-quality training, experience and networks in the social impact sector.  After Volans Year, these individuals could potentially pursue a further degree, launch their own social enterprise or take on senior positions within recognized social enterprises. 

The founding cohort for Volans Year will launch in the first week of February 2010.

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Enrolment for Volans Year has now closed, thanks to sending in your applicants, as well as inquiries around the program.  We are currently following up with all applicants and hiring organizations on the interview process.  Stay tuned!

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Starting last Friday, we’ve been sending out emails to friends and networks to announce the opening of enrollment into the Volans Year program.  Please feel free to use this email template below to spread the word!  For a list of Volans Year positions available within our outstanding list of hiring organizations, click here.

Dear [friend’s name],

You care deeply about the complex problems facing our world. Passionate about finding solutions, you drive results through business innovation. You are a strategic thinker who makes an impact. Volans Year is a new program that leverages the drive and talent of passionate, highly-skilled professionals like you to transform social impact organizations. Volans envisions a global community of leaders where business innovation and social and environmental responsibility are an integral part of who they are and woven into the fabric of their careers. These leaders will pioneer and drive the new economy.

THE PROGRAM: VOLANS YEAR
Volans Year trains business professionals through one-year placements in high-calibre social impact organizations while enhancing their skills and directly increasing the organizations’ impact. The program has two integrated components:

· SOCIAL IMPACT PLACEMENTS: Participants are matched with a social impact organization in either Cambodia or Singapore in a full time position.

· EXECUTIVE EDUCATION: For a week every quarter, participants strengthen their skills in executive education and transformational leadership coaching. The curriculum has been designed to include practical and high-impact business and social impact topics. It is taught by leaders in the field.

Volans Year launches in Southeast Asian cities: Singapore and Cambodia. As the commercial epicenter for the region, Singapore is well-positioned to take a lead in social innovation. After nearly three decades of civil war, Cambodia is gradually rebuilding itself as a country, albeit with support from close to a thousand international and local non-government organizations. Several of these organizations are employing innovative approaches to addressing a broad range of social needs, providing significant learning opportunity for anyone in the social impact field.

Hiring organizations in the Volans Year portfolio have been screened by Volans and in several instances, recognized by social entrepreneurship intermediaries like the Skoll Foundation, the World Bank or the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

JOIN THE TRANSFORMATION
Volans Year is seeking its founding class of participants. The ideal candidate envisions a world where doing good and doing well is more the norm than the ideal, and aspires to be a leader and influencer in this space. If this sounds like you, please visit www.volansyear.com for further details. If you know anyone like this, kindly share this email with them!

Applications deadline: October 31, 2009.
Program launch: January 31, 2010.

~ One Year. Lifelong Impact. Lifelong Change. ~

For more information and application details: Visit www.volansyear.com.

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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.

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