AIM2Flourish - Preparing Global Goals-ready Leaders

This month our speaker is AIM2Flourish.com’s director Claire Sommer.

Claire leads the world’s first higher-education, experiential curriculum for the UN Global Goals and business’ role in achieving them. Over 60 professors worldwide are using the AIM2Flourish curriculum this semester to have their students publish mini-case studies about positive and profitable business innovations. 

Aim2Flourish is a project of long standing interest to this group - given their objectives and name!  We are delighted that Aim2Flourish has recently decided to formally self-identify as a project of members of this group - recognizing both that many members are already involved and in order to grow their co-creation and impact!   Their new project page here in our wiki provides more information on this perspective.

Claire's presentation will offer an overview and update on the 2.5 year old initiative, which is housed at the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at the Weatherhead School of Management – Case Western Reserve University. 

To date, the AIM2Flourish experiential assignment has been used at 57 schools worldwide by 63 professors, by 4,175 students who cumulatively have published 1,000 stories on the AIM2Flourish.com website. You can browse these universities, professors, and stories on AIM2Flourish.com - more detail below.

• Date: Tues April 10
  
• Time: 90 minutes starting  13h30 PST / 16h30 EST / 21h30 GMT / 22h30 CET / 06h30 JST (+1 day)

To join the meeting please see the F2F co-ordinates or virtual logistics posted to our LinkedIn Group in this post.

Anyone who joins the LinkedIn forum is considered a member of this group and is welcome to join at the meeting

To introduce Aim2Flourish, herself and her talk, Claire wrote:

AIM2Flourish uses the strengths-based Appreciative Inquiry methodology that teaches people to discover what’s already working in a system, and then build from there to make businesses, organizations, and networks more successful. Appreciative Inquiry was invented by Professor David Cooperrider, Fowler Center Director at the Weatherhead School of Management.

After an overview and update, Claire will pose some questions to the group:

1. What questions do you have about AIM2Flourish?
2. How might AIM2Flourish support you and your organization’s work?
3. How could AIM2Flourish support the work of the SSBMG?
   
4. What suggestions do you have for how AIM2Flourish can best support future-fit business and management education?
   
5. What are the gaps, and where are the opportunities?

Each one of these stories represents the completion of all these steps in the assignment:

The Professor introduces the assignment in the classroom, including information about the positive interviewing approach called Appreciative Inquiry and the UN Global Goals as a framework for positive business innovation. We provide everything the Professor needs to be successful: AIM2Flourish Professor Resources

1. Students work individually or in teams to discover a local successful business leader who inspires them (Learning about researching)
2. Students arrange and conduct an in-person interview, collecting information needed for the AIM2Flourish story. (Learning about interviewing and creating business relationships)
3. Students submit the story online, the professor reviews it, and then the story is published. (Learning about writing and editing)
4. AIM2Flourish shares the story on social media and with the business leader. (Learning about social media & generating a resume-ready sample)
5. The AIM2Flourish assignment and the story platform are free of charge to universities, thanks to the extraordinary generosity of our supporters

Student Impact: Our students tell us that the AIM2Flourish experience changes how they feel about business' purpose. They say that they didn't believe it was possible for a business leader to do good *and* do well until they met a leader doing exactly that. We have hundreds of student reflections that tell us that the experience changes how the students feel about their own potential to be world-benefiting leaders themselves.

• Claire Sommer, Executive Director, Aim2Flourish - Preparing Global Goals-Ready Leaders, New Jersey, U.S.A.
• Peter Jones, SSBMG Co-founder, Core Team member Flourishing Enterprise Innovation Toolkit Project, Prof. OCAD University Faculty of Design
• Antony Upward, SSBMG Co-founder, Convener Flourishing Enterprise Innovation Toolkit Project, Adjunct Prof. OCAD University Faculty of Design, Kristansand, Norway
  
• Simon Robinson, Holonomics Education, author of Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter and also Customer Experiences with Soul.
  San Paulo, Brazil
• Ruben Burga, Professor University of Guelph
• Sayeh Dastgheib-Beheshti, Sayeh.ca, Toronto
  
• Gil Friend, Natural Logic Inc., in Palo Alto California
  
• Rose Kudlac, Toronto
  
• Doug Worts, Worldviews Consulting
• Ondine Hogeboom, Co-Founder Lean for Flourishing Startups, Montreal