Selected conversations and profiles about my work with SINA, the practice of freesponsibility and how people develop through real responsibility. For interview requests or background information, contact etienne@salborn.com.
Recognition & Profiles
Thinkers50 Leaders50 · 2024
Included in Thinkers50’s inaugural Leaders50, recognising inspiring leaders from organizations around the world. The selection connects the work of practising leaders with the people who research and write about leadership.
Capital · Germany’s Top 40 under 40 · 2025
Selected for Capital magazine’s annual recognition of young leaders in Germany.
AACSB Influential Leaders · 2021
AACSB’s profile traces the development from educational sponsorships through Jangu e.V. to SINA, and the role of experiential learning in helping young people build social enterprises.
MIT D-Lab · Innovation Ecosystem Builder Fellow · 2018
My profile from the MIT D-Lab fellowship, an early reference point in the development of SINA’s wider ecosystem.
Podcasts & Interviews
Leadermorphosis · With Tonny Wamboga
What does self-organization ask of people who grew up being taught to obey? Tonny Wamboga and I join Lisa Gill to discuss how people learn to hold authority at SINA, the misunderstandings that arise, and what freesponsibility means in daily practice.
The Impact Multiplier CEO · Creating 100,000 Change-Makers
A conversation with Richard Medcalf about SINA’s beginnings and the challenge of developing leadership that can grow without every decision returning to its founder.
Selected Talk
Purpose over Positions · World Agility Forum
Using SINA as a case study, I explore how purpose and shared responsibility shape an organization, and what leadership looks like when authority is distributed through roles.
For Journalists & Hosts
I welcome conversations about how authority is distributed in practice, how people learn through responsibility, and what it takes to build social enterprises from challenges people know firsthand.
Topics include freesponsibility and organizational self-management, entrepreneurship education, refugee-led innovation, and the changing role of a founder as an organization grows.
For a request, please include the publication or programme, the subject you want to explore, and your proposed format and deadline.
Biography
Etienne Salborn is a changemaker-maker and the founder of SINA (Social Innovation Academy), a movement of self-organized learning communities where disadvantaged and refugee youth stop waiting for permission and create their own futures as social entrepreneurs. His journey began in 2006 as a volunteer in Uganda, where he started an educational sponsorship program for orphans. Years later, when the first sponsored youth finished school and still found no jobs, no university access, and no way forward, they co-created what became SINA. Today, the SINA Framework is rooted in freesponsibility and turns real roles, lived challenges, and community decision-making into the curriculum. SINA has grown to 24 SINA Communities across ten countries and gave birth to over 150 social enterprises, which have created about 2,000 jobs. Originally from Germany, Etienne has called Uganda home since 2013 with his Ugandan wife and two children. He has been named among the Leaders50, Germany’s 40 under 40, an AACSB Influential Leader, and an Innovation Ecosystem Builder by MIT D-Lab.
Photographs
For other high-resolution portraits or photographs of the work at SINA, please contact me with your intended use. Photographer credits will be provided with the images.
More Voices from SINA
Many of the people best placed to discuss SINA’s work are the people running its Communities and building its social enterprises. If your story calls for a particular perspective, we can help connect you.