Volans Year will conduct one week of academic modules for each quarter.

The academic modules for Volans Year fit into three complementary suites -  Social Impact Topics, Foundational Skills and Transformational Leadership & Coaching.  Social Impact Topics will provide the Participant in-depth exposure to cutting-edge trends and tools for double- or triple-bottom line businesses.  Foundational Skills will equip the Participant with management fundamentals that incorporate specific considerations for businesses with social and/or environmental impact.  Underpinning these two suites is a Transformational Leadership track that will run throughout the Volans Year Program.

Together, the three suites will provide the Participant with a holistic and well-rounded set of knowledge, skills and tools to lead businesses that positively impact the world we live in.

Here is an overview of the workshops.

Social Impact Topics

• Context for Social Entrepreneurship – takes the Participant through the thought process of why we need social enterprises.  It helps us understand market failures and public sector gaps in providing for the marginalized.  It also shows us the ecosystem that social enterprises need to succeed in.
• Theory of Change and Impact Measurement – helps the Participant understand how critical a good mission statement is, and how that can be translated to intended outcomes.  The second half will focus on the different ways in which a business can measure its double or triple bottom line.
• Human Centered Design – a hands-on workshop that engages the Participants in learning and applying Human-Centered Design as an approach to innovation and collaboration. Participants learn a proven approach to innovation (HCD) that can be implemented within their organizations to take steps towards their goals, such as helping to identify new opportunities and increasing the speed and effectiveness of creating new solutions.
• Hybrid Models & Legal Forms – presents the spectrum of organizational structures a social enterprise can take and the pros and cons of choosing one model over another.  It also touches on emerging legal forms and that how that varies in different parts of the world.
• Funding and Impact Investors – looks at the different sources of capital for a social enterprise (from grants/donations & donations to equity finance), and helps the Participant understand what impact investors look for when they fund such initiatives or projects.
• Challenges of Growing Your Social Enterprise – takes a look at the different phases of a social enterprise and challenges associated with each phase.  Practitioners will share their successes and failures in overcoming these obstacles.
• Weaving Network Trampolines for Impact – provides examples of cross-sectoral partnerships, and importantly, how a social enterprise can leverage other actors in the field to significantly increase the impact.
• Innovation & New Business Models – discusses examples from the Phoenix Economy on how different kinds of organizations (from small social enterprises to large multi-national corporations) have been innovative in creating social and/or environmental impact, and what we can learn from them.

Foundational Skills

• The Servant as Leader – unveils servant leadership and what it takes to be able to serve the world we live in.  In addition, we will have a ‘Transformational Leadership’ series that runs throughout the year to grow the leadership capacity of the Participant.
• Strategy for the Multiple Bottom Lines – how do you transform your vision into reality?  How do you sustain the innovation, keep to your mission and at the same time strive for financial sustainability?
• Marketing your Innovation – a functional expertise that is currently desired by most social enterprises.  The 4 P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), using social enterprise examples.  Specifically in a resource-constrained world, how do you sell your story to your target audience?
• Social Capital Markets and Enterprise Financial Planning – the social capital market is still undercapitalized and lacks a secondary market – how can we develop supply and demand for risk capital?  This workshop will also take the participants through the ‘nuts & bolts’ of financial planning, evaluation and capital structures, using social enterprises as examples.
• Accounting Policy & Financial Statement Analysis – perform financial statement analysis, with examples from social enterprises.  Review accounting policy, costing and accounting controls.
• Operations & Process Efficiency – many social enterprises seeking to be financially self-sustaining often turn to running business operations that produce goods and services that can be sold above cost. What are the standard operations theories (cycle time, costing, bottleneck analysis, etc) we can apply to social enterprises to optimize them (and where are the constraints)?
• The Economics of Social Issues – a system-level view of market and government failures, and shows us the true economic cost of failures in welfare systems, and how we can account for overall benefit to society when social problems are being taken care of by social enterprises.
• Organizational Evolution & Behavior – analyzes organization evolution & structure (both formal and informal structures) and tools that a social enterprise can use to leverage the talent that they have throughout their various growth stages.

Transformational Leadership

Perennial wisdom tells us to “ know thy self”, but how?  Ghandhi encourages us to “be the change you want to see in the world”.  Be what change? Max Depree reminds us the practice of “leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do”.  Who are you as a leader and what kind of impact do you want to make in the world?   Through experiential exercises and dynamic group process, we explore the inquiries, paradoxes, and practices of Transformational Leadership and Coaching in four modules:

1) Discovering the Self: You will recognize your natural leadership strengths and clarify your core values

2) Engaging the Others: You will increase your influence by learning how to listen, connect and appreciate others.

3) Creating the Community: You will build powerful alliances and achieve mutual goals.

4) Leading with The World: You will envision new ways to lead and serve the planet.