Summer
Story
Season
2025
Summer
Story
Season
2025
If you’re a non-profit leader ready to rethink how work gets done, Summer Story Season is for you. In three eye-opening sessions, you’ll hear real stories from organisations that have challenged traditional structures – ditching rigid planning cycles, removing hierarchies, and embracing more agile, output-focussed ways of working.
Hear how charities are creating cultures of learning, collaboration and accountability by empowering teams, decentralising decision-making, and adapting in real time to changing needs.
Each session will offer honest insights, practical tools and fresh thinking to help you lead differently – no matter your role or starting point. If you’re feeling stuck in outdated ways of working, or simply want to explore a more agile approach, join us.
These sessions are free, online and open to all – so do bring along others. You’ll leave inspired, equipped, and ready to make meaningful change, without waiting for permission.
Agile Against the Current: Working in New Ways, When No One Else Is
Shaila Varma, British Red Cross
11 June 12:00 BST
Experimenting with new ways of working – when everyone around you is doing what they’ve always done – might be daunting, but the pay-off can be huge!
Join us at 12pm on Wednesday 11th June to hear how Shaila Varma from British Red Cross took the plunge into agile ways of working to deliver a large, complex and vitally important piece of work which built a transformational fundraising and marketing strategy.
During the session we’ll explore how Shaila:
- Brought together a multidisciplinary project team around a shared goal.
- Empowered her team to iterate on the strategy, by seeking constant feedback from stakeholders.
- Adapted her communication style and got comfortable with not having all the answers.
- Navigated the messy middle of this complex project, and brought people along with her.
- Developed her own agile leadership style and evolved her role.
Shaila’s first-hand experience will show you what is possible when you have the courage to give agile a go. You’ll leave encouraged, with some tangible tools and activities you can use to start realising the benefits of agile ways of working, even if no-one else is.
Safe Enough to Try: Radically Empowering and De-siloing Teams
Yolande Zuijdgeest, CliniClowns Netherlands
23 July 12:00 BST
We’ll hear how they have created a purposeful way of working by shifting to empowered, self-managing teams and moving from paternalistic control to more adult-to-adult communication.
Yolande will share her personal experience as a legacy fundraiser, team member and decision-maker within a Holacratic organisation. You’ll hear how:
- Decisions are made without managers.
- Teams run high-paced, output focused, energising meetings.
- Each team member (not their manager!) takes personal responsibility to stay updated and make relevant decisions.
- Working in a self-managed team looks and feels different.
- Siloed working has been replaced with shared accountability across teams for setting and meeting goals.
You’ll leave inspired, with ideas on how to reduce silos, empower decision making and drive greater impact in your organisation.
A Whole New World: Ditching the Annual Business Plan
Rosie Leatherland, Amnesty International UK
13 August 12:00 BST
Join us to hear how Rosie is facilitating living business plans that support leaders and team members to prioritise and deliver their work day-to-day.
Rosie will report back, 18 months on, about how:
- Amnesty International UK adapt their strategic plans based on real world learning and insight across the whole organisation
- Rigorous reflection sessions allow teams to respond to the external environment and actual results, in real-time.
- This process is driving more strategic conversations about the extent to which specific work is really driving impact.
- These ways of working are enabling them to become ‘a learning organisation’, with teams more comfortable innovating, giving things a go and experimenting.
If you’re working on a cross-organisational piece of work, this is a way of working you can mirror. You’ll leave energised and excited to try out new ways of collaborating across your organisation.
