Announcement – CEO Old Is New / Co-CEO / GM Transition / A Road To 100K Kids And Beyond

Friends,

After almost 18 months in the role of Head of Design, I’ve been so thankful to have the space to help design a different AIME from the inside out; retaining the core of mentoring, educational equity, and adding the complexity of systems thinking.
The result is an amplification of our 17 years as a social network for good, into a digital social network for good.

 In this time we’ve looked at what makes us sing, and we’ve borrowed from mycelium to embed cellular systems into how knowledge and communication moves throughout our organisation. We’ve rapped with Tyson Yunkaporta and others to embed Indigenous Knowledges throughout our strategy and embraced complexity & emergent design, and we’ve really pushed what’s possible in the space of self-management and decentralisation. 

With the invention of IMAGI-NATION{University} we’ve been able to scale our ability to train mentoring to be delivered on campuses, in the schools, in business, and in doing so added more strings to our system-wide approach to addressing inequity. 
Throw into the mixer inventing our way through COVID-19, we’ve been able to deliver digital mentoring through IMAGI-NATION{TV} & Making of a Hoodie (MOAH) podcast to 1000’s of young people across the world.

In the civic space, we’ve continued to push for art to lead the cultural conversation with our campaign to Make Space commencing in 2021, leading to our own gallery for young people, including one of the first-ever Indigenous artists, Olivia Anderson to release an NFT. In fashion, to make caring cool, we’ve been working behind the scenes to emerge from COVID with a runway to deliver the world’s most meaningful activated hoodie (move over activated almonds)… commencing with one of the world’s first digital OP Shops, the AIME Op Shop for a fairer world – launching December 1.

There’s heaps of work to be done, and that’s why I’ve decided to return as CEO and lead AIME to support 100K young people by 2025.

This has come in sync with our GM Taryn Marks making a decision to transition from AIME…. And what a stint T has had, from leading so much of the above including a team that founded a {University}, driving IMAGI-NATION{TV}, embedding a decentralised leadership model, recruiting brilliant staff across Australia and around the world, and working tirelessly to put form to AIME’s setting it up for today and tomorrow.

I want to thank Taryn who has also been brilliant as GM in leading alliance partnerships with crew like Stronger Smarter, Career Trackers, UNESCO, and a host more, to show how we can be better together. T will stay with us as a mentor and in strategic partnerships until May next year. I’m thankful for the counsel, generosity, kindness and space she personally gave to me, and to so many in the team. We are so excited about the next chapter for Taryn.

As we look forward, our focus at AIME is to emerge from COVID and be a force for good on University campuses early next year – we wanna give this generation of school students and University students who have been stuck behind screens, the chance to get to be mentors and have deep meaning in their return to their University campus.
We have scratched the surface in the release of our digital mentoring tools, behind the scenes we have been working over the last few years in refining Mentor Class, a tool to go directly to teachers in the classrooms – stay tuned for a very exciting old is new partnership to work on this in the Australian space.

Globally, we have a wonderful team on the ground in the continent of Africa, and we have great potential to firm up our early work in the USA to build the foundations of what we have created there so the wealth and opportunities in NYC can be shared with young people outside the margins around the world.
In the next month, we’ll announce next year’s Co-CEO and 2022 will see us working with a suite of corporates around the world to build their own Co-CEO pipeline.

In the space of storytelling, we are building up a world of mentoring to be brought to life by our wonderful Professors, taking on the challenge to make Puppets the mentor messengers for 16-24 year-olds – early next year we’ll give you the chance to crowdfund this project with us and make the 21st-century Sesame Street.

Plenty of good times to come, I’ve learned a lot about my leadership from the first stint, and from my time working as a designer,  I want to facilitate growth confident that we can be a force for good across my home continent and throughout the world.
Now we set our sights on ensuring mentoring can reach 100K kids worldwide per year by 2025, with 10,000 of them being Indigenous Australians connected to a global network. This accelerates the highways of exchange, with imagination as their superpower entering a century that is going to demand it.

To the next chapter,
Jack MB