Daniela Papi-Thornton is the Deputy Director at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.
At the Centre, she has worked to design a number of initiatives that align with the thinking in this report including a social impact careers conference to highlight a broad range of paths to impact, a leadership programme exploring the soft-skills and learning required for social change, funding to support students to apprentice with a problem, and a contest and learning programme designed to support students to learn about and build upon the social and environmental efforts of others.
Prior to doing her MBA at Oxford herself, she worked in Cambodia, which is where she first realized the value of apprenticing with a problem, something she had personally failed to do.
The education and youth leadership organizations she founded look very different now than they did a decade ago, and many of the lessons she and her team have learned might have come quicker had she spent more time learning and apprenticing before jumping in to start an organization.
One of the outcomes was shifting the travel company she founded from a voluntourism model to a development education travel company built on an approach they call “Learning Service.” She has been working with co-authors on a book on the Learning Service topic which is forthcoming.
Daniela now works to share the lessons she has learned with others with a hope that others will apprentice with the problems they seek to change and not have to repeat the same mistakes.
She was part of the 2014 Clore Social Leadership Programme cohort and this report is a result of her research on that programme