Network building is difficult and made more so by constant turnover of key people in the network as well as constant introduction of tops down collaborations into a city, state or country. In addition, there is tend to fund hands-on work more than intermediary and organizing efforts. Finally, short term funding cycles, do little to support what is a long term process. I’ve been working to build a network of people and organizations who support youth in high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago since 1993 and have many positive and negative experience to share. I’ve piloted uses of maps, web sites, concept maps, and on-line documentation, yet still work in the shadows with very little support.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience. We are all too aware of these phenomena that you describe and thru this research are seeking to bring attention to the disconnect between the rhetoric around collaborations in the social sector and actual practice which often undermines the very collaborations that are purportedly being promoted. It is our hope that by shining a light on the networks and communites that leaders such as yourself have helped to catalyze and build, there will be more support for existing community based networks rather than a proliferation of new collaborations driven from the top down. The former often already have the critical foundation of trust built in and can make great gains in impact with a small infusion of support/resources while the latter may attract the resources at the outset but never get off the ground because the trust based relationships were never/could never be established
Daniel - David Ehrlichman and I have also observed what you describe. This is hard, gritty work, not for the fainthearted. You must be a network entrepreneur!
Yes! Insights resonate powerfully, almost as if our change efforts here were put under the microscope. Deeply appreciative to get to work amongst leaders willing to be vulnerable and do the hard intra-&inter;-personal work of connecting hearts, heads and hands to truly drive positive change. I Patrick Lencioni’s “The 5 Dysfunctions” offers a simple test compelling framework for embracing healthy, effective relationships necessary for driving/achieving results…perhaps a nice complement to the other resources you mentioned. Looking forward to reading more of this series.
This is a great summary of what Ashoka Globalizer calls the “Smart Network” approach to scaling social impact. I will incorporate some of your points in our toolkit.
Glad to hear that our work is a complement to the work that you are doing at Ashoka. We know that there are many practitioners demonstrating network leadership in their work. We are eager to support your efforts. We would like to hear from you and help share your stories. We truly believe that network entrepreneurship is the road that will lead us to efficient, effective, and sustained social change.
Glad to hear that our work is a complement to the work that you are doing at Ashoka. We know that there are many practitioners demonstrating network leadership in their work. We are eager to support your efforts. We would like to hear from you and help share your stories. We truly believe that network entrepreneurship is the road that will lead us to efficient, effective, and sustained social change.
I, too, am sympathetic to Daniel’s frustration. While you rightly call out key characteristics of a network entrepreneur. It takes a sender and a receiver to succeed. In my experience, the relational foundation is “shared” motive and values; in particular putting company and those you serve ahead of your Division or self. Beyond this, a s"hared” willingness to invest a minimum amount of time in building relationship; above which we can differentiate between quality and quantity. And, as you describe, a “shared” willingness to step out of your job description and help others succeed. These cannot be characteristics of the network leader only. They must be characteristics of all participants. The question for network entrepreneurs, how do we recruit for these characteristics?
John, thank you for these great points. I absolutely agree with you. Our view of the network entrepreneur is not one of a single, charismatic leader at the helm, but rather a community of leaders at multiple levels that demonstrate these network leadership principles in their day to day work. By adhering to these values, the various participants in the network develop a culture among the group that reinforces this set of ‘counter intuitive’ behaviors. A prime reason these principles are not more dominant in the field is simply because philanthropy generally has not incentivized, nor rewarded such behavior, but has instead done the opposite, investing in institutions, building big brands, predefined programs, and ‘stars’ rather than constellations of stars. However, as network cultures become established, these norms as defined by the 4 principles above are helpful for attracting others that share these values, and at the same time, peer accountability acts as a powerful mechanism to ensuring that all participants are leading according to these principles, even deselecting those that don’t ‘play well with others’. Having studied these successful networks for the past fifteen years, I can attest to the fact that communities of network entrepreneurs are indeed out there, but that it takes a fundamentally different set of search criteria to find them. Sometimes it is as simple as asking communities and beneficiaries which players have served the mission well, who has put their own interests behind those of the field, who has been a trustworthy partner, who do they most admire in the field etc? It will likely be a very different group of leaders that emerge than those that typically attract the most recognition or funding in the field.
Jane, I think networked leaders are out there, but not many are connected to each other, with a focus on the same areas of interest. Furthermore, I’m not sure how many are using the internet and building libraries of information intended to help others connect with each other, and with ideas…and are at the same time leading a personal crusade intended to shine the light on all of the people/organizations in their ecosystem, not just themselves. This PDF shows the learning network that I’ve been trying to build, with limited support, for nearly 20 years. https://www.scribd.com/doc/69918102/Tutor-Mentor-Institute-Learning-Network-Strategy I keep looking for others who outline their own strategy in similar type presentations. Those would be great people to connect with.
Daniel, we couldn’t agree with you more on the need to bring network entrepreneurs like yourself together since you so often work under the radar and in relative isolation in your respective fields. This role of convening is one that we (my coauthors David Sawyer and David Ehrlichman) have played when we hosted a dozen network entrepreneurs (many of whom will share their stories in this blog series) at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business in Spring 2015 for the very purpose that you suggest. We are continuing to explore how to best play this role to enable more leaders to share their success stories in their own words and attract much deserved space and support for your work. There is a huge opportunity for leveraged impact by seeking out, supporting, and investing in existing community networks that already have a track record for impact rather than forcing new collaborations with the blunt tool of funding. Through this series, we seek to bring greater attention to the opportunity that the former present.
Fantastic article. Your 4 operating principles sum up so eloquently a set of theme’s I’ve long noticed, but which are difficult to pin down given the pressures to advance one’s own agenda, organization, etc. This is a tremendous contribution to the ongoing dialogue about how think about collaboration as a type of organic civic infrastructure, rather than merely as a strategy one employs as an individual actor among other individual actors. Many thanks for the thoughtful framing.
Thank you for your article. There is tremendous discussion on strategies that use top down and bottom up rationale to support the structuring, trust building and creation of networks amongst social entrepreneurship. As these individuals evolve in their efforts to build sound companies they seek reliable and responsible contacts. It is important that entrepreneurs feel they can partner with others that share mutual interests and return to them at a later time for an exchange of services or a satisfactory interaction, and have confidence in their ability to do so.
I would have to reason that it isn’t really a question of top down or bottom up approach at all. Rather, I think it is either a centralized mission and intuitive sense in trust building that encompasses outward, and active engagement in the larger context of society, and seeing the various examples, scenarios and ways that various important players, thinkers and critiques make a difference in the world outside of themselves. It is their holistic experience within their communities and the way that they contribute, that helps to establish trust and reliability and confidence in bonds and collaboration based on action, not theoretically talking about goals and aspirations.
This paragraph from your article best represents that sort of concept:
“Like social entrepreneurs, they are visionary, ambitious, and relentless in pursuit of their missions. But where social entrepreneurs often struggle to scale their own organizations despite heroic efforts, a network entrepreneur’s approach expands far beyond the boundaries of their own organization, supporting peers and partners across sectors to solve the problem. Not surprisingly, the potential for impact increases exponentially when leaders leverage resources of all types—leadership, money, talent—across organizations and sectors toward a common goal. And as a result of this work, we celebrate the change-generating network itself above any single person or institution.”
Thank you for this great article and appreciations to the commentors for their thoughtful discourse! I would like to suggest a follow-up article on how the network entrepreneur can capitalize on their efforts.
Thank you Suzannah for the thoughtful suggestion. One key way that Network Entrepreneurs can capitalize on their efforts is to find funders who value and support this approach, which certainly is not easy. From my experience, network entrepreneurship is more often the exception rather than the norm among both foundations and nonprofit grantees. I have written other articles that seek to help funders understand how best to support (and how they often inadvertently hinder) network entrepreneurs and their respective networks, but it is still not common place for funders to provide patient capital, with flexibility for ongoing learning and adaption in the network. We continue to do work to advance the practice of network leadership in the field, so are open to reader suggestions for how to change the norms in the field. It will require a network of stakeholders to fundamentally transform the way that social impact work is done. There is still much work to be done and we welcome readers’ engagement on this.
As I read this, I am also thinking about how it would be great to have more conversation about who is in these networks and how we ensure not to build trust and mission but replicate the systems that are causing the underlying issues of inequity or climate change, etc. Many of us do not have the requisite experience in diversity and equity—and it is a muscle we should exercise profoundly within network building.
Thanks for your comment Miriam, we couldn’t agree with you more. Undoubtedly, a network’s potential for impact will be shaped by who is at the table. The social sector needs to make a much more concerted effort to engaging and mobilize not just the ‘usual suspects’, but also those participants at all levels that ‘you’ve never heard of’. Often, those closer to the problem, or even living the problem, are in a much better position to know how best it might be addressed.
Engaging and mobilizing more than the “usual suspects” means someone needs to be doing the research to learn “who all these people/organizations are” who are part of the same universe of people/organizations focused on a common issue. Without this, invitations will always reach only those known by whoever sends the invitations and will not include those who aren’t known, or who don’t seem important enough to include in an invitation.
For the past 20+ years I’ve been maintaining a list of non-school tutoring and/or mentoring programs in Chicago and of people who support them, study them, show why they are needed, and share ideas for ways to help them get better.
While I’ve more than 200 programs on my Chicago area programs list, my total web library has more than 2000 links.
Anyone can access this information by clicking through the four sections of this concept map. http://tinyurl.com/TMI-library
During the 1990s I maintained a FileMakerPro data base, which grew to nearly 14,000 names. I built this by adding names of programs and organization in my library as I learned about them. I sent everyone on this list a print newsletter three times a year to share ideas, point to information in the library, and invite people to connect in conferences and capacity-building events that I hosted. I stopped doing printed newsletters in 2003, when I ran out of money and the value of the database has eroded. While I continued to share ideas via email newsletters, many on the print list were no longer being reached.
I’ve used concept maps to show some of the people in my network. For instance this concept map shows other Chicago organizations serving as intermediaries, as I do. http://tinyurl.com/ChicagoYouthNetworks,
Anyone can use the map to get to know organizations they may not know, and to invite people they want to know to on-line or place-based events that help build relationships and stimulate idea-sharing. This is one of several similar maps that can be seen at http://www.tutormentorconference.org/conceptmaps.asp
If you browse through all of this information, it represents an ecosystem, a knowledge base, or as much of it as I’ve been able to identify, with very limited resources. If you look at this article, you’ll see a graphic that shows how the work I do is intended to support goals many want to see achieved. http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2013/04/community-wealth-building-anchor.html
All of the organizations I point to are the center of their own universe, most often, much larger than my own, with ties to hundreds of other people and organizations that they know, but I don’t yet know. Thus collectively, our network is much, much larger than what any one of us might know.
There’s much more that I’d be doing to help these organizations connect to each other if I had the resources so I’m not sharing this information to say “I’m the best.” By sharing I hope to connect with others doing similar work in other cities or causes, or who might want to support the work at the foundation-level of this process.
“the single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants.”
This really resonates with the work of my organization, Synergos. Building trust is essential - without it it’s difficult or impossible to build collaboration that is not just transactional.
At Synergos, we’ve been using an approach we call “bridging leadership” that is similar in many ways to network leadership.
In our experience, bridging leadership is a style of leadership that focuses on creating and sustaining effective working relationships among key partners and stakeholders. By “bridging” different perspectives and opinions often found across the breadth of different stakeholders, a common agenda can begin to be developed and shared in order to find solutions to social and economic problems.
We looked at the elements of bridging in another piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review at http://syngs.info/sa41
I find it fascinating to read about the new ideas and inventions out there that are changing the way we live and helping with global issues and concerns. I recently read a book that really reminds me of this post entitled “Financial Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid” by entrepreneurs and financial experts Carol Realini and Karl Mehta. The book focuses on the surprising number of people here in the states (as well as throughout the world) who do not take advantage of traditional financial services at the bank, why they don’t, and what can be done to make banking services more accessible and appealing. It was shocking to read the number of reasons why people can’t AFFORD having a bank account and all the companies out there looking to fix that. Financial inclusion is a very real issue and I found this book to be very innovative and informative. Here is the website: http://www.openfininc.org/
Thank you Leah, your book recommendation is extremely timely, I just purchased a copy to dive deeper.
We’re just starting to help build a financial network in Washington state to increase the financial resilience of the 1.7m unbanked and underbanked people across the state. We too are learning about the barriers that keep lower-income households from having a bank account and that keep many micro-enterprises from meeting conventional lending criteria.
The collaborative network solution, being pioneered by Express Advantage and its credit union partners, is to combine the products and services provided by CDFI credit unions with the charitable programs of a non profit (including financial coaching and accessible community tellers) to deliver affordable, accessible financial services and seamlessly crafted financial education to low and moderate income individuals and families. It has already proved to be extremely effective on a small scale. There are immense challenges ahead, but the hope is that this model, once scaled statewide, can ultimately become a case study to help decrease poverty and the fill the financial services gap nationwide. Stay tuned.
Ethereum. bitcoin, et al were all built on this idea. Even bigger radical disruptions are headed our way. Such as, disrupting the centralized startup and replacing it with decentralized foundups on the blockchain
COMMENTS
BY Daniel F. Bassill
ON September 16, 2015 02:12 PM
Network building is difficult and made more so by constant turnover of key people in the network as well as constant introduction of tops down collaborations into a city, state or country. In addition, there is tend to fund hands-on work more than intermediary and organizing efforts. Finally, short term funding cycles, do little to support what is a long term process. I’ve been working to build a network of people and organizations who support youth in high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago since 1993 and have many positive and negative experience to share. I’ve piloted uses of maps, web sites, concept maps, and on-line documentation, yet still work in the shadows with very little support.
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON September 16, 2015 03:54 PM
Thank you so much for sharing your experience. We are all too aware of these phenomena that you describe and thru this research are seeking to bring attention to the disconnect between the rhetoric around collaborations in the social sector and actual practice which often undermines the very collaborations that are purportedly being promoted. It is our hope that by shining a light on the networks and communites that leaders such as yourself have helped to catalyze and build, there will be more support for existing community based networks rather than a proliferation of new collaborations driven from the top down. The former often already have the critical foundation of trust built in and can make great gains in impact with a small infusion of support/resources while the latter may attract the resources at the outset but never get off the ground because the trust based relationships were never/could never be established
BY Sawyer, Converge
ON September 16, 2015 04:19 PM
Daniel - David Ehrlichman and I have also observed what you describe. This is hard, gritty work, not for the fainthearted. You must be a network entrepreneur!
BY Michelle
ON September 16, 2015 09:36 PM
Yes! Insights resonate powerfully, almost as if our change efforts here were put under the microscope. Deeply appreciative to get to work amongst leaders willing to be vulnerable and do the hard intra-&inter;-personal work of connecting hearts, heads and hands to truly drive positive change. I Patrick Lencioni’s “The 5 Dysfunctions” offers a simple test compelling framework for embracing healthy, effective relationships necessary for driving/achieving results…perhaps a nice complement to the other resources you mentioned. Looking forward to reading more of this series.
BY Odin Mühlenbein
ON September 17, 2015 07:59 AM
This is a great summary of what Ashoka Globalizer calls the “Smart Network” approach to scaling social impact. I will incorporate some of your points in our toolkit.
Thanks!
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON September 17, 2015 05:58 PM
Glad to hear that our work is a complement to the work that you are doing at Ashoka. We know that there are many practitioners demonstrating network leadership in their work. We are eager to support your efforts. We would like to hear from you and help share your stories. We truly believe that network entrepreneurship is the road that will lead us to efficient, effective, and sustained social change.
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON September 17, 2015 05:58 PM
Glad to hear that our work is a complement to the work that you are doing at Ashoka. We know that there are many practitioners demonstrating network leadership in their work. We are eager to support your efforts. We would like to hear from you and help share your stories. We truly believe that network entrepreneurship is the road that will lead us to efficient, effective, and sustained social change.
BY John McGeehan
ON September 18, 2015 07:10 AM
I, too, am sympathetic to Daniel’s frustration. While you rightly call out key characteristics of a network entrepreneur. It takes a sender and a receiver to succeed. In my experience, the relational foundation is “shared” motive and values; in particular putting company and those you serve ahead of your Division or self. Beyond this, a s"hared” willingness to invest a minimum amount of time in building relationship; above which we can differentiate between quality and quantity. And, as you describe, a “shared” willingness to step out of your job description and help others succeed. These cannot be characteristics of the network leader only. They must be characteristics of all participants. The question for network entrepreneurs, how do we recruit for these characteristics?
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON September 18, 2015 01:43 PM
John, thank you for these great points. I absolutely agree with you. Our view of the network entrepreneur is not one of a single, charismatic leader at the helm, but rather a community of leaders at multiple levels that demonstrate these network leadership principles in their day to day work. By adhering to these values, the various participants in the network develop a culture among the group that reinforces this set of ‘counter intuitive’ behaviors. A prime reason these principles are not more dominant in the field is simply because philanthropy generally has not incentivized, nor rewarded such behavior, but has instead done the opposite, investing in institutions, building big brands, predefined programs, and ‘stars’ rather than constellations of stars. However, as network cultures become established, these norms as defined by the 4 principles above are helpful for attracting others that share these values, and at the same time, peer accountability acts as a powerful mechanism to ensuring that all participants are leading according to these principles, even deselecting those that don’t ‘play well with others’. Having studied these successful networks for the past fifteen years, I can attest to the fact that communities of network entrepreneurs are indeed out there, but that it takes a fundamentally different set of search criteria to find them. Sometimes it is as simple as asking communities and beneficiaries which players have served the mission well, who has put their own interests behind those of the field, who has been a trustworthy partner, who do they most admire in the field etc? It will likely be a very different group of leaders that emerge than those that typically attract the most recognition or funding in the field.
BY Daniel F. Bassill
ON September 18, 2015 02:24 PM
Jane, I think networked leaders are out there, but not many are connected to each other, with a focus on the same areas of interest. Furthermore, I’m not sure how many are using the internet and building libraries of information intended to help others connect with each other, and with ideas…and are at the same time leading a personal crusade intended to shine the light on all of the people/organizations in their ecosystem, not just themselves. This PDF shows the learning network that I’ve been trying to build, with limited support, for nearly 20 years. https://www.scribd.com/doc/69918102/Tutor-Mentor-Institute-Learning-Network-Strategy I keep looking for others who outline their own strategy in similar type presentations. Those would be great people to connect with.
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON September 18, 2015 03:26 PM
Daniel, we couldn’t agree with you more on the need to bring network entrepreneurs like yourself together since you so often work under the radar and in relative isolation in your respective fields. This role of convening is one that we (my coauthors David Sawyer and David Ehrlichman) have played when we hosted a dozen network entrepreneurs (many of whom will share their stories in this blog series) at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business in Spring 2015 for the very purpose that you suggest. We are continuing to explore how to best play this role to enable more leaders to share their success stories in their own words and attract much deserved space and support for your work. There is a huge opportunity for leveraged impact by seeking out, supporting, and investing in existing community networks that already have a track record for impact rather than forcing new collaborations with the blunt tool of funding. Through this series, we seek to bring greater attention to the opportunity that the former present.
BY Bill Fulton
ON September 19, 2015 01:39 PM
Fantastic article. Your 4 operating principles sum up so eloquently a set of theme’s I’ve long noticed, but which are difficult to pin down given the pressures to advance one’s own agenda, organization, etc. This is a tremendous contribution to the ongoing dialogue about how think about collaboration as a type of organic civic infrastructure, rather than merely as a strategy one employs as an individual actor among other individual actors. Many thanks for the thoughtful framing.
BY Laura Merithew
ON September 24, 2015 07:54 AM
Thank you for your article. There is tremendous discussion on strategies that use top down and bottom up rationale to support the structuring, trust building and creation of networks amongst social entrepreneurship. As these individuals evolve in their efforts to build sound companies they seek reliable and responsible contacts. It is important that entrepreneurs feel they can partner with others that share mutual interests and return to them at a later time for an exchange of services or a satisfactory interaction, and have confidence in their ability to do so.
I would have to reason that it isn’t really a question of top down or bottom up approach at all. Rather, I think it is either a centralized mission and intuitive sense in trust building that encompasses outward, and active engagement in the larger context of society, and seeing the various examples, scenarios and ways that various important players, thinkers and critiques make a difference in the world outside of themselves. It is their holistic experience within their communities and the way that they contribute, that helps to establish trust and reliability and confidence in bonds and collaboration based on action, not theoretically talking about goals and aspirations.
This paragraph from your article best represents that sort of concept:
“Like social entrepreneurs, they are visionary, ambitious, and relentless in pursuit of their missions. But where social entrepreneurs often struggle to scale their own organizations despite heroic efforts, a network entrepreneur’s approach expands far beyond the boundaries of their own organization, supporting peers and partners across sectors to solve the problem. Not surprisingly, the potential for impact increases exponentially when leaders leverage resources of all types—leadership, money, talent—across organizations and sectors toward a common goal. And as a result of this work, we celebrate the change-generating network itself above any single person or institution.”
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON September 24, 2015 09:05 AM
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. Your points are well taken. We appreciate your highlighting this nuance.
BY Suzannah Simmons
ON September 27, 2015 08:55 AM
Thank you for this great article and appreciations to the commentors for their thoughtful discourse! I would like to suggest a follow-up article on how the network entrepreneur can capitalize on their efforts.
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON September 28, 2015 01:30 PM
Thank you Suzannah for the thoughtful suggestion. One key way that Network Entrepreneurs can capitalize on their efforts is to find funders who value and support this approach, which certainly is not easy. From my experience, network entrepreneurship is more often the exception rather than the norm among both foundations and nonprofit grantees. I have written other articles that seek to help funders understand how best to support (and how they often inadvertently hinder) network entrepreneurs and their respective networks, but it is still not common place for funders to provide patient capital, with flexibility for ongoing learning and adaption in the network. We continue to do work to advance the practice of network leadership in the field, so are open to reader suggestions for how to change the norms in the field. It will require a network of stakeholders to fundamentally transform the way that social impact work is done. There is still much work to be done and we welcome readers’ engagement on this.
BY Miriam Messinger
ON October 1, 2015 10:48 AM
As I read this, I am also thinking about how it would be great to have more conversation about who is in these networks and how we ensure not to build trust and mission but replicate the systems that are causing the underlying issues of inequity or climate change, etc. Many of us do not have the requisite experience in diversity and equity—and it is a muscle we should exercise profoundly within network building.
BY Jane Wei-Skillern
ON October 2, 2015 01:48 PM
Thanks for your comment Miriam, we couldn’t agree with you more. Undoubtedly, a network’s potential for impact will be shaped by who is at the table. The social sector needs to make a much more concerted effort to engaging and mobilize not just the ‘usual suspects’, but also those participants at all levels that ‘you’ve never heard of’. Often, those closer to the problem, or even living the problem, are in a much better position to know how best it might be addressed.
BY Daniel F. Bassill
ON October 2, 2015 02:47 PM
Engaging and mobilizing more than the “usual suspects” means someone needs to be doing the research to learn “who all these people/organizations are” who are part of the same universe of people/organizations focused on a common issue. Without this, invitations will always reach only those known by whoever sends the invitations and will not include those who aren’t known, or who don’t seem important enough to include in an invitation.
For the past 20+ years I’ve been maintaining a list of non-school tutoring and/or mentoring programs in Chicago and of people who support them, study them, show why they are needed, and share ideas for ways to help them get better.
While I’ve more than 200 programs on my Chicago area programs list, my total web library has more than 2000 links.
Anyone can access this information by clicking through the four sections of this concept map. http://tinyurl.com/TMI-library
During the 1990s I maintained a FileMakerPro data base, which grew to nearly 14,000 names. I built this by adding names of programs and organization in my library as I learned about them. I sent everyone on this list a print newsletter three times a year to share ideas, point to information in the library, and invite people to connect in conferences and capacity-building events that I hosted. I stopped doing printed newsletters in 2003, when I ran out of money and the value of the database has eroded. While I continued to share ideas via email newsletters, many on the print list were no longer being reached.
I’ve used concept maps to show some of the people in my network. For instance this concept map shows other Chicago organizations serving as intermediaries, as I do. http://tinyurl.com/ChicagoYouthNetworks,
Anyone can use the map to get to know organizations they may not know, and to invite people they want to know to on-line or place-based events that help build relationships and stimulate idea-sharing. This is one of several similar maps that can be seen at http://www.tutormentorconference.org/conceptmaps.asp
If you browse through all of this information, it represents an ecosystem, a knowledge base, or as much of it as I’ve been able to identify, with very limited resources. If you look at this article, you’ll see a graphic that shows how the work I do is intended to support goals many want to see achieved. http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2013/04/community-wealth-building-anchor.html
All of the organizations I point to are the center of their own universe, most often, much larger than my own, with ties to hundreds of other people and organizations that they know, but I don’t yet know. Thus collectively, our network is much, much larger than what any one of us might know.
There’s much more that I’d be doing to help these organizations connect to each other if I had the resources so I’m not sharing this information to say “I’m the best.” By sharing I hope to connect with others doing similar work in other cities or causes, or who might want to support the work at the foundation-level of this process.
BY John Tomlinson - Synergos
ON October 5, 2015 01:35 PM
“the single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants.”
This really resonates with the work of my organization, Synergos. Building trust is essential - without it it’s difficult or impossible to build collaboration that is not just transactional.
At Synergos, we’ve been using an approach we call “bridging leadership” that is similar in many ways to network leadership.
In our experience, bridging leadership is a style of leadership that focuses on creating and sustaining effective working relationships among key partners and stakeholders. By “bridging” different perspectives and opinions often found across the breadth of different stakeholders, a common agenda can begin to be developed and shared in order to find solutions to social and economic problems.
We looked at the elements of bridging in another piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review at http://syngs.info/sa41
BY LeahCippioni
ON October 13, 2015 07:46 AM
I find it fascinating to read about the new ideas and inventions out there that are changing the way we live and helping with global issues and concerns. I recently read a book that really reminds me of this post entitled “Financial Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid” by entrepreneurs and financial experts Carol Realini and Karl Mehta. The book focuses on the surprising number of people here in the states (as well as throughout the world) who do not take advantage of traditional financial services at the bank, why they don’t, and what can be done to make banking services more accessible and appealing. It was shocking to read the number of reasons why people can’t AFFORD having a bank account and all the companies out there looking to fix that. Financial inclusion is a very real issue and I found this book to be very innovative and informative. Here is the website: http://www.openfininc.org/
BY David Ehrlichman, Converge - [url=http://www.convergeforimpact.com]http://www.convergeforimpact.com[/url]
ON October 14, 2015 08:51 AM
Thank you Leah, your book recommendation is extremely timely, I just purchased a copy to dive deeper.
We’re just starting to help build a financial network in Washington state to increase the financial resilience of the 1.7m unbanked and underbanked people across the state. We too are learning about the barriers that keep lower-income households from having a bank account and that keep many micro-enterprises from meeting conventional lending criteria.
The collaborative network solution, being pioneered by Express Advantage and its credit union partners, is to combine the products and services provided by CDFI credit unions with the charitable programs of a non profit (including financial coaching and accessible community tellers) to deliver affordable, accessible financial services and seamlessly crafted financial education to low and moderate income individuals and families. It has already proved to be extremely effective on a small scale. There are immense challenges ahead, but the hope is that this model, once scaled statewide, can ultimately become a case study to help decrease poverty and the fill the financial services gap nationwide. Stay tuned.
BY FOUNDUPS Michael J Trout
ON July 31, 2016 06:09 PM
Ethereum. bitcoin, et al were all built on this idea. Even bigger radical disruptions are headed our way. Such as, disrupting the centralized startup and replacing it with decentralized foundups on the blockchain
BY Tin tức ô tô
ON April 15, 2018 11:04 PM
Very good article post.Much thanks again. Cool.