Ever dream of radically changing something at work or in your community? Like creating a climate action plan or sustainability policy for your company or department, launching a Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiative, or redesigning your community engagement platform? This could even be something smaller, like setting up a recycling station at your workplace or implementing a flexible work arrangement. All of these pursuit—from improving employee engagement to the performance of a program—fall under the category of intrapreneurship.
RebelBase is launching a new intrapreneurship track, developed with the expertise and leadership of Aurora Winslade who teaches “Leading Organizational Change” in Bard’s Sustainable MBA program, and she has been leading change for two decades for a number of large organizations. In 2015, Aurora was hired to be the director of sustainability for Swarthmore College, a relatively new position. She was the first person in the role to report to the president of the college. This role was particularly difficult because Swarthmore had already made a public statement claiming it would be net zero by 2035, but had no plan for how to get there.
Coming in from the president’s office, rather than facilities, Aurora had to build buy-in to create an energy infrastructure plan to achieve carbon neutrality, figure out how to finance it, and get everyone, including the chief financial officer, the director of maintenance, the vice president for facilities, and the Board of Managers to engage with and support the idea. In addition to researching technical details about the college’s built environment and energy systems, she built relationships with the existing stakeholders by using Appreciative Inquiry in order to understand their strengths, hopes, and visions for the future.
Starting with Aurora’s methodology, the intrapreneurship track on RebelBase, contains six new learning modules, called “Builders” on the platform. With the methodology created from years of experience, this new track will help rebels understand why change fails, how to avoid common pitfalls, and introduce a framework that allows the budding changemaker to develop a project on their own. And while the rebels are developing their own change project, they’re learning tips for stakeholder buy-in, identifying leverage points for change, and facilitating a group meeting.
The track is first being used by students in an OSUN course that pairs students globally with client organizations to lead a change effort in the United States, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and China. The collaborative, international, cross-institution course in social intrapreneurship has students engaging stakeholders, conducting research, developing proposals and giving recommendations on how to make a positive impact within an organization.
But students aren’t just going through learning modules, they are providing peer feedback and showcasing their project in a portfolio, thanks to the RebelBase platform. The work of this course and use of the Builder is designed to result in real, meaningful, and impactful change within life and work.
