Leadership Academy Operations

The Catalyst Leadership Academy is where community members can teach and learn leadership skills. Offer high-quality and relevant courses.

We are experts in Business, Project, Community Management. We are veteran full-time community members, serially funded proposers, Community Advisors, Catalyst Circle, and Admin Team members. We have deep knowledge and experience with Project Catalyst and are passionate mentors.

[IMPACT]

Project Catalyst is a huge success in exploring impactful collaborations, however, by a rapidly growing community, we also have to ensure coordinated actions between collaborations that build solutions and initiatives to solve specific problems within the Catalyst & Cardano Ecosystem.

Social dynamics are a crucial part of a sustainable network and ecosystem growth. Leadership is not only a term but yet the main part in exploring and establishing a decentralized society and helping build an economic network.

Bridge Builders is convening a group of motivated and passionate leaders from the community to collaborate and design the Leadership Academy curriculum and offerings. This is being done in an interactive and experimental manner so we are able to capture emergent needs in the community and make offerings that are relevant and timely.

The Leadership Academy will operate as a container for many different teachers and instructors and facilitators to teach, inspire, motivate, and uplift members of the community on a variety of business, leadership, governance, and community-building topics.

A leadership academy for leaders, teachers, visionaries, and facilitators:

• The Leadership Academy will be an open forum where members of the community can offer their expertise and skills to teach others.
• We aim to build an ever-expanding resource that the community can use to help build their project teams and businesses using our freely available and open content.
• The Bridge Builders Series (one component of the emerging Leadership Academy) will be centered around strategic planning, business model generation, navigating business contracts, and other content to help Catalyst teams launch successful businesses and teams.

The envisioned format will be:

• Instructor content created for the community based on emergent need
• Convening of instructor and students via Zoom for a 1-2 hour course or experience
• Most courses and experiences will be recorded for use by people who could not attend or would like to review the materials. (note, not all experiences are meaningful or honoring of privacy when recorded, so there may be some exceptions to this)
• The recorded contents, course materials, and notes will be uploaded to a public repository
• Over time, the content will be curated into curriculums that can be used by the community to learn complete topics or to level up in a specific skill set.

The Leadership Academy team will build community, facilitate curriculum creation, envision new and exciting experiences to take individuals and groups to new levels of collaboration and co-creation, and oversee the academy and the direction it evolves into. This team will grow and shift over time as the community matures and changes. We envision an emergent team, an emergent curriculum, and many exciting offerings coming from the community.

Risk: There are not enough instructors or leaders stepping up to contribute meaningful content

Mitigation: We have already started engaging and collaborating with a group of 9 community leaders who are motivated and excited to re-envision and build the Leadership Academy. There are many more who have expressed interest in participating. We will continue our outreach and networking to ensure a continual influx of qualified leaders to contribute.

Risk: The community does not find the content valuable

Mitigation: In order to ensure that we’re delivering relevant content, much of the upcoming curriculum and offerings will be created based on emergent community needs. We will also collect feedback after all of our engagements to gauge the sentiment and needs of the community for our next offerings

[FEASIBILITY]

June - Identify instructors/teachers and start to develop the curriculum and create initial course offerings. Goal = 4 offerings by the Leadership Academy. Run post-course surveys and iterate and improve the offerings.

July - Continue instructor recruitment, Ramp up to providing multiple weekly learning opportunities for the community, all engagements being free and released using open source and creative commons licenses.

August - Continue offering course materials for the community, updating offerings based on feedback and community needs. We will target a goal of 24 total offerings at the end of 90 days of operation.

• 24 Leadership Academy offerings @ $50/hr * 2 hours live instruction + 8 hours prep + 2 hours administrative/documentation = 14400
• Leadership Academy community management, $2500 * 3 months = 7500
• Tools and technology = 1000
• Contingency fund = 1000

Total = 23900

The Team:

This proposal is a collaborative offering by Bridge Builders and the Leadership Academy.

The Bridge Builders are an aligned group of highly engaged and committed Catalyst Community members coming together as a community-driven assembly to provide value to their environment. We problem-sense challenges and identify gaps within the Cardano and Catalyst ecosystem. In collaboration with well-established community projects, we co-build and design "tailor-made" solutions in line with the Cardano & Catalyst philosophy of "from the community, with the community, for the community."

The Bridge Builders Assembly is mainly acting in a coordination role for this proposal and aims to ensure that needed resources and environment are available to guarantee a successful implementation of the Proposal.

The Leadership Academy is a group of leaders from within the Catalyst community that brings expertise in leadership, meeting facilitation, conflict resolution, community building, mentoring, strategic planning, business development, management, and more.

[AUDITABILITY]

• number of courses offered
• number of students taking courses
• number of educational materials/videos/documents created and shared
• number of educators and leaders engaged in sharing their knowledge with the community
• number of external experts brought in to share their knowledge with the community
• number of learning opportunities and events offered

• Identifying and recruiting qualified teachers and educators
• The continual offering of regular learning opportunities
• Post-course surveys to measure student satisfaction and receive feedback for improving the offerings
• Recording and documenting the courses and offerings so the community can use the material asynchronously and gain value even when not able to attend in person.
• Creating an online library and curriculum on a wide variety of topics and subject areas.
• More impactful community networks and more successful projects delivered at a higher quality and competency level

This is a continuation of: F7 - Catalyst Leadership Academy https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Leadership-Academy/384140-48088

And the F6 - Leadership Academy’s Entrepreneur's Book Club:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Entrepreneur-s-Book-Club/368373-48088