Are you interested in reflecting on and enhancing your positive societal impact?

Join our Impact Coaching program!

The pressing challenges of our time, such as climate change, inequality, social injustice, political radicalisation, etc. require new ways of doing, thinking and organizing, new practices, structures and cultures. We cannot address the problems we face using the knowledge and skills used to produce them.

Students, in the diversity of roles they hold, have a deep lever in the required changes, but often feel overwhelmed by the many challenges ahead and often feel insufficiently equipped to engage.

Therefore, the department of Sustainable Development offers the Impact Coaching program! This program helps you to reflect on and further develop your societal impact skills by offering personal coaching, reflection and guidance. During the academic year, specifically trained coaches will help you assess and develop your personal ambitions, and embrace your development potential to improve your ability to have positive societal impact. Specifically, the program focusses on three areas:

• Personal leadership and personal qualities: Taking responsibility for your own development. By knowing yourself and engaging with yourself, you can find your strengths to build on and development potentials to improve.
• Intercultural communication and teamwork: Creating societal impact is a collective process. In this part we will focus on group dynamics: Building vision and momentum, and improving motivation and performance are key to successful collaboration.
• Stakeholder interaction: Societal impact always requires engaging with societal stakeholders, who each have their own interests and views on the world. Maneuvering this can be challenging, and needs particular skills.

During the academic year your will initially focus on personal leadership and personal qualities. This will be done in period 2 (Workshop 1, 2, 3). In period 3 (Workshop 4, 5, 6), we will focus on intercultural communication and teamwork. In period 4 (Workshop 7, 8, 9), we will deal with societal stakeholder interaction and work together with other students in the consultancy project, which aims to use scientific knowledge to engage with questions from societal stakeholders.    

During the coaching sessions an open and save space will be created where you share development in groups of five students. The coaches will help you reflect on your progress and discover new opportunities for further development. Input for these sessions will come from you: discussions you participated in, workshops you followed, course work, or other experiences from daily or work life will be the basis of the sessions. During the academic year you will have in total nine meetings. At the beginning of the program and during the year we will assess your progress via specific assessment tools so to follow your development and help identify focus points for the sessions. The goal of the assessment is getting to know yourself better, not getting a good grade.

Interested?

The program is open to all master students of the Department of SD. This includes the masters Energy Science, Innovation Sciences, Sustainable Business and Innovation, Sustainable Development, and Water Science and Management. Participation is voluntary. The program is extracurricular, there are no EC points. Over the year we expect that you will spend about 28 hours on the program. This does not include time for activities that you undertake to develop specific skills, such as participating in workshops. Students that participated in a similar module last year, indicated that it was a very valuable addition to their personal development. 

When you participate in the program, we expect you to continue throughout the courses you decided on. Space might be limited, so we are looking for students who take program seriously.

If you are interested in this unique opportunity to broaden your own skillset, please send an e-mail to Kristina Bogner.

When?

We are currently developing the timeframe. In every period, there will be three meetings of 2 hours each.