It is not often that one gets to meet a social entrepreneur. I was fortunate to have an engaging conversation on Zoom with Siobhan last week.
At the early age of 17, Siobhan decided that she would stay single and focused on pursuing her dream of creating a niche for herself in a path less travelled. And that she has done admirably.
As the quintessential independent woman, she has harnessed every opportunity that has come her way, leading to a rich tapestry of experience and expertise. She carries a strong sense of being on a Soul’s Journey, here to learn and develop. This has led her into innovation in social enterprise, leadership, policing and higher education.
Siobhan shared the metaphor of coral, to describe her passion for collaboration across hierarchies, organisations and systems. Each piece of coral is fragile and easily breaks, but when connected together with other pieces of coral, it becomes strong and sustainable. Her work is all about creating spaces for people to connect and collaborate through partnership, to create stronger and more robust systems. This way of working has culminated in a unique model of training she describes as Learning Communities.
For a decade she took this way of learning out into police services across the UK where staff and managers transcended hierarchy to develop new ways of policing. She took the Learning Community modality into the higher education sector, designing new undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in social enterprise and leadership. She created the first qualification in Women Building Peace, funded by the European Commission. She introduced the Learning Community as a new way of working to the largest organisation tackling sight-loss in the UK – Guide Dogs. This proved pivotal during lockdown as the charity was forced to switch to online engagement.
Combine together these decades of experience, and Siobhan is now one of the leading experts of the Learning Community model in the UK. As Covid has given new meaning to the online space she has a new spirit of inquiry – how do you develop deep and meaningful participation in the virtual space? This led her to establish Learning Communities Network and enter a new phase of expansion in her repertoire, which is soon to be joined by Soulutions, a modality that works with intuition’s role in life and leadership.
During my conversation with Siobhan, I was struck by her admiration for the Persian poet and esoteric Sufi – Rumi, who also happens to be my favorite poet.
While discussing the fallout of Covid and how organisations need to be more emphatic to employees returning to the office, she quoted Rumi – “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there’s a field; I’ll meet you there”.
I agree 100%!
Penned by Sharad Agarwal
