How to Design Inclusive Convenings: Lessons from the Emerging Leaders Initiative

The Emerging Leaders Initiative (ELI), a six-year partnership between the Skoll Foundation and the Mastercard Foundation, sought to support the next generation of rising social entrepreneurs. Between 2014 and 2019, the program brought together 69 young leaders from around the world to experience and participate in the Skoll World Forum. With ELI now sunsetting, I had the honor and privilege of engaging with several of these amazing social entrepreneurs to hear how this program impacted them and what insights they have for similar efforts in the future.

While the full report outlines several key lessons on the themes of connection, learning, visibility, and growth , as the evaluator, this is my overarching takeaway:

Leadership programs, like ELI, are powerful tools for increasing diversity and fostering more proximity at global convenings, but organizers need to put a lot of intention and work into making sure these events are truly inclusive.

“And you could clearly see the difference between people who are coming from the US or Europe. You could tell these are things they’ve done before, and they already had friends and networks at the Forum and places to be. But the new, com­pletely fresh participants, there was a bit of just feeling out of place.” –Angela Nzioki, 2016 Emerging Leader and Kenya CEO of Sokowatch

I read once that increasing “diversity” means that everyone gets invited to the party. “Equity” means that everyone can contribute to the playlist, and “inclusion” means that everyone can dance. That doesn’t just happen by accident. This is the thought that kept occurring to me when talking to Emerging Leader alumni this past year. The positive programmatic aspects, like showcasing the Emerging Leaders’ stories in the official program, and areas of growth, like wanting more active facilitation of mentorship opportunities for female social entrepreneurs, kept returning to this theme of inclusion. If connection, learning, visibility, and growth are the key opportunities for all Skoll World Forum delegates, how can we ensure that everyone can take advantage of them equally? How can we ensure that everyone attending the Skoll World Forum gets to dance—figuratively and literally?

Here are some highlights from the report that can help make convenings more inclusive of diverse voices, especially young social entrepreneurs, women, and leaders from emerging markets:

• Take steps to remove barriers that typically marginalized groups face at global convenings. Beyond invitations, plan ways to ensure traditionally marginalized groups are included by involving them in discussions about the structural barriers and norms that contribute to exclusion. Moreover, actively engage them in creating solutions.
• Help these new folks navigate the convening and make connections more easily. This could mean facilitating meetups or leveraging technology in creative ways that help aligned people find each other. Make sure to pay attention to how this might need to adapt to the needs of different groups. For example, several of the female ELI alumni expressed difficulty in finding mentors and requested facilitated mentorship opportunities. None of the male participants mentioned this. Clearly, these young women social entrepreneurs were facing unique obstacles, which should be considered.
• Make Leaders visible by putting them on the convening agenda. Not only are their insights valuable on the stage but increasing their visibility can open doors to connections and other opportunities that would be more difficult to achieve through attendance alone.

Global social impact convenings, like the Skoll World Forum, are powerful opportunities for changemakers, policy shapers, activists, social entrepreneurs, and thought leaders to come together, exchange ideas, learn from one another, and accelerate solutions to global challenges. But overcoming these challenges requires global, representative perspectives and input—especially from those most proximate to the problem.

Our impact falls short without both representation and inclusion. Beyond the ELI program, we have taken steps to diversify the delegates and speakers who attend. In 2018, we launched the Skoll World Forum Fellowship to remove financial and navigational barriers for later-stage entrepreneurs as well as community builders and storytellers. The fellowship to date has supported 110 leaders from 68 countries to attend the Forum.  In 2020, we are excited to bring together the largest cohort yet: 25 returning senior fellows and 85 new fellows.

We have been so grateful for the opportunity to work with the Mastercard Foundation to establish opportunities for emerging leaders to join us in Oxford for the past six years, and look forward to evolving our current fellows program to accommodate even more opportunities for global leaders. And, as always, we’re learning along the way.

Thank you also to all the inspiring Emerging Leaders. We can’t wait to see what you do next.

Read the full report here. Learn more about the ELI program and all the Emerging Leaders here.