“Igniting vibrant communities.” “The intersection of money and meaning.” These are often used buzz words in the world of social enterprise and, in fact, the tag lines of SOCAP, a San Francisco-based organization and its seminal annual conference. But what do they mean? And how do they translate to real change in people’s lives? All of us who work in the field of economic development want to do just that — but in what ways can we claim an impact on these populations we’re dedicated to serving?
I had the privilege of sitting on a panel last week at the SOCAP14 conference for a session called The Reinvention of Mentoring: Activating Our Community’s Wisdom. The session was the last Friday of the four-day event attended by nearly 2,000 folks from around the world, and I didn’t have high expectations for attendance. The two sessions I attended earlier that morning, Food and Technology: How Does Technological Innovation Foster Sustainability? and Getting to the Heart of the Bay Area’s Financial Ecosystem, were both really rich in content, expertise and provocative points of view. And each attracted an engaged audience of about 20–30.
I was blown away by the participation of nearly 100 conference goers at my mentoring session. This attendance really demonstrated to me that there is a thirst across the world right now for mentorship. Seemingly everyone that could not only showed up in the room, but wanted to participate—stand up and ask for help and/or offer the help they thought they could to an individual or organization that is similarly using business as a force for social change.
Technology Has Power, But People Have Purpose
What occurred to me through the course of the conversation (that PCV Co-Founder Penelope Douglas) did a masterful job of facilitating) was that my fellow panelists and I work every day to try to connect entrepreneurs and small business owners with expertise coming from a wide range of places—Wall Street to rural Kentucky to Dubai—and now many of us are using technology to help facilitate that connecting process. But at the end of the day, our work is truly igniting vibrant communities—we are formalizing the informal act of finding a trusted advisor and truly helping people predisposed to be able to have a positive influence on each other by lending, and accepting, an outreached hand.
We think a vibrant community gets ignited through building impactful relationships. For example, worker-owned Arizmendi Bakery, head quartered in Marin County, heard about www.businessadvising.pcv.wpengine.com through a relative. One of their worker/owners signed up to get an advisor. That worker/owner ended up leaving the organization but another member of the team saw the great impact of the advising relationship and actually took on the advising engagement herself. The vibrant community and impact of the relationship extended to a larger circle of influence.
Similarly, Triple BK Landscaping not only received a loan from PCV but we were able to connect them with another www.businessadvising.pcv.wpengine.com customer, and Triple BK became a preferred vendor for Flora Grubb Gardens and are adding employees to meet the growing demand for their services. We just can’t anticipate how impactful these relationships will be to their respective communities.
Communities Don’t Exist Without Human Contact
Technology can facilitate human contact, but the vibrant community comes from the people we connect, not the platform we offer. At PCV, we’re hanging our hat on the premise that in order to fully quench the thirst for mentorship and advising that exists in our country, we need technology to help us reach, but we need people to help us quench the thirst. Technology is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. We’re not replacing people, but using people to their highest and best use—increasing the direct proportion of their time connecting with other people.
Does The Private Sector Have Any Business In Economic Development?
And what excites me most about PCV every day is that we’re actually bringing about a model of economic development — something that most of us think is work only for governments at the local and state level — and we’re innovating in this field from the private sector. We’re helping to make small businesses stronger and better poised for growth and success. And their success has the economic outcomes that we care so much about influencing. In this way, we really are at the intersection of meaning and money. I get it. I’m proud that PCV is helping quench the thirst by recruiting and managing our incredible network of volunteer advisors, to help small business owners from across the country ‘not go it alone’. And I’m grateful every day for the incredible volunteer advisors who participate in our network, lend their expertise and improve the lives of small business owners across the country every day.
Buzzword Debunk
I guess at the end of the day I can confidently say, as an executive leader in a nonprofit that purports to do this work, we can define ‘igniting vibrant communities’ as connecting people to help solve small business problems, and that we work at the intersection of money and meaning. We do have lasting impact and create real change in peoples’ lives. Buzz words or not, we’re impacting the lives of the people we aim to serve. I can drink to that.
Read more about SOCAP 2014 and the next steps for impact investing, in this post by Beth Sirull.