Hi Reader,

Last week, a member of our Academy posted the following question to the community: "Does anyone have any examples of self-managing or teal organizations in Africa?" It’s a question I get asked more often. And, until recently, I did not have a very good answer to it, as we didn't know about many progressive workplaces from the African continent. With David College, Wasafiri, and SINA, we have only three African companies on our Bucket List.

But although we have only three African organizations on our list at the moment, I recently learned that among them, there is at least one true pioneer—a truly progressive organization. That organization is the Social Innovation Academy (SINA) from Uganda. We first met up with SINA’s founder, Etienne Salborn, a few months ago and were introduced to their fascinating story.

Etienne described SINA as ‘a self-governed community that provides a pathway, tools, and the mindset for marginalized youth and refugees (called ‘scholars’) to shape a vision for their future and create new solutions in the form of social enterprises with a benefit to society and the environment.’ From what I understood, SINA can be seen as some kind of ‘social enterprise incubator’ that picks up those who have dropped out of school and whom society has labeled as useless. SINA then turns their scholars into real social entrepreneurs through ‘their cost-effective and freesponsible community approach.’

SINA trains the scholars through an extensive training program and enables them to flourish by giving them responsibilities and a passion for entrepreneurship. They motivate the scholars to transform their personal tragedies into a social enterprise by disrupting the root causes of their social problems. As such, SINA scholars do not leave with a certificate or diploma but with their own employment. What once started with a single SINA community in Uganda is now rapidly scaling all over Africa, with more than 10 different SINA communities. Collectively, they have spun out more than 70 social enterprises so far.

Last week, we organized a virtual community event where we interviewed Etienne for about 1,5 hours to share his story with all Academy members (the recording is available on our Academy platform). It was a great session, with some very good questions coming from the audience. We will also (hopefully) be visiting SINA in Uganda soon, as there are many more inspiring things to learn about SINA and their model, which we will then share with you on our blog.

So, the next time someone asks me for an example of a highly progressive African organization, my answer is clear. My answer will be SINA.

New articles

We published a new article on our blog earlier this week:

• Introducing Our New Course: Upgrade Your Feedback Approach​
  This month, we launched a new course on our Corporate Rebels Academy. Our latest course focuses on feedback. In this article, our colleague Emma de Blok provides you with a glimpse into what our new course offers. Check out the article here.

What inspired us this week

Here's something noteworthy we discovered this past week that you’re going to love:

• Elevate your feedback game
  ​As part of our new feedback course, we have developed a pretty cool video animation that provides you with a small taste of what awaits in our course. It is a nice and quick introduction to four key things you can do tomorrow to improve your feedback approach. View the animation here.

Your weekly challenge

At Corporate Rebels, we believe that small changes lead to big results. That's why we challenge you each week to make a small but significant change. This week....

Good luck and see you in two weeks!

PS: We’ve moved our weekly newsletter to Thursday and are now also sending a weekly email on Monday to notify you of our newest blog post. If you don’t want to receive those, click here.

Cheers,

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