Accelerating collective #socent impact? @ci2iglobal is born in the afterglow of #we_b

Below is a lyrical personal story of what recently happened when I invited some worldshaping women friends to Brussels in January 2012, to co-host an experimental co-creation lab for accelerating global social impact and innovation.

I compiled these images and wrote this story (without twitter handles or links) for a Pecha Kucha evening in Brussels on 25 January, which means I had only 20 seconds to speak about each image - that's  6 min 40 sec total to tell the whole story of what was an extremely transformative experience. It didn't go perfectly, but all in all, a great learning by doing experience I can highly recommend for sharpening your changemaker presentation and storytelling skills.

I would also share that collaging and then turning the story lyrical in the days following these events were both very intense, even catalytic ways, to distill and harvest what really happened for me. I have mindfully told this from a very personal perspective, because I can't say at all that the deep shift which happened for me is representative of what everyone at the #we_b event experienced.

I do know that the whole @ci2iglobal group, however, continues to be deeply moved by what we experienced together with the amazing #we_b participants, and in our debrief and planning session after the event (not to mention dancing together until 4 in the morning in between those!).

Enjoy the story ~ I'd love comments on how it makes you feel.

(You can click on each image to see a larger version, if you need to.)

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This is a story about a mosaic 

of social entrepreneurs, changemakers and worldshapers. 

In my belief system, they are the living angels 

in which the hope of our planet currently lies. 

It’s a her-story.

that’s becoming 

a history of WE-stories.

It’s a story about accelerating the work of “changemakers” around the world.

And since I am one of them, it’s also my story. 

I first fell in love with the simple word “WE”

when I was using it to catalyze 

Webbed Empowerment 

in an East African warzone.

I'd been amazed when 

an organization “labelled” me 

a “leading changemaker” 

because of essentially personal passions 

I was pursuing.

But I became aware in those days 

that there were other people like me, 

who were driven to serve the world 

by something different inside. 

My passion for WE 

moved with later me to Brussels, 

where I’ve explored & found 

work for myself in the emerging 

global changemaker scene.

There’s lots of us now! 

At the start of this year (2012), I invited five friends 

- fellow women changemakers -

to gather from 3 continents at my home.

Each in unique ways they are my angels, and

We see eye to eye on many things.

our plan was to have a conversation

and to host a conversation 

about accelerating collective 

global changemaker impact and innovation. 

We invited a few people we knew

to join us for an experiment in Brussels. 

that we called in the invitation "#we_b."

We also committed ourselves 

to moving a conversation forward

around the world in the next 2 years. 

Worldchanging folks heard the call 

and gathered with us for this first ever WE_x co-creation lab. 

The inspiring space filled with awe inspiring people 

Their uniquely powerful energies 

humbled us 

as we bumbled through 

our group’s first time working together as a team

Round 1 of group introductions confirmed 

it would be a very exciting day

We were 20 changemakers

from 9 countries

with work on 5 continents

and unlimited passion in the room

into this pool of empowered people 

we unleashed systems thinking content

and co-creative processes

and personal reflection.

With ease the group sparked and taught each other

about how the changemaker space is emerging today, 

and explored what that could mean for each of us.

For 12 hours we conversed, we played, we ate, and made plans.

It was exhausting and exhilerating at the same time.

I learned so much. 

One framework that cut naturally across

many of our conversations was

the @Thrivable action spectrum, 

proposed by Jean who was there to share from Chicago 

Seeing our actions as changemakers 

through the lens of 

what we can control

what we can guide

and what we can nurture

was so grounding.

a collective sigh of relief

seemed to ripple through

this group of often 

over-committed over-achievers 

as we got this.

Christelle from Paris

provoked us to think about impact 

in terms of social risk and opportunity 

How might we invite 

new conversations with old system institutions and corporations,  

that re-frame the story of why social inclusion matters? 

What if 

creating social impact 

was valued in terms of 

reducing social risk? 

Bonnie from Chicago and Carolina from Buenos Aires

led discussions about scaling impact which left us wondering:

Must we all scale our impact?

Or can we find ways to work together 

to achieve the impacts we seek at scale? 

There is only so much each of us can do, 

to control, guide, & nurture 

the world’s current transformation.

But collectively

We are a new landscape 

that’s daring to emerge

and through modeling with clay we learned:

We each define the impact we seek to create in this lifetime,

We each bring our own dynamic to the landscape,

and We each determine the direction we face 

as we keep moving forward to serve 

Our group included changemakers 

at every stage of the European talent pipeline. 

we were students and start-ups,

consultants and thought leaders and 

directors from globally operating organizations

We’re still developing the basic language 

to talk about what we do,

and why we do what we do. 

Our simplest shared truth is that 

we exist as a real community of human beings 

who feel called to live our lives in service to the earth’s 

transformation today. 

It might sound to some of you

like our heads are in the clouds.

But as an angel who joined us reminded me, 

each of us sees something different in the clouds. 

and learning from what we all see

is the essence of the magic 

that tapping into our collective wisdom offers. 

The perspective we gain when we gather 

helps all of us to see how to reach higher

another nugget from her, and this frilly doodle 

that floated in from one of the many flipcharts

have given me a new appreciation for ginger lately

Did you know that ginger is a rhizome? 

I’m told it’s a unique biological concept, 

that needs no beginning or end to grow

the nodes grow where they are called to grow 

without any perceptible effort

like the conversation that #we_b became

So people left us inspired, 

some embarked on new paths of commitment and collaboration

The conversation moved online

with #we_b angels like @ladyniasan and others

organizing themselves to connect and 

to share all their many thoughts. 

But although this first #we_x lab was done

we knew, 

the real harvest was yet to come.

In the afterglow 

a warmth of women’s wisdom infused my Brussels home,

where we debriefed and distilled, 

seeking meaning in it all

for another 12 hours.

With a renewed sense of common purpose, 

but still without clarity on what we’d actually done, 

we pondered ci2i logo options and 

discussed and discussed and 

asked ourselves, 

again and again

Where does the #we_b conversation lead us? 

For me personally, clarity came

once everyone else had finally gone.

In the house all empty and reflective 

The silence started rumbling 

as an organized unjumbling

of the many thoughts in my head

began to crystalize 

and spill itself 

onto the screen. 

It was our ci2i group’s mosaic 

of content and tools and process and future plans. 

It that thing that drives me on this path.

Forming a clear picture
where there hadn’t been one before

of an approach - our collective approach - 

to nurturing the changemaker’s call 

to learn and become

who we are and what we can do

in this emerging new landscape 

we're co-creating. 

Working together to guide this discovery

in ourselves and in others, 

is a natural way forward 

my angels see eye to eye on 

and I love it 

since there is nothing else we can control. 

For each changemaker carries our own cross for change

and follows our own integrated personal and professional development path,

that leads us toward the kind of impact on this transformation that 

we are each here to make.

And every day, 

more and more brilliant and 

driven people 

are picking their up their own crosses for change

and pursuing journeys in service to the earth's renewal, 

toward humanity's higher good. 

Look around and see us everywhere, 

gathering in places like Brussels every day.

Are you one of us?

I’m glad they like ginger in Thailand,

since Chiang Mai is the next step in my own unique journey

Now preparing for new projects in the orient 

I feel oriented. 

#we_b was a powerful affirmation for me

of the the thriving existence of a global tribe 

to which I know I belong.

I can only wonder 

at what we’ll see 

at #we_c !!

===== end =======

Special gratitudes to @appliedwisdom, @bonniekoenig, @christellevh @carolinatocalli @nurturegirl and the #we_b participants for all the amazing inspiration.

Thanks to you as well for reading and commenting if you feel so inspired. Feel free to share.

Follow us collectively at @c2iglobal

I'm at @ChristinasWorld

What is a Changemaker, and how do I become one?

I have been having fun with this presentation lately as a conversation starter with groups of aspiring changemakers. I originally prepared it for a group of HUB Brussels members and Dutch civil sector students who were visiting the HUB on their European study tour.

Earlier this week, I recycled it for a round-table discussion at the Maastricht University Business School. What an honor to learn from those engaging young talents!

What is a changemaker, and how do I become one? on Prezi

What is a Changemaker? Reflections on Ashoka's EACH Vision and the Changemaker's Campus at #ACW2011

During the second quarter of this year, I had the honor of working with Ashoka Paris and a global team of professional group conversation facilitators in hosting a 3 day set of dynamic dialogues at the first ever Ashoka Changemaker's Campus.  Our theme was building Ashoka's Everyone A CHangemaker or "EACH" Vision.

Months before June's global event, when I had just signed on to help the Paris team and was presenting some ideas for feedback from the rapidly growing Ashoka Belgium group, someone from a local company asked me "but what do you actually mean by the word changemaker?"

I remember winging an answer that most of the room seemed to feel comfortable with at the time, but today - yes, even after helping to organize and attending the Changemaker's Campus in Paris, I am still not 100% sure that my definition of a changemaker is the same as how others in my professional space use it. If I have learned nothing else in my years of exploring the emerging "changemaker space," it's that we tend to have lots of issues with semantics. In the end, that might not be such a bad thing.

Are you a Changemaker? 

Of course you are - even if you're not calling yourself that yet.... and no, you actually don't have to participate in a changemaker campus to be one!

As I see us, we changemakers are a rapidly growing global tribe of hearts with minds who dare to accept and embrace that we actually can have a world where EVERYONE has the means and incentive to contribute to a thrivable human existence on this planet. We are the Blessed Unrest that Paul Hawken writes of - the largest movement in the world that nobody saw coming.

When I close my eyes and allow myself to see the EACH Vision as we embody it now, we are a beautifully gleaming mosaic of social innovators, social entrepreneurs, social investors, social enterprises, social ecosystem builders, socially engaged corporations, community based initiatives, NGOs, Foundations, LC3's, community action networks, government agencies, informed & engaged consumers, philanthropists, volunteers, moms, dads, kids and grandparents ALL OVER THE WORLD who have already decided and who will eventually decide to work together more and more, in big and small ways, to turn the world around, and set our planet's human development on a sustainable course for a thrivable future.

There we were at the Changemaker's Campus. 1000 of us with power networks, ready to reach across sectors and silos and backgrounds to start thinking big about growing the number of changemakers everywhere. We were bankers and policy wonks, practitioners and investors, corporations and consultants, and cutting edge social innovators from every corner of the globe tackling complex human challenges in incredibly exciting ways. We lived on campus at HEC, one of France's most prestigious business schools. We ran into each other to linger over serendipitous conversations in the long halls, outside of state of the art classrooms, where we learned from each other about our collective potential to build a world where the EACH vision could become real. 

The Changemaker's Campus main 2 day "EACH program," with 3 cross-cutting collaboration tracks (which followed a special sectorally themed cluster program), turned out to be a delightfully gooey and messy banana split of an event experience (with drums sprinkled on top!), where the many flavors present worked wonderfully well together.  For three days, we experienced the special magic that happens whenever changemakers gather. Idea sparks flew, mountains moved, foundations were built, and our collective sense of resolve and direction was sharpened. 

There was a collectively intoxicating giddiness in the sudden knowing: 

• that we are many; 
• that we are powerful; 
• that we are very real and growing daily in our reach.

Changemakers are everywhere among us, already playing your parts to make the world a better place in large and small ways - many of us only beginning to understand the power of the impact we can have on the world with our personal choices about how we spend our time and money. Some of us are driving change from within the towers of industry, some of us are generous in helping out with crowdfunding and online votes for projects our friends send us links to. Some of us are driving innovation from within communities of likeminded people; some among us will influence new national policies, and millions of others of us are influencing the economy through spending habits that we are increasingly linking to the kind of impact we want our households to make in the world. 

Ashoka's Founder, Bill Drayton, proposes that teaching empathy in elementary schools would create a next generation of changemakers that would really kick the building of a more peaceful society into overdrive. I couldn't agree more. But frankly, I also don't think we'll need to wait for those kids to grow up before we start witnessing an intense acceleration of Changemaker activity in the world. I personally sense that the most important "big thing" we must begin doing together is to work harder at measuring and showing the collective impact of the (billions?) of Changemaker actions that are now happening 24/7, all over the planet.

My call to all of us is what are we all measuring, and what can we start measuring together? Which indicators, which targets, which micro-level actions and trends can growing groups of us commit to measuring together, in ways that can help all of us more clearly see and understand the new world that is emerging through our collective actions?  How wonderful it would be if we could figure out how to use our networks of networks to build bridges to a shared new perspective on what our unique pieces of the global change puzzle look like, when we are able to look at them together. 

Co-creating a world where Everyone is a Changemaker involves all of us who believe in a better world taking a frank look inward, at our own personal values and potential value to society, and making choices in our lives that reflect the kind of human beings we want to be, and the kind of change in the global human condition that we want to be a part of.  It is up to each of us, the world's people who choose to work and buy and invest in the part of society that believes in the betterment of humanity, to build our own bridges to a thriving new reality, and personally choose to walk over them. 

Finding your own comfort zone within the Everyone A Changemaker vision is a transcendence of all political dogma; it's not a passing new age fad. It's about choosing to identify yourself with the growing global tribe that knows the world’s best kept secret: that alongside the armageddon of crumbling global economic and political systems we all see in the news lately, other kinds of widespread positive change in the human condition are possible and increasingly real today, thanks to the growing millions of individuals, families, organizations and institutions that are engaging in new kinds of dynamic alliances across silos, across boundaries, and across dogma to co-create it. The world we are building holds empathy for the human condition at it’s core.


There is hope. 

Look around you, people. See the bridges to a more just society around you everywhere, and choose to walk into the reality of building and being the better world you believe in. We changemakers are the anti-conspiracy movement that’s opening up new possibilities for each and every person on the planet to thrive, in an inclusive, cooperative and a thriving world. 

Trust me, even if reading this blog post is the first time you’ve ever thought of yourself as a changemaker in whatever position life finds you, I can assure you it won’t be the last time in your lifetime that you will be called upon to reflect on the impact you can make in building a better world. We are taking over the world's leading business schools. We are infiltrating old institutions and (not so covertly) co-creating some new ones. We are sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, parents and grandparents from all over the world who are embracing this life’s large and small opportunities to redress local and global imbalances.  

Surely if you have access to the information today that leads you to this post, you are already  powerful beyond measure in what you know you can do with a few simple searches or clicks to support your favorite cause, social action or concern. What I guess I’m really saying Paris gave me is a certainty that more of those kinds of easy choices, on many levels in our lives, are yet to come. Changemakers at all levels of society are conspiring to create a world where all of us doing our part is as easy and natural as breathing.  If you don’t think you are a changemaker yet, you will be... we are making sure of that :-)  

#gratitude to Ashoka for allowing me to play such an active role in thinking through HOW to host the amazing event that the Changemaker’s Campus became, and to the amazing group of facilitators who lived up to the trust I place in them to help make the event "anything but a conference." I loved the experience and feel transformed in my thinking about my own potential value as a Changemaker because of it.


Feeling inspired? Share this post with some budding changemakers in your life and pass the positive energy along :-)

Part 3/4: A Social Business Plan for Serving the #socent Community: Collaborating to Build a Values Driven Collective

A vision is (and can only ever be) a framework for anchoring our thinking. What becomes "real" from a vision is always (and can only ever be) a reflection of how it resonates with others, especially with people who have the will to make what they see in it real.

Since I began writing about the Consultancy idea last month, some interesting people I know have shown an interest in moving forward to make it real. Some I reached out to, some got in touch when they read my posts here, some already know each other. Instead of writing a blog post to share with them the next bit of info about this vision that I'd planned to share, I've turned to prezi for help.  It's embedded below.

The inspiration to serve

Every vision is initially selfish - sharing it starts with admitting what I want. What does my mind's eye see in my dreams of what I would love to be able to be a part of on a daily basis? What kind of legacy do I want this endeavor to leave on me as a person, as I eventually transition again and keep moving on into my old age?

So I admit it - if I am going to be building something new at this point in my life, I want to be investing my time in something that helps me to achieve an alignment between my core essential values and my professional life. I would also like to work with others whose personal values and professional integrity I have reason to trust, and who are also seeking alignment with their personal values in their lives as innovators.  In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that kind of alignment really needs to happen more if we are going to maximize the potential effectiveness of deploying social entrepreneurs as a cross-dimensional workforce in the world.

Last week, I managed to gather 7 amazing people together on a group call, and shared some thoughts on how we might structure and finance the start-up of a member governed Consultancy Collective that would help it's members - Social Entrepreneurs - to build dynamic careers that are strengthened by nurturing our core personal values.

Of course, the challenge in sharing a vision is to articulate it in a way that others will be able to see clearly enough, to be able to find that they want it too. The blog post I was trying to write wasn't working. I am still not sure the prezi captures everything I needed to say at this point, but it's out of my head and some next steps are already planned, so things are moving.  

And what about you? Do you see anything in the prezi that resonates with what you want? if yes, feel free to reach out.

The Big Idea

Consultancy Collective on Prezi

Where to now?

Space for the emergence of whatever should happen next is now open around all of the people who have already been involved in discussions about these ideas.

Present on last week's call and tentatively on the list of potential Builders are Sharon Bylenga, Simone Poutnik, Jean Russell, Christelle Van Ham, Bonnie Koenig, Cheryl Cooper and me, Christina Jordan. (Disclosure: yes, I have tweaked the prezi a tiny bit more since I shared it with the group.)

I will also be sending the prezi to former colleagues in consulting Marie-Astrid Corbisier, Michel Cervesato, and Walter DeSchepper (whom I have spoken to but who were not present on the call), as well as to Antonella Notari, Yann Borgstedt, Jennifer Milliken, and Jonathon Hirons, who all represent potential partnership opportunities I have been nurturing, and who should - for the sake of transparency - be aware of the bigger picture emerging behind the ideas I will be proposing to them in the coming days & weeks.

If you have a prior working relationship with any of the people noted above and you find the idea of getting involved as a "builder" worth discussing further, please reach out through your personal channels to get connected, and we'll talk.

Part 2/4: A Social Business Plan for Serving the #socent Community: Co-creating how we present ourselves

A key cornerstone to developing the unique consultancy practice I've written about will be the quality of our database of social entrepreneurs who are vetted, willing and available to be deployed on short term consultancy assignments related to their skills and sectoral/issue based knowledge.

When it comes to initially recruiting potential consultants, the prestigious "labeling" networks such as Ashoka, Skoll Foundation and Schwab Foundation offer existing vetting processes and profiles that we can hopefully build upon.  Asking those agencies' input on identifying their Fellows who fit the "post-late-stage" description comes to mind as a great place to start approaching those important standard-setting organizations with value we can help them to add to their Fellow's experience. 

However, we will need a scalable framework for effectively tapping into an even broader range of dynamic social entrepreneur talent pools than the "big" labeling networks alone can offer.  To that end, I am proposing a database development process that includes at least 6 months of gathering direct potential stakeholder input as described below.

Engaging our potential consultants in designing how we present their experience to potential clients will enable us to explore a variety of ways we can plan to leverage the value of the database we build, for maximum impact on the growth of all of our consultants' primary activities. It will also give us the knowledge of our consultants capacities we'll need to begin developing differentiated pricing models and quality control systems for the kinds of value added services we can confidently claim to offer.  

The inspiration to serve

After a presentation I recently gave at a #140confBrussels gathering, another of the speakers persuaded me of the "black hole of information" that he told me futurists are saying will exist around the recorded history from our time. As I understood his argument, too much valuable new information is being created in digital age real time that we are not yet capturing and sorting for historical knowledge sharing purposes.  Even powerful tools like the amazing wayback machine are having trouble keeping up with the pace of new online content growth in a self-sustaining way.

So here's how I see it: If we want today's stories of social change to matter in the world, it is incumbent upon us to start building our history, and keeping a clear record of what we are gaining experience in and collectively achieving in the global changemaker space. I have been feeling a need to redefine how we profile ourselves for many years, and am thrilled to see that new online mapping tools like OpenAction.org are finally making it easier to imagine creating profiles for social entrepreneurs that, I believe, can add considerable value to our unique professional potential.

The big idea

Building a successful commercial consulting practice will involve developing an up-to-date database of the relevant experience that our workforce of consultants has to offer, which reflects the variety of current operational expertise we have to draw from in designing and deploying consulting teams to meet our clients' needs.  The internet offers us increasing shapes and forms of content to link to in evidence of that operational experience. Mapping technologies like what OpenAction.org is able to render make it possible now (finally) for individuals within a community to seamlessly and effectively consolidate a broad range of online content activity from different platforms, into a single profile and archive building interface.

If we begin to use that kind of technology to deliberately build upon the value of an individual changemaker's big and small cutting edge activities and achievements - historically and in real time - we will have also created something more. Our database of consultants, which is also in effect a trust based network with a high propensity of face-to-face connections, becomes a unique platform for showcasing what our experts' endeavors are achieving, have achieved, and even need help with right now.  Our database of links to the full range of a Social Entrepreneurs activities that are visible online becomes an "online superstore" of social change-related activities that can serve to invite repeated stakeholder and fan engagement.

In the consulting database of social entrepreneurs I am imagining, we would be encouraged to configure our profiles to automatically keep our resumes up to date with active links that offers a full picture of our operational experience, expertise and output. For example:

• video media about our projects
• business & community services our projects offer
• books we have written that are for sale
• socent competitions we participate in
• awards & distinctions we have received
• physical products our projects are selling 
• crowdsourcing campaigns we are spearheading
• other funding models we are experimenting with
• financing campaigns we have recently contributed to
• reports we have submitted from completed assignments 
• social media channels we are using to tell our ongoing stories
• feedback from our clients and teammates about our work on completed assignments

A collective digital space that pulls together links to this kind of content from a collection of the world's leading social entrepreneurs would not only give us a powerful platform through which to find, deploy and share about operational expertise, but would effectively serve to increase the visibility of every campaign, product for good and other kind of fundraising initiative listed in it.

Who benefits, how?

Our consulting practice will benefit from using technology that can tap into a wide range of evolving activities that our consultants are engaged in to create & demonstrate their impact;

Our partners and clients will benefit from the ability to see, find and personally invest in the ever changing landscape of social change that's emerging around people they personally know and trust;

The current and past Social Enterprise projects our community of senior experts has launched would all benefit from visibility within an online superstore of social change-related initiatives that invites engagement with each individual experts' current, past and future endeavors.

Most importantly, participating Social Entrepreneurs will benefit. 

In fact, an evolving profile is one of the things many Ashoka Fellows I know have wished for the most loudly during the 10 years since I was named a Fellow. Unfortunately, our Ashoka profiles are (by Ashoka's design) a static snapshot in time of where we were with our plans at the moment when Ashoka chose to invest in us. One could argue that what really matters is what happened after that investment, but our continued evolution as social entrepreneurs is not well reflected in how Ashoka (and other competitive award networks) have tended to present the work of social entrepreneurs to their stakeholders. 

The face-to-face client and teamwork relationships Social Entrepreneurs can build through occasional consulting assignments can fuel new levels of viral engagement with each of our ongoing and past activities. Pointing my client in the Corporate Social Responsibility department where I am deployed to an easily sharable professional profile that always offers them automatically updated ways to consider supporting or engaging with my other work in the world could be a very, very good thing. 

A one stop page that gets automatically fed with fresh content as we continue to blog, upload videos to youtube and participate in social media platforms and competitions as usual can also help to streamline the use of a social entrepreneur's promotional time. Instead of breaking our time up around promoting specific links to new opportunities as they arise, our consultants' profiles will offer a full picture of what each is actively engaged in right now to make the world a better place.

The consultant's profile should be designed to be equally useful to the potential consultancy client who is considering expertise proposed for a job, to the former client or teammate who is looking to support or engage with the work of a changemaker they now trust after completing a job together, and to the online contact or family member who sees it in our email signature.  Our evolutionized profiles will become the one place where everything we Social Entrepreneurs do in the world can be seen, in a coherent, evolving, career-history documenting picture. 

A community co-created plan for supporting social entrepreneur careers

To begin transitioning Social Entrepreneurs' skills from our own projects to transferable skills that can be deployed in a social change consulting workforce, we need to first take stock of what we are currently doing and learning to do with new and old tools that we all have available. Technology will enable us to let what we are doing speak in the present and create a historical marker, so that what we have done can eventually start speak for itself. The question now is, which tools and systems are Social Entrepreneurs using to achieve what they are doing in the world, that our database should be sure to capture?

I am currently talking with a number of partners about what's emerging as a +/-6 month plan toward the development of a professional changemaker database with high impact value. The plan includes 3 basic activities:

1. Prototype an online collaborative process for developing a useful, trust-based community designed platform which serves senior social entrepreneurs in a specialized sector with new kinds of career-building support, visibility and potential to connect with new opportunities. 
2. Develop and test an offline series of seminar events for guiding Social Entrepreneurs at various stages in their careers through a process of building a reframed and expanded vision of their professional value. The process methods will be tested with small groups. 
3. Work with partners and potential consultants to co-create the consultancy vetting, training & certification process (and related database needs) that will provide a backbone in the quality control systems we put into place for pricing our consultants' services, coordinating teams, and guaranteeing the delivery of value.  

Existing groups of Social Entrepreneurs within easy reach for engagement in this exploratory process through existing partnerships over the next 6 months include: 

• Groups of regionally connected, self-identified social entrepreneurs who are members of the HUB Network in the Benelux region (Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam) and possibly the UK;
• Groups of actively connected changemakers and Social Enterprise support networks who gather at open space industry gatherings such as OxfordJam and SHINE UK. 
• Groups of senior late stage changemakers (Ashoka Europe, WomenChangeMakers Foundation)

Where to now?


I am in active conversation with a Social Entrepreneur support partner on developing a trust-based web community that offers high value to their soon to be appointed first round of Fellows later this year, and see clearly how that experience could serve as a prototype for building a broader database that taps into other kinds of specialized, issue-oriented operational expertise. 


As a Board member of the HUB in Brussels, I have recently been stepping up my engagement in helping to initiate a stakeholder engagement strategy in 2011 that - among other objectives - will aim to strengthen the HUB's community identity as a global and local network of self-identified social entrepreneurs. I will be looking seriously this week at the feasibility of incorporating the Social Start up Labs model in what I hope to develop with and for HUB members, and will continue to pursue discussions with OpenAction.org on how to use their mapping technology to build on the currently evolving HUB member information systems. 


I was thrilled to learn in detail last week about Ashoka Europe's plans to hold a Europe-wide collaborative gathering of Fellows and key stakeholders in the social change space in late June of this year. The most exciting new thing I learned in the presentation was that one of the main themes in the programme agenda is building social entrepreneurs' professional competencies. You can be sure I'll be exploring potential synergies with those developments in more detail with some of my Ashoka contacts this week. 


What can YOU do? 


Inspired by some of the very practical new technologies for changemakers recently launched by people I've worked with and been watching for a while in the social change space, such as OpenAction.org, StartSomeGood.org and wonderful initiatives like Amy Sample Ward's #commbuild chats, I am currently collecting guest-written articles about the latest developments online that support the social change space. These articles will feature prominently in a plan to bring the Internet4Change.com blog back to life this spring. If you are a Social webpreneur developing online tools for the social change space, you are invited to introduce your tool, tell us your story, and tell us specifically how you see it building project and career level value for today's Social Entrepreneurs. 


Please let me know @ChristinasWorld or in the comments below if you would like to contribute a blog post about a tool for #socent mapping, project financing, product sales or career building that you'd like professionals in the social entrepreneurship space to know is now launched, launching or growing. I will look forward to finding ways to connect further around your ideas for Internet4Change article submissions, and will be seeking an initial 12-20 articles to fill a pilot content schedule in the Spring.

Part 1/4: A Social Business Plan for Serving the #socent Community: Developing a Commercial Consultancy Practice

The inspiration to serve

The real inspiration for this component of the Evolutionize It business plan came from the amazing group of late stage social entrepreneurs I had the honor to work with when I led the WomenChangeMakers Foundation launch workshop last spring. The purpose of the workshop was to let social entrepreneurs in the field of gender equity inform the newly forming foundation about how they should conceive of a great fellowship support package. We all learned a lot, and my hat goes off to the WomenChangeMakers foundation for how they are incorporating what they learned into the new support programs for social entrepreneurship in gender equity that they are developing.

One of the most intense moments of the workshop came when the participants and I collaboratively coined the term “post-late-stage social entrepreneur,” and started revealing, crying about and discussing what that meant as a condition we all shared. Collectively, these 8 women from around the globe had impacted the lives of over 10 million people. They had all won multiple awards for their work. They were awe inspiring in their abilities to make magic happen in the world, and in their persistent effectiveness for the security and wellbeing of others. At a certain point, they all understood, however, that they all shared a really terrible and serious set of professional and personal weaknesses in the structure of their lives:

• Not one of them was financially secure.
• They all knew that they would have to transition away from the projects for which their lives had gained some recognition in the public eye, and yet, not one of them could visualize a plan for what was next for themselves.
• Those who had ideas about new projects they would like to start were not finding any resources to back them.

And of course, there I was right in that spot they were afraid of finding themselves in. Starting over after having stepped away to allow what I had started in Uganda to continue growing on it's own, and completely dependent on just my own creativity to figure out what was supposed to come next. For me, it was a transformational moment of realization that our experiences represented a critical gap in the social change space that needs to be filled. 

While I will be forever grateful to my delightful WomenChangeMaker friends for being the first to so bravely help me start to see and understand our professional condition, ventures further abroad in the social enterprise sector have confirmed that this condition extends beyond just women who are changemakers, and beyond just social entrepreneurs who are working for gender equity. It’s a sector-wide phenomena among the best social entrepreneurs that we must transition, that we have skills that are extremely valuable to society, but that we find ourselves in need of support in making “what’s next” happen.

Embracing that even the most committed social entrepreneurs must eventually transition out of the primary leadership role in the projects they create in order to rightfully claim the term "sustainable," the primary aim of the commercial consulting practice I am now collecting partners to co-create, is to identify and develop relevant and useful career building opportunities for social entrepreneurs - starting with those who have been vetted and recognized as noteworthy by the growing number of social enterprise support networks and agencies around the world.

The big idea

From 25 years of experience in the international development aid industry and as an occasional consultant in the corporate sector, I am 100% certain that there are many interesting commercial opportunities to source short-term consultancies for governments, corporations and international aid agencies from among experienced & acclaimed social entrepreneurs, on competitively tendered and paid assignments related to:

• community event facilitation, 
• stakeholder engagement strategies, 
• facilitation of community dialogue & decision-making processes, 
• the use of online communication tools for social change, 
• project development, assessment & feasibility studies, 
• proposal writing and specialized text editing
• innovative approaches to assessing and leveraging the impact of ongoing development projects and programs,
• etc.

I have some concrete ideas about how to find assignments like this. One of the things I used to do professionally was sell & manage international development consulting services to multilateral and bilateral aid institutions. Lately I have been making some unanticipated but interesting inroads into the world of CSR, which lead me to believe that there could be a broader range of potential clients to explore for the kind of expertise that (especially) late stage social entrepreneurs have to offer.

Who benefits, how?

The opportunity to engage in the kind of short-term consulting assignments I believe we can find will allow social entrepreneurs to:

• penetrate and influence thinking in diverse sectors of the global economy with their experienced innovator skills and social insights,
• gain practical experience working together collaboratively
• take planned breaks from their projects to gain new perspectives on their interests in new contexts 
• practice leaving others in charge of their projects for short periods, with support from other social entrepreneurs who've done it;
• earn meaningful personal income with low levels of annual time commitment,
• invest in developing a personal long-term and global professional value that will outlive their role as leaders of their current projects, and offer some long term financial security.  

Of course, all of that assumes that clients will actually benefit from the expertise that social entrepreneurs have to offer.  To that, all I can say is that personally speaking, through my interactions with Ashoka Fellows and likeminded #socent groups in countries around the world, I have become convinced that social entrepreneurs are among the smartest, most cross-dimensionally thinking people on the planet. I nurture a personal belief that within the minds of our systemic thinking changemakers lies our greatest hope for the future of our global development systems. Enabling ways for talented social entrepreneurs to influence projects and systems beyond their own projects feels like a noble and worthy pursuit. 

A commercial, for profit practice? Oh my!

While this will operate as a commercial practice, Evolutionize It is a non-profit making association, which means that profits are not distributed among owners but are reinvested into mission related activities. The net revenue that Evolutionize It earns thru successfully developing this commercial consulting practice will be reinvested in, for example:

• creating jobs related to building the practice, including a solid consultancy marketing and global management support structure, 

• developing a broader range of professional coaching & career development support services for social entrepreneurs,

• establishing a start-over seed fund for post-late stage social entrepreneurs who have transitioned away from their original structures and are now starting new projects.

Where to now?

Key in making this work will be getting the right people and partnerships on board to help grow it operationally - I’m not talking about starting something that Christina can run from home, but that will take on an organizational form of operations early on.

There are a couple of current and former business partners that I have scheduled discussions with in January to discuss ways we might work together in mutually beneficial ways to get this idea off the ground at an appropriate scale. At least one short term contract for a team of wisdom crowdsourcing experts to be recruited by Evolutionize It is already in late stage negotiations for late 2011.

The development consulting firm I used to work with has also recently been in touch - in a small assignment to review their web copy I livened up the descriptions of their experience with new language from the social change sector, and was inspired to think about how doable it could be to deploy social entrepreneurs on the kinds of EU funded projects that they bid for.

Explorations continue - I should have further news on this component by the end of January.

Introduction: A Social Business Plan for Serving the #socent Community (4 parts to follow)

During the last month of 2010 I went decidedly offline and did some reflecting on how to re-frame everything I've been investing my energy in during Evolutionize It's start-up year, into a coherent business plan for a diversified social enterprise model that serves the emerging social enterprise sector in meaningful ways.

As 2011 begins, I am excited to feel my entrepreneurial spirit restored. Last year's explorations in facilitating supportive relationships between social entrepreneurs are connecting with my decades of other professional experience in new and exciting ways, creating a pathway to Evolutionize It's future as a social enterprise support institution that feels comfortable, and easily within reach.

Under my continued leadership for the next 1.5 years, Evolutionize It will be pursuing a diversified and growth oriented social business plan for serving social entrepreneurs in some very concrete and practical ways, including:

1. Development of a commercial consulting practice that sources global teams of short-term consultants from among seasoned social change agents
   
2. Co-creative leadership on designing a cooperatively owned platform of premium business building services for social entrepreneurs, specifically targeting (but not indefinitely limited to) self-identified social entrepreneurs who are vetted members of the global Hub co-working space communities.
   
3. Modeling the establishment of effective, trust based online support networks for groups of social entrepreneurs with specialized needs, and
   
4. Establishing career development services and a "start-over" seed fund for accomplished social entrepreneurs who are transitioning from one brilliant project to another.  

In the coming days, I will be using this blog space to share where I'm currently headed on each of these components with the plan that's in my head and real conversations that are already taking place. 

What's most exciting to me is that while this reframing of my eclectic collection of professional activity since Evolutionize It was incorporated feels new and ambitious, things are already rolling in these directions, and these have been activities/ideas that I have fantasized about developing for quite some time (no - this list is not exhaustive!)   Identifying these 4 components of a plan that's tangibly doable right now is making it easy for me to see how I can build on everything I've already got in place to be able to get Evolutionize It where I'd like it to go. 

What I'd like it to be - what I have always hoped it would be - is a new kind of social enterprise model that meaningfully serves the growth of the social enterprise and grassroots innovation movement worldwide. 

Stay tuned for details.

First impressions welcome in the comments! 

Collaborator backgrounds in the shaping of ideas

As I set out to build the evolutionize it core business models, my thinking is influenced quite a lot by the collaborative relationships I am currently engaged in. As I'd hoped, investing in an unsalaried year of gathering social enterprise collaboration experience first hand is sparking a lot of focused thought on how to build a business that contributes meaningfully to the development of collaborative systems in the social change sector.

I have been talking with a lot of folks lately about facilitating collaboration through different kinds of "webbed events": from 100% virtual events, to face-to-face conference events and dinner parties that "web" themselves into a living interactive virtual state, to kickstart viral collaborative action.

The people I'm talking to about that are bringing several layers of depth into the product development process. I am acutely aware that right now I am not a social entrepreneur with an idea that sports the Ashoka label, but in start-up mode once again, with untried ideas. In that reflection on transition in my own career, one of the things that is fascinating me recently is the variety of career paths behind some of the fellow social entrepreneurs I'm interacting with regularly right now.

I have been tempted on more than one occasion to post the skype chat and/or voice notes from the conversations I've been having with the people I've listed below, and may still do that with their permission. I' feel it's important to document who they are and what they bring to this process.

- Ben Metz is a social enterprise strategy consultant and former director of Ashoka UK who is spearheading the OxfordJam event, that's scheduled to run parallel to the Skoll World Forum next month. Ben shares my zeal for encouraging changemakers to develop stakeholder collaboration strategies, and has worked with me to set the parameters for some practical labs that will experiment with collaboration strategy building approaches. I am equally excited about Friday morning's FREE Social Media and Collaboration session: transforming the value of your networks, and Thursday evening's Big Collaboration Dinner we're cooking up (£25) to evolutionize collaboration through team-play. The push is on, so book your tickets to both events now!

- Suresh Fernando brings a background in investment banking, tech financing and philosophy into my professional sphere. He is currently having some high level email conversations about financing models for collaborative systems building that I would love to see taking place more publicly, with more players who have an interest in that particular field. In the true spirit of collaborative integrity, Suresh agrees but refrains from calling that conversation himself. I have volunteered to think about convening a fishbowl discussion that includes Suresh's group as well as collaborators on a couple of related projects I am aware of. I am chewing over the best tools to use to create that online conversation event, and kind of excited about it.

- Mark Grimes has been a close collaborator and friend of mine for the past 6-7 years, both during my time in Africa and more recently. Prior to embarking on building the ned model, Mark created some of the web's earliest viral marketing successes. He currently operates 2 co-working spaces for tech startups and changemakers in Portland, and owns the online wiki/discussion space for better world builders at http://ned.com. Mark shares my will to take risks and "just do it" when it comes to simple, good ideas. There's a lot of trust and loyalty between us. He and I are having some exciting conversations about tweaking and replicating the unconference event we co-hosted in Portland in February. I'm also talking to him about maybe putting the collaborative systems building discussion with Suresh and others at ned.com.

- David Ewaku helps me connect the pieces of new and old concepts. David and I imagineered ideas together in Uganda as far back as 2002. He worked with me while he was in law school in Uganda, and his current UK course of study as a CPA specializing in network security makes him a really great thinking ally. David has been a party to the evolution of these concepts longer than anyone else, so I am able to talk to him about how the pieces fit together in ways that I can't with anyone else.

- Tom Dawkins is the social media coordinator in the Ashoka Washington office. It is ironic (but pleasant) to have an active working relationship with the inner Ashoka now that I'm no longer officially a fellow. Tom and I co-hosted the recent #4change chat, which gave me a nice opportunity to experience a fast-paced conversation event. I really appreciated his willingness to let me take the reigns, and forgiveness for my mistakes. We've also talked some about ways to engage more fellows in shaping Ashoka's social media presence. Tom doesn't know it yet, but I have some ideas for helping him to do that brewing, that I plan to share with him soon.