Sage Skills Leadership Experience

Every day I witness young people with the energy and thirst for real change in our communities in Ghana. However, the powers that be make no space for young people to lead meaningful change. At home in Ghana, we are a nation that defers to our elders - youth who try to pursue their own ideas are punished. Around the world, youth are frequently relegated to spectators, passive recipients of the decisions of an antiquated power structure. 

There are 1.2 billion young people aged 15-24 globally, and in Ghana 57% of the population is 25 or younger. However countless jurisdictions restrict young people from holding any official office or voting. We hold low expectations of young people, excluding their voices and denying them opportunities to actually help solve the problems they face! This lack of real-world opportunities leaves our young people ill equipped to lead in the future. 

Even you might be thinking they’re too young to be trusted with big decisions. Are our politicians making great decisions? A survey of "youth leadership" programs in selected developed countries showed 100% of them focused on listening to youth or serving youth, but none actually trust youth to lead real-world initiatives and none offer structured support to young people to solve the problems facing their communities. In Ghana, it is no different. This lack of trust in our young people is stunting future leaders. 

While there are countless token “leadership programs” for young people, nearly every single one fails to offer a space for real-world action on the problems they face. Young people are condescendingly expected to learn “leadership” listening to inspirational speakers in hotel ballrooms or learn theory through programs hosted on college campuses. At best, young people are used as tokens in the activities of official authorities. As a former school prefect, I can attest that our student government taught us only compliance with authority. Project-oriented “leadership experiences” such as scouts, sand-box young people giving little connection to solving real-world problems. Youth “leadership” opportunities train young people to collect hours of “service” not solve root problems. I regularly witness how our young people lack the confidence in themselves to take on the problems they face.

In addition to lacking opportunities and confidence for real-world leadership, young people lack the support and feedback needed to hone the skills required to harness their energy and creativity into real-world action. Learning leadership is like learning a language, which means you learn it best when you’re young, and you learn it most effectively through immersion. If all it took was a few inspirational talks by overpaid speakers, some ice-breaker games, and some post-it notes on a white board, the world’s problems would be solved by now. We give young people coaches to improve their athletic skill, tutors to improve academic performance, and for the most privileged, even special university admissions consultants to help them get into elite schools – but young people do not have the comparable structured support needed to grow as leaders.

Our Sage Skills Leadership Experience provides an in-person and virtual platform that enables young people in Ghana to collaborate with young leaders from privileged contexts on solving a real-world problem facing our community. Our young leaders join a team focused on an issue they are concerned about. These teams are then supported by a project advisor who guides the team through a structured process adapted from design thinking. 

Our young leaders start by interviewing local stakeholders to understand the issues faced and experience the problem first-hand. Sage advisors give space and structures to students from very different backgrounds to get to know each other and work effectively together. Remote students use video calls with teammates on the ground to explore the community and get to know the stakeholders. Along the way, these relationships help our young leaders from more privileged backgrounds recognize their privileges and empathize with peers from very different circumstances. Our young leaders from less privileged contexts gain amazing confidence seeing themselves hold their own with peers from privileged backgrounds. 

This process is supported by our Sage personal coaches who help our young leaders reflect, unpack their backgrounds, and practice ways skills to navigate diverse stakeholders. In addition, team members meet regularly with a subject mentor who has expertise in the relevant content area. Team members practice asking purposeful questions, synthesizing information, thinking critically, using decision-making frameworks, and articulating their ideas in writing and verbally. 

Leveraging their new relationships and insights from phase across five weeks of interviews and conversations with community members and stakeholders, teams are guided through a second phase by their advisors to define the problem clearly and develop a solution. Once they have clarity around the problem, teams begin brainstorming solutions to the problems faced by their communities. The young leaders then organize a focus group or other sessions to gather local wisdom and ideate and prototype ways to address the community problem. Guided by their advisor, team members refine their prototypes and prepare to launch a real-world initiative. 

In the third and final phase, team members practice project management skills to plan, organize, implement, and evaluate a pilot of their real-world initiative. Throughout this phase, our young leaders continue to be supported by their project advisor, personal coach, and subject mentor to help them manage risks intentionally, experience best practices in project management, and hone their budgeting, planning, organization, and communication skills.

The real-world initiatives students launch bring stakeholders, with local chiefs and government officials invited to participate, witnessing the incredible work of our young leaders, and transforming their perceptions of young people’s readiness to lead. 

By providing a structured process, a team of diverse young people, a coach for personal growth and reflection, a subject mentor for topical expertise, and a project advisor with experience leading community initiatives, the Sage Skills Leadership Experience, enables young leaders to build their confidence, hone high-value power skills, and gain experience that propels them to solve the next challenge.

The Sage Skills Leadership Experience serves a powerful range of target populations. First are our young leaders who come from across Ghana and around the globe. Our young Ghanaian leaders have never before been given a chance to do any of the things we do with them – whether interview community elders, think critically about issues in their community, or organize their own initiative. They frequently come to the program with very limited critical thinking experience, yet they are at an age that within a couple months, through dialogue with their peers from more privileged contexts, they start seeing both their own agency and the ability to think through complex issues. These Ghanaian young leaders stay at our own residential Sage Centre where they are in a safe space to asking new questions and try new things. Our Ghanaian young leaders are almost always on full scholarships. 

Next are our young leaders from outside Ghana, typically from more privileged backgrounds. These young people very rarely had a chance to collaborate as equals with someone from such a different context. Our international young leaders quickly realize how little their privilege will help them solve these issues, and how much they have to learn (seeing how much their Ghanaian co-leaders know about the world that their privileged background has shielded them from). 

In addition to our young leaders from Ghana and elsewhere, our platform benefits the community where they host their projects in Ghana. These tend to be incredibly diverse communities they serve, whether local school children, small scale farmers, female entrepreneurs, unemployed young adults, and so many others our young leaders have already served. 

Interestingly, perhaps the greatest transformation that takes place is in the local leaders who our teams engage in each project. We have seen village chiefs who are expected to be stoic, participate in a community’s first-ever science fair, participating in experiments in front of their subjects in ways to promotes scientific reasoning. We have seen Ghana Education Service officials, who are want to maintain the status quo, be shocked by the skills of the young people organizing programs and serving their communities, asking us to help them think how they can better incorporate these principles into other efforts. While perhaps not traditionally underserved, I would suggest these local leaders may at times not had a chance to see what young people are capable of, with our programs opening eyes that have the potential to further these transformations.

I am a cofounder of Sage Experience. I was born to a fishing family in rural Ghana, where I spent the early years of my life, learning the local languages, the customs, the values, the ways of life, the beauty and the struggles of our village. I enjoyed peace times and I confronted ethnic conflict. I moved to a squatter settlement when my parents wanted me to escape the local conflict and enroll in school. I was eleven and had never held a book. I lived with relatives who struggled themselves to make it to the next day. When I went hungry, I scoured the nearby city’s rubbish dumb. A garbage truck from the nation’s airport was my salvation, allowing me to scavenge half-eaten slices of English Cheddar from the prior night’s British Airways arrival. Living in our settlement, I came to speak eight languages so I could communicate with the many migrants, necessary to survive. I know what it feels like to sit in school, dreaming of something more, motivated by an empty stomach that no longer even had the energy to growl. When I was given the chance to attend high school, something that few of my peers had the chance to do, I committed myself to not just learn everything I could, but also serve my peers where our local authorities failed. Our school had no school nurse or anyone to help us when one of the over 1,000 of us pupils had an accident or fell sick. I became our de facto school infirmarian, being called out of exams to negotiate with the local clinic to get care for my peers, even when we held no money to pay. 

I know the challenges we face. I faced these challenges everyday barely able to survive them myself. I know the young people who yearn for something more. I yearned in my waking hours and in my dreams to make something of myself. I know the families who others believe have little and need our help. I bear witness to the boundless love and rich heritage they give their children every day.

I am proud to have colleagues who like me have dedicated their lives to serving our communities and peoples. My deputy Moses shares his own story at once very different and yet the same as my own. My cofounder Ben has supported young people from across Ghana for nearly two decades as teacher, coach, leader, parent, and big brother. At our residential facility, the Sage Centre, we have an incredible team ready to host students so their safety and nourishment is always taken care of. Each of these team members comes from the local community, representing women and men, teens, adults, parents, and elders. We make sure all our staff members have opportunities and support to grow as leaders themselves, organizing initiatives that make our world a better place.

We are applying to Solve to help us address the four main needs we have at this time:

First, we have a proprietary Sage skills feedback tool that leverages Google Sheets, but we are aiming to turn it into a mobile-friendly site with an effective UX that makes it easy for team members to give, receive, and track feedback. We have a Ghanaian contractor starting work on this, but it is a high-value endeavor and guiding the app development exists outside our core capabilities. We hope Solve can help us with the development of this technology to strengthen this aspect of our program.

Second, as we have been able to refine and strengthen our service delivery model over the past several semesters, we are now ready to take on more young leaders and more projects. While we have an operating model that can grow in the local context, we need to first grow our branding and marketing to access more tuition-paying young leaders. While we have a website, mailing list of educators and alumni, and over 100 donors, we need help defining our brand and operationalizing our marketing to celebrate the amazing achievements of our young leaders and gain additional future young leaders for our program, both locally and internationally so our revenue base also grows. We hope to Solve can help us leverage expertise and technologies that strengthen our brand and marketing in ways that increases awareness and deepens the connections between our diverse young leaders and the stakeholders in their projects, both within Ghana and internationally.

Third, while our current operating model works well within our district in Ghana, we want young people from all over our country and others to also be able to benefit from what our alumni often cite as Sage’s “life-altering” experience. We have a potent synergy of cross-cultural collaboration, real-world curriculum, and structured support, but we need help figuring out how to deliver it equally as effectively in another area. Through Solve, we hope to gain experience and mentoring in growing in scale and launching in new sites.

Fourth, while we currently offer a hybrid tuition-based model with full-time staff support, we hope to be able to facilitate Sage leadership development through a more robust online platform that builds on our skills feedback system in an open format that allows peers and experts to match up, hold video calls, and go through our learning modules asynchronously. While we will always have an important place for our full-tuition experience (that includes young co-leaders in Ghana receiving full scholarships as team members), we also have a vision to share our approach as an online tool with youth, families, schools, and organizations around the world to power the development of future leaders with our special Sage approach of real-world practice, scaffolded support, cross-cultural collaboration, and effective power-skill feedback.

Our first innovation is trusting young people to take on real problems in our community. Effectively helping someone develop power skills required for leading, such as listening, public speaking, giving feedback, receiving feedback, persuasion, negotiations, asking questions to gain insight, and more is no different than how I learned to swim or farm. Just do it! (Perhaps Nike should enter leadership development). When my dad threw me in the river, with family there for support, I learned to swim. Going to the farm morning after morning with my mom, I soon understood the many detailed skills required to sow, grow, and harvest our food. I can’t say our approach is earth-shatteringly innovative, but for whatever reason, I haven’t found programs that teach leadership this way. For young people to learn to lead, we need to throw them into the river of life with proper supports to help them thrive. Perhaps you could say trusting young people to solve a real-world challenge facing our community is our biggest innovation.

In addition to the trust we instill, our hybrid platform bringing together young leaders from less-resourced parts of Ghana to collaborate with co-leaders from highly-resourced communities abroad, enables an innovative pedagogy whereby our Ghanaian young leaders come to see themselves as valuable contributors to their community and our international young leaders, engaging remotely, quickly learn how little they know about the world and the importance of humility, listening, and practicing empathy. This hybrid platform for cross-cultural engagement is structured very intentionally and that pedagogical approach is also part of our innovation. Our project advisors use special strategies to balance the power dynamics between diverse co-leaders so each gives and gains in equal measure.

A third innovation is in our Sage skills feedback tool. This inter designed feedback system avoids grading young leaders on their skills, but rather helps them find their strengths and identify practical opportunities to push themselves. 

Finally, how we have designed our young leader support with a tri-mentor approach offers one more innovation. By providing each young leader with specialized mentors for discrete areas of their growth as leaders yields powerful results. Just as I learned to swim with my father and farm with my mother so I could thrive in a fishing village, young people need the right mentor to support them for distinct aspects of their leadership. Sage starts with a project advisor who serves as both facilitator for the Sage curriculum and as a project management mentor. Next we add a personal coach who uses a special Sage-designed meditation-based coaching process to enable self-awareness and self-reflection. And finally we equip young leaders with a subject expert in a field relevant to the problem they’re solving to connect theory with practice.

In the next year Sage aims to develop over 20 young leaders, with over half coming from Ghana. Our students will run at least 10 community projects, effectively doubling the total number of Sage projects, having taken us 4 years to get to get to launch the first 10. This will require us to have a stronger recruitment pipeline for tuition-paying students from both in Ghana and internationally. Within two years we hope to sustain the growth in our pipeline and develop an addition 50 young leaders, with over half coming from Ghana, launching 20 new projects. 

As we achieve a critical mass of alumni in Ghana over the coming year, we aim to collaborate with them to create additional linkages with local leaders and organizations. Through this alumni initiative, we want to ensure they continue to have opportunities to take on real problems and gain feedback and inspiration from peers as they support their communities and others. In the next two years, we hope our alumni collaborate on at least 10 Sage alumni projects.

In three years we want to launch a second site in Ghana, supporting 50 leaders and 20 projects during the year and by the fourth year we want to launch a third site in Ghana for an incremental 50 leaders and 20 projects annually. This means developing 150 leaders in a year who launch 60 innovative initiatives that solve local challenges. During this time, we hope to enable 20 alumni projects as well.

As we look beyond the three-year horizon, within five years we hope to begin growing our physical presence internationally even as we grow our remote young leader base globally. We envision opening a site in a second country, perhaps elsewhere on the African continent or in another emerging market serving 30 new leaders who launch 10 new projects. 

Over the next 5 years we envision growing our Sage young leader alumni to be 500 strong, leading over 200 projects! By the end of the coming 5 years we also hope to be able to launch a validated online platform that enables connecting diverse young leaders alongside personal coaches, project advisors, and subject experts with at least another 1000 active young leaders. Beyond five years, we dream big – launching in additional countries and growing our online platform to service hundreds of schools and over one-hundred-thousand young leaders actively solving problems in their communities with formal authorities recognizing the true power of young people to lead the change we need to have a healthy and equitable future.

With development of Sage young leaders ready to tackle issues in their communities as our primary output, we start by measuring our impact through the number of young leaders who have successfully launched meaningful projects in our communities. Through our Sage skills feedback tool we also measure the impact we have on each individual young leader through the new skills they demonstrate as part of their Sage Experience.

We relatedly measure impact through the number of projects our young leaders launch. Given we aim to inculcate an impact-oriented mindset in our young leaders, we similarly look at the impact of each project, which has been intentionally  designed and implemented by our young leaders to address carefully defined community problems. For each project, we aim for our young leaders to identify the number of beneficiaries, both direct and indirect. In addition, we look at the specific outcomes we expect in the community through each project, typically aligned with a specific SDG target. 

At this time, all our tracking is completed manually, but we hope with the launch of a digital platform our young leaders can better track their impact (including cost for impact) to help others improve design and delivery in the future.

Sustainable change in communities starts and ends with good leadership. In low-resource communities, adults are typically already burdened with the pressures of family and livelihood, but by giving young people a chance to take on real-world issues facing the community, these young people can simultaneously learn and lead real change. Supplementing the opportunity to lead with appropriate support and feedback increases chances of success to very close to 100%. Developing a young generation of leaders equipped with the experience and skills to take on the problems their communities face means lasting change informed and driven by local needs.

For Sage Experience, our process starts with our activities of facilitating real-world practice of leadership among young people who launch projects in their communities that solve actual needs. 

The output of these activities includes (1) young people from within our community gain tangible experience and skills for collaborating across cultures to design and implement meaningful community programs; (2) young people internationally understand some of the challenges facing less privileged communities with the connections and empathy needed to support their peers in less privileged contexts

These outputs lead to short term outcomes of these activities, notably (1) local community members benefiting from the projects launched by young leaders, and (2) local authorities witnessing the power and potential of the young leaders in their community to actually lead meaningful change

In the long-term the Sage Skills Leadership Experience yields (1) community leaders who sustain community initiatives that address local needs and pass on the skills and knowledge to neighbors, peers, and the next generation of young leaders; and (3) international supporters who have the maturity, understanding, and motivation to support the needs of diverse communities. This means true sustainable development with local leaders who know how to work with peers in global organizations and deliver programs using leadership best practices.

Sage Experience leverages both digital and ancestral technologies. For digital technologies, we use Zoom, WhatsApp, Messages, and Google Docs to enable collaboration between our residential young leaders in Ghana and their co-leaders around the world. Central to our success is the ancestral wisdom that we learn best how to live by actually living and practicing the skills we seek to pass on. Both the curriculum and pedagogy Sage has designed is itself a powerful technology informed by both traditional wisdom and expertise from Harvard Kennedy School, Dartmouth College, and MIT Sloan School of Management.

Together these digital and traditional technologies create a powerful experience for both our students in-person and remotely. 

As we look ahead to the future, we are aiming to launch our own mobile platform to facilitate Sage skills feedback within a year or two. The current iteration of this tool (using Google Sheets) has been co-designed by experts in Ghana, Australia, and the US. A responsive mobile version is in the works the will enable more time and insights for human connection and coaching. One day, this tool could incorporate AI trained on team conversations to help our young leaders get rapid and detailed feedback on their practices and skills. Within five years we hope to launch a robust online platform that allows anyone in the world to collaborate and grow as a leader through real-world practice.

Sage Experience is committed to ensuring everyone we work with feels welcomed and can be their authentic selves on our teams. We work with young people from just about every imaginable background, from migrants to millionaires, from conservatives to liberals, and from diverse ethnic identities, educational and literacy levels, and languages spoken. We serve many community members who cannot access the internet due to technological, linguistic, and economic limitations – and we strive to remove barriers whenever we are able. We are proud to work with people across gender identities and sexual orientations, even though we are in a country that is very traditional. We invest heavily to meet all our young leaders and stakeholders where they are, including providing ample extra support for our young leaders in residence at our centre in Ghana, from digital and English and local language literacy to extra opportunities to practice critical thinking and self-expression. We firmly believe that by enabling more diverse voices, the solutions our young leaders develop become more effective and more sustainable.

Unlike many nonprofits that separate revenue from their services, by relying on donations, we believe that to deliver sustainable high-impact youth leadership development, we must drive revenue directly from the value we deliver. As such we use a tuition-based model to ensure our service remains of the highest value to customers who are also some of our beneficiaries. We currently charge a $6300 tuition fee to international young leaders. With their tuition we are able to build a team around a local need, including bringing on a young leader in Ghana on a full-scholarship to co-lead with their paying international peer. Tuition also covers the costs of the project advisor, subject expert, and personal coaching for both team members. On top of this, the tuition covers the basic cost of the project delivery itself. We let local young leaders and their families know the program is not free, even if they receive a full (or partial) scholarship, and they are in fact receiving a high-value service delivered to international standards. Even our business model helps build the confidence of our young leaders, helping them realize their worth and the value of the skills they practice.

The families of our young international leaders pay the tuition mainly in hopes of helping their children build their resume, but also for them to explore issues they care about and grow as leaders entering college and careers. This financial model is supplemented by donations that can allow us to host additional local young leaders on project teams or bring additional scale to our young leaders’ projects. Looking ahead we hope that by growing donations and even receiving grants we can invest in our recruitment pipeline, build new digital technologies for enhanced delivery, and provide more scholarships to local and international students.

We are generally self-sustaining at this point, but lack the surplus necessary to grow. Our tuition is priced to cover our costs for a given project. We are working on some partnerships with schools and educational organizations to expand our recruitment pipelines. We also offer a summer program for international and Ghanaian youth that can help us generate additional revenue to fund growth and further enhancements. We are also looking at some partnerships with community organizations abroad to sponsor young leaders from their communities to patriciate remotely or in person over the summer. We do not want to rely on donors or grants to sustain our activities, but rather use funds we may receive from those revenue streams towards high-impact projects launched by our young leaders.

While we have a different mission, focus, and approach, we compete for customers in the summer program, gap year, and voluntourism space. This is a highly fragmented and highly competitive space, but as the higher education landscape faces challenges we believe we have an opportunity to compete there if we can more strategically incorporate our subject experts and build partnerships with higher education institutions.

For our four years of existence thus far we have funded our operations mainly through tuition paid by our international young leaders. We have had 15 tuition-paying students to date (with more student having paid for our upcoming summer programs), even while we were still defining and refining our programming and lacking formal recruitment processes. We hope through more strategic recruitment efforts we can grow this number substantially. In addition to tuition dollars, we have generated several thousand dollars annually through gifts from about 100 donors, most $300 or less. Lastly we offer workshops and webinars about student leadership paid for by third-party organizations, which has brought in over $10,000 per year and helped generate some leads for our own recruitment.