For several years, we both have actively supported entrepreneurial ecosystems in our respective regions. We are both what some call ecosystem builders. As ecosystem builders, we act as intermediaries, cheerleaders, connecters and conveners, advocates and overall-supporters of purpose-driven entrepreneurs in our communities. We facilitate and accelerate that flow of talent, information, and resources by listening closely to what founders need, and by creating an invisible infrastructure in our communities to support entrepreneurs, based on consistent, collaborative human engagement.
“An ecosystem that allows for the fast flow of talent, information, and resources helps entrepreneurs quickly find what they need at each stage of growth,” says the Kauffman Foundation. “As a result, the whole is greater than the sum of its separate parts.”
COVID19 has hit social entrepreneurs hard. Their chances of recovering from the negative effects on their revenue, value chain, and talent will largely depend on whether they have access to a community of support, mentorship, and well-being. This is where ecosystems – nascent and established – will face the ultimate test of their purpose.
In the virtual Skoll World Forum this week, as IMPAQTO and Social Venturers, we hosted four global ecosystem builders to share five insights they have gained from acting as second responders to heal the fabric of communities of social entrepreneurs on four continents.
Ecosystem builders come in different shapes and sizes, with financial sustainability models that range from purely philanthropic to for-profit revenue streams. Many of us lead or work in organizations that enable us to support our entrepreneurial communities directly.
Danielle Anderson of Step & Stone and Afri-Love Connection Club made the case in the webinar for empathy and immediate support. “We have to remember that a lot of the people like myself who provide support to the ecosystem are small businesses ourselves,” said Anderson. “We don’t rely on government funding or grants, NGOs or international development projects. We, too, are facing unpaid invoices, a low pipeline, uncertainty and big decisions. So instead of reaching out to us ecosystem builders and asking us to support social entrepreneurs, please remember that we, too, need support. The more business support we are able to give to founders in this particular period of time, the more of them can make it to the other side of this pandemic.”
In the case of IMPAQTO, immediately after the government lockdown measures were announced, we put on our own oxygen masks – figuratively speaking – to ensure we could weather this situation to be able to support social entrepreneurs and help them put their oxygen masks on. We spent two days recalibrating what we do, projecting new revenue streams, and understanding the immediate needs of local entrepreneurs. We had to shut down our five coworking spaces, one of which we opened only a month ago. With bills due at the end of the month, we had to cut salaries, cease contracts with some of our staff, and we have prioritized payment to all of our small to medium-sized businesses that are our suppliers. But even then, we had to figure out a way to keep going – find new revenue streams that support our ecosystems in a lock-down world.
At IMPAQTO and Impact Hub Berlin, we were lucky to find that our funding partners trust us enough to release new funding or repurpose existing grants to stay afloat and reinvent the ways in which we can attend to the ecosystem’s needs.
Ecosystem builders cultivate agility to adapt to new circumstances. “We’re a ‘done beats perfect’ kind of organization,” shared Rick Turoczy of Pie PDX in Portland. “When stores started shutting down, we immediately created a rough survey and over the course of 72 hours received almost 900 responses from small businesses sharing with us how they are impacted by COVID-19.”
In a context where a day can make all the difference between reacting on time or being too late, having data quickly allowed ecosystem builders to act. At IMPAQTO, we quickly launched a survey nationally and then joined forces with a Latin America-wide survey with Sistema B. Over 3,000 respondents shared that 22 percent had already stopped operations and that 76 percent will shut down within 2 months if loss of revenue continues at this rate. Digging deeper, we also quickly learned that entrepreneurs need more than cashflow support. They need emotional support so they can feel safe and think creatively about navigating this crisis.
Creativity is precisely what ecosystem builders can unleash in uncovering innovative ways to manage the crisis. Leon Reiner of Impact Hub Berlin was able to convene seven like-minded organizations in Germany to organize the #WirVsVirusHackathon. Within 48 hours, 43,000 participants had signed up, with 3,000 mentors to tackle over 2,000 mapped-out challenges.
Based on the collected data, ecosystem builders were quickly able to assess the most urgent needs of social entrepreneurs in their communities.
“One of the immediate responses was buying gift cards directly from businesses,” reported Rick Turoczy. “Even if it meant kicking the can down the road a little bit, it was at least getting some capital into the hands of founders. Fortunately, we saw that percolate nationwide.”
The #WirVsVirusHackathon was planned within five days and executed with zero funding. But Leon Reiner also pointed out that in his role as managing director at Impact Hub Berlin, he was forced to reduce staff to part-time and keep overhead as low as possible while the space remains closed. While social entrepreneurs might not be hiring right now, Leon made a case for activating your network of mentors and experts. “If you have the phone number of an excellent business consultant who usually works for big corporates, give him or her a call and see if they’ll do a quick webinar for your entrepreneurs to share some of their knowledge,” said Reiner.
After the success of the hackathon in Germany, Leon Reiner and his team are open-sourcing the methodology globally, for instance, in Latin America IMPAQTO has already joined others to replicate the tool in Hackea la Crisis – Mujeres y Niñas to offer solutions for the challenges girls and women face in isolation during quarantine in Latin America. Likewise, at IMPAQTO we found the low-hanging fruit in the abundance of amazing resources online for adapting, remote work, and managing crises that came from our international networks. However, the content was unfortunately only in English, so we launched a webinar series in Spanish language with local facilitators that leverage this knowledge and adapt it to local context.
In that sense, we found we could create value in two specific areas where we could deploy support immediately:
We assume that over the coming weeks, entrepreneurs will face a real struggle, not just emotionally but technically because they just don’t have the tools. To address that, we created a personalized matching mentorship program. We also created a Learn-and-Adapt webinar series to help companies in Latin America shift to digital work.
Rick Turoczy and his team at Pie had no choice but to move their Demo Day online. “Our Demo days are less about investors and more about bringing the community together to celebrate the businesses that are being built here in Portland,” said Turoczy. “We’d been practicing for weeks and weeks and weeks for an on-stage theater presentation and once we saw how quickly COVID-19 was shutting down public life, we pivoted to a slide-driven, voice-over version. So basically the exact opposite. The greatest win there is that we now have a playbook that we can share with everyone else.”
Leon Reiner reported that their hackathon community remained connected even weeks after the event. “We still have a Slack channel with over 30,000 people who still want to create more solutions! We’re now busy creating a follow-up program to support these prototypes going forward.” This type of consistency and follow-on support is crucial in building trust online.
Danielle Anderson reported that she, too, is trying to transition the network of female entrepreneurs of Afri-Love Connection Club to an online space. “In Kenya, we rely very much on face to face interactions in order to build trust and community,” she said. “We need to invest now in order to make that shift to online so we can stay connected with all our founders and continue to support them in ways that we have not explored before.” At IMPAQTO, we have been careful to build a distributed network through online tools so we don’t become the bottleneck of connections, rather, the platform.
Hearing strategies to manage crises from four different continents we quickly understood that in an effort to move forward, we need bold funders with patient capital to support
This might be the least sexy investment, but ecosystem builders who adapt well in these situations and can continue to support entrepreneurs in their communities rely on some very basic functions like having a great administrator in your organization that helps you navigate the new bureaucracy. The institutionality of your ecosystem building organizations is what allows us to do this work. These things are not sexy to invest in, but they are so necessary to allow us to do the work, and to do it well. That’s what support for us looks like right now: long-term investment in our staff, in keeping the lights on, in paying for the crucial administration. This is the time that funders and investors come to understand the importance of investing in structures and systems, not flashy initiatives.
This is a learning opportunity for ecosystem builders around the world. Being able to connect with other systems thinkers allows us to replicate and adapt what works and accelerate the rate of learning. Most importantly, it prevents us from reinventing the wheel and wasting resources.
“As a global consortium of ecosystem builders, let us try to learn together!” said Leon Reiner. “And for those actors and organizations out there who have the power to allocate resources to this emerging field of ecosystem building – make funds available to conduct research, to help us share our learnings and to run pilots to understand how to do this work well. Nurturing and maintaining ecosystems might be more important now than ever before. But finding out what works best and sharing those insights is going to cost money. We need people who are ready and able to do that work, and we need people willing and able to support those efforts.”
As a community of ecosystem builders for social change around the world, Social Venturers offers exactly that. Through our Fireside Chats, we host monthly discussions with a curated group of experts who bring a deep understanding of impact-specific topics such as impact assessment and metrics, reporting, strategy and goal setting, leadership, succession planning, responding to crisis, and community building.
To strengthen connections among ecosystem builders and support their personal growth, we provide four-month mastermind programs tailored to the needs of ecosystem builders who are passionate about supporting social entrepreneurs and managing through this crisis.
Read more about how the Skoll Foundation is responding to COVID-19.
Want more stories of transformational change on the world’s most pressing problems? Sign up for Skoll Foundation’s monthly newsletter.
“File:Nasca’s handshake (14561594455).jpg” by François Bianco is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
