Our first workshop of 2019: A million jobs, an ex-elite soldier, a future-proof investment club and new hub leadership

 

In the Copenhagen Hub of the Global Shapers Community, we meet each quarter for a full-day workshop. Read along, if you’d like to know a bit more about what we spent the first workshop of the year on

Group photo in the beautiful streets of Christianshavn 📸

Group photo in the beautiful streets of Christianshavn 📸

3 inspiring guest speakers 😎

As you could read about in our last medium post, a core part of what it entails to be a Global Shaper is the work we do together on a number of Hub projects. Sometimes, we create the projects from scratch ourselves. Other times, we consult social ventures and non-profits and help them maximise their impact. One example of that is our work with the NGO Enable for Life, who’s doing amazing work educating orphaned girls in India. We’ve helped Enable on a variety of things, ranging from strategy to designing a new website to helping them organise a charity dinner.

On Saturday, we were joined by Thorkil and Henrik from Specialisterne, an organisation Thorkil founded 15 years ago with the ambitious goal of creating employment for 1 million people with autism and other challenges. The traction of the organisation is amazing and they’ve already created hundreds of jobs.

How? Well, I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that Specialisterne does not look at autism and similar as diagnoses. They look at these as superpowers that just need to be applied in the right settings. Superpowers that are not possible to activate in all types of work environments; superpowers that require companies to adapt and implement some small, but important, changes to be unleashed.

We’re excited to launch a project with Specialisterne, who we will help with three important areas over the next months: first, we will work with Thorkil on crystalising their core value proposition and support him in creating a focused strategy for the next exciting steps of the organisation; second, we will work with Specialisterne on nailing their communications so that they can get their important message out to companies that could benefit from employing some of Specialisterne’s super-powered people; third, see how we can tap into the ressources of the Global Shapers Community to help Specisterne grow globally as well.

Alongside Henrik and Thorkil, we were joined by an additional amazing speaker: the former elite soldier and now Founder of True NorthNicolai Moltke-Leth. Nicolai gave a great talk touching on self-motivation, the influence of habits and biases (and how to break them), and his work about emotional development for youth. All areas super relevant for our project aiming to get more children from underprivileged backgrounds.

An exciting new project launch 🌱

At the workshop, we also launched our newest project led by our hub members Teddy (Project Lead) and Tinne with the snazzy name “The Future-proof Investment Club”. The project aims at looking at future trends and operationalise these into actionable investment ideas and screening criteria focussing on a dual bottomline. Tune in to read more about the project at our next blogpost!

Two amazing Shapers stepping into leadership 🙋‍♀️️️🙋‍♀️

Finally, we want to share some exciting news: at the workshop we elected our new Hub leadership. All Global Shapers Hubs are led by a Curator and a Vice Curator, who is responsible for pushing the members of the hub to do their best and set the general strategy for the hub.

What is extra exciting for us is that our new leadership consists of two brand-new shapers who joined our hub after our last recruitment cycle in September. Here goes:

Our new leadership consists of Kelsie Schmit (Curator), who is currently doing amazing work at the Novo Foundation as Board of Directors Program Manager and EA to the CFO, and Tinne Amalie Damgaard Nissen, who is doing important work as a Research Assistant at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research. Join us in giving both of them a warm welcome! 👏

If you’d like to join the Global Shapers Copenhagen Hub then keep your eyes on our FB page and website, where we will announce the opening of our next application cycle later this spring. In the meantime, you are always welcome to reach out to us and say hi on hello@shaperscph.com

By Emil Bender Lassen. Emil is the former Vice Curator of Global Shapers Copenhagen. He’s studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at King’s College London & NUS and is CEO of the global non-profit education startup Project Access.