Sharing is caring
One of my main goals in my personal learning journey that I boldly aimed for at the start of #CISL10 was to learn from my peers in leadership roles across sustainability nonprofits in Trinidad and Tobago. While in many cases I have learnt through my interactions with them over the last year or so, I have pivoted a bit to centre much of this ambition on learning from my team at The Cropper Foundation.
As I would have described before, the Foundation is a very well-respected nonprofit based in Trinidad and Tobago, founded in 2000 and we work within sustainability practice and policy. Much of our in-house team is pretty young in comparison to other established nonprofits, with the majority of them being between 25–30, with me at the ripe old age of 35 being the CEO. Their interests and specialisations are varied and rich, from a former French language teacher, to a protected agriculture specialist, and a petroleum engineer.
As I wrestled with the difficulties of getting my peers together in the same room with busy schedules and then the all-encompassing spectre of COVID made schedules even more mad — I looked at my team and asked myself why am I not diving into the idea of a leader as a nurturer and facilitator of learning? So we decided about mid-2021 to start a schedule wherein team members would present to the group on an idea, issue or topic that interests them significantly (but not necessarily sustainability related on the surface) and tie it back to a sustainability impact.
Over the last few months we’ve had presentations on:
- How massive multi-player games use Artificial intelligence for content moderation, and its application to building empathy online
- The role of issue framing in political conversation
- The rise of electronic Formula-1 (Formula-E) racing
- Vulcanology and the Caribbean
- Honk Kong’s housing policy
All these presentations and more were prepared and delivered by young team members, many of whom have self-declared discomfort with public speaking and the like, which made these exercises a double dose of professional and personal development. I made it a rule to just be a member of the audience and let them take the lead in facilitating their own Q&A sessions after — jumping in when I thought it may need a bit more moderation.
I was thrilled to not know about many, many topics within the presentations, as it re-emphasised to me just how little we actually know when we sometimes feel like ‘experts’ in a field — and just how wide the breadth of knowledge is within the sustainability space.
I would like to think that this small exercise has yielded great results, and we’ve already started to plan an offshoot of this where we start setting up (virtual still) coffee sessions with other similar-aged young professionals to build a network within the nonprofit space — sharing experiences and knowledge while building leadership within this generational cohort.
