In the first of a two-part story, Cari-Anne Quinn tells the story of the Spread and Scale Academy; a groundbreaking, immersive programme geared to give innovators the tools they need to lead adoption at scale across their organisation, region or across Wales and beyond.

In this episode, we hear from Joe McCannon and Becky Margiotta, founders of the US-based company, The Billions Institute, who led the Academy. Since 2015, their company has created transformational learning experiences for over 500 foundation and non-profit executives who are leading large-scale change efforts in the social sector. Joe McCannon says, “To do this big change work, you have to be operating at a very high level personally, everything is about relationships.”

The Billions Institute is the pioneer of the Model for Unleashing, which encourages innovators to ‘Dig Deep’ into their motivation for change and ‘Dream Big’ about where they’d like to take their project. “It's really breaking beyond the confines of what you can do with the resources you have and flipping it to thinking of what needs to be done and how can we get there?”, says Becky Margiotta, who created and led the 100,000 Homes campaign, that mobilized 186 cities to house 105,000 people off their streets in just four years.

More than 50 delegates came to the Life Sciences Hub Wales in Cardiff in 2019, to attend the Spread and Scale Academy. We’ll hear their story in the next episode.