Dearest Christina -

It is so good to see you back active among us. We have always had you here in some form but active is distinctly better.

What happened to thoughts of graduate school?

Missing you terribly - as always.

Hi Linda,

Thoughts of a PhD are still in my head, but muddled at the moment. The entrepreneur in me wants to do something; the social scientist in me wants to study the thing that I do...

I've wanted to teach; I've wanted the legitimacy that another degree might offer; I've wanted to write. Have realized that I can teach others without a PhD, I can allow myself the legitimacy to ensure my project's respectabiity, and that the book I have inside me to write is not an academic one just yet.

Without at all closing it out as an option, I guess I realize I need to be really clear on why I want to pursue a PhD. Until that particular clarity comes, I won't be sitting idle. Many of the ideas I was thinking about in the context of a PhD research proposal can also build into a more action oriented plan... one that will hopefully provide a source of funding for the applied research project I would love to eventually propose for academic study.

Miss you too, dear. Your apartment in Thailand and the Asoke communities you introduced us to there feel so very far away in space and time right now! Will try to hunt up some old links to them... do you have any to post here?

Just edited in the link to The HUB in Brussels http://brussels.the-hub.net/publ ic/

So good to hear of your adventures, and wishing you well! Thanks for sharing with me. I have been up to some other stuff myself, and will post soon regarding it. You or others may well have ideas that will be centrally helpful in this endeavor. Stay tuned. Warm hellos to other old friends!

This just gets better and better!

Not just Christina, but now Rory too.

So good to hear from old friends!

:)

A series of unfortunate events but we are with you Christina.

Right now I am loving the trust engendered by our past interactions here at Ned and on Onet. When someone like Rory says they are working on something new it sends delightful tingles down my spine.

Rory I am sure we will all look forward to learning more about what you've got up your sleeve!

Yes, it has been quite a year.....for all of us. But I am so happy to hear that you are coming back. For me personally, it has been a very lonely year without you.

I am going over to David's ned plot now and check it out.

Well, it was really a year since then but much better you are back online

Hi Christina!

And Hi Barbara!

Lovely to see you on Ned!

I am very sure beyond doubt that you are going to pull back all the great crowd that has been on Onet and Ned,your contribution was so enormous, I am so happy that you are here again!

So good to see some of LiA back on ned. Here's hoping we can get things going again.

barbara spalding said:

Hi Christina!

HI Barbara, really good to see you here

Why didn't I see this until today? Working on the birthday plot too.

welcome back cuz!

LiA on track

I've had this window open for a week now, wanting to write about my (great) experience with the Ashoka France group last weekend. Amazing how having the kids home full time gobbles up every hour of the day. Will today be the day I actually write something? Stay tuned...

My schedule is a lil tight but will keep on keeping on.

At the beginning of this month I was fortunate to be invited to attend a 24 hour working session with some francophone Ashoka Fellows that was hosted by Ashoka France at a lovely lakeside setting just outside of Paris.

Not only was it exhilerating (as it always is) to connect with other Fellows, but it was also fascinating to see Ashoka France's unique new "Ashoka Support Network" (or "ASN") model in action, and to interact with several ASN members as well.

For those who don't know much about the inner workings of Ashoka, the global Fellowship is managed in a very decentralized way, with national and regional offices taking the lead on identifying potential Fellows and providing varying levels of backbone support to mostly Fellow led networking initiatives. It's only relatively recently in the organization's history (the past +/-5 years) that Fellows from the most industrialized countries have been named. Prior to that, Ashoka's centralized fundraising efforts were generally geared toward getting investors (and also some inkind service providers) in wealthier countries to support system changers in less industrialized/poorer countries. But identifying and appointing Fellows in wealthier countries has resulted in a need to reconceptualize the fundraising & support model, and decentralize that as well.

In that context (which I admittedly don't have all the super-fine details on) Ashoka France has come up with a really interesting fundraising and support framework that they call the Ashoka Support Network. To date, the ASN model is unique to francophone Europe (organized & coordinated by Ashoka France). It is my understanding, however, that the model is now being considered as a possible new way forward for other regional & national Fellowships to follow.

The concept is pretty simple - the Ashoka Support Network consists of individuals who commit to contributing both money (10,000 Euro/yr) and time over a 3 year period. Each Ashoka Fellow has a small consultative team of ASN members "assigned" to their project according to the relevant expertise of the ASN members, and with whom they meet on a regular basis to work on particular issues related to taking their work to the next level.

2-3 times per year, there are also "Work on it" events, like the one I participated in earlier this month. At that kind of event, Fellows can present specific current issues they are facing and the others who are there (ASN, Ashoka staff and other Fellows) spend 2-3 hours brainstorming on ways forward in small working groups. The Fellows benefited from very targeted, practical, high level discussion around their issues, and the ASN members got to benefit from direct involvement in helping to make a range of good things happen.

I was really delighted and impressed with the ASN system in action at the weekend event. For the sake of other Ashoka Fellows everywhere, I hope it does take off in other countries. During my Life in Africa days I would have loved to have that kind of regular face to face interaction with local business leaders who might have been part of an ASN in Uganda.

Interestingly, though, one drawback that was mentioned in a feedback session about the ASN, was that Fellows were missing more interaction with other Fellows. That's a shame. In East Africa, where we didn't have an external support system to look to, interaction with other Fellows was (in my book) hands down the best part of being a Fellow. I'd hate to see that important element in Ashoka's culture become undervalued in the move to develop more ASN structures.

All in all, though, I wholeheartedly applaud the work that Ashoka France has done to develop and pioneer this new model for supporting social entrepreneurs in such a targeted way, and look very much forward to participating in the next "work on it" event in October.

Should anyone reading wish to get in touch with Ashoka France (or Belgium!) about participating as an ASN member, don't hesitate to send me a pm here on Ned and I'll be happy to connect you.

On a personal level, it's been important for me since leaving Uganda in April to invest considerable time in carefully planning how to go about jumping back into social innovation mode. My experiences online from Africa have born many ideas; sifting through to identify THE idea that I might be able to most effectively develop while in Brussels for 3-4 years has been a personal thought process that's greatly benefited from stepping back to enjoy some relaxed offline time. Of the 3 main ideas I've been considering, one has come to the forefront and taken a place of primary thought focus since June... it's an idea I have for developing an online system to enhance new social benefit concepts and collaboration efforts in their early stages.

When I started out in Uganda, I was under a rock for much of my early time - in my earliest days as a social entrepreneur I did not have a conceptual framework for understanding social entrepreneurship as a field, or Better World Building as a viable global economic sector. I perceived myself to be alone, weird and unusual. If there is one thing I have learned since Ashoka introduced me to the concept of social entrepreneurship as a profession, it is that I am certainly not alone. My objective in developing an online system, that can enhance the viability of social entrepreneurship and cross-dimensional collaboration, builds upon the knowledge that there are many of us out there facing similar challenges at various stages in our "Better World Building" work. I see "us" as a sector, with a need for globalized systems that can enhance our collective ability to influence global development. We don't just need to make change happen - we also need to make it stick.

To date, I have only articulated the idea twice - both times to people who are active in developing and promoting social entrepreneurship at a sectoral level. Their reception to the idea and the financially & operationally practical systems-level approach I intend to take in developing it has been very positive. There are a few more private conversations I aim to have this month before I actually start publishing any details of the project online. I have promised myself that the real work begins, from the ground up, in September.

Just yesterday, I had one of those 2 discussions in which I articulated my idea with the folks at i-propeller in Brussels. Like the HubBrussels, which I wrote about earlier as a place I hoped to possibly call home for this new venture, i-propeller offers an innovation action lab context within which to set up shop. What I appreciate most about the i-propeller set-up is their strong academic ties in the form of sector-level research projects on social entrepreneurship, in partnership with leading European universities. Their main & only requirement for offering downtown office space for me to work from part time, is that I be willing to share my knowledge and collaborate with the other projects that are happening there. Perfect... and the PhD option I'd been toying with comes back into reach through working with others who are academically active.

BTW - The part time job with a consulting firm I'd mentioned earlier that I was offered didn't end up being financially exciting enough for me to decide that it is worth my time right now. Just before meeting with the i-propeller folks yesterday, I finally decided to turn it down. Right now, I am thinking that 2 days/week at i-propeller, 1/2 - 1 day/week with the HubBrussels community and the rest of my time at home will provide me with the foundational real-world context I need to move myself firmly back into social innovation mode online in September as planned.

No more working under a rock! This time I am doing things differently. While others have sometimes articulated the need to balance their time spent building online connections with their real-world work, I suspect that at this stage in my career it will be important to me to balance my time spent building real-world connections with my online work. But by reaching out actively into the European social entrepreneurship scene, I am starting to think that my next few years in Brussels are going to be a lot of fun, and possibly more productive in terms of the impact I might hope to create than I'd previously thought.

I am getting excited to get back to work.

That's a very good thing.

.

(edited to add links)

Thanks for drawing my attention to this thread -- being attendant to family I only read the latest post. We should certainly talk some time or at the very least I should share my own model with you. I've been keeping my big concept/model under a rock as well, so to speak. Mainly I want to be more deliberate in this effort.

I think I'm finally ready to talk a bit about the big idea I'm getting myself ready to start working on.

I was asked by Jill Finlayson (@socialedge) to weigh in with thoughts on a discussion she will facilitate at #SoCap09 about some of the gaps in the big picture of social media and social change. For the first time, I articulated the plan and why I am doing it in writing. I thought I could share it here as a first glimpse of what the new project is about.

###

In essence, the project I'm getting myself ready to start building in September can be described as an effort to fill the gaps I see.

1. We need trust-filled spaces for collaboratively developing and implementing action together. We need to be able to invite our constituents - including the people who give to us and the people we serve - into dynamic dialogues that can take place at a slower pace than blogs or twitter allow. On twitter I am often invited to visit blog posts about issues and personal stories, but I am not seeing folks sending out invitations to work together on real actions to address real problems.
2. We need to address the financial ROI of participating in the world of social change via social media. An income generating mechanism that can make it possible for small orgs (particularly orgs in countries where internet access cost is high) to justify the time required to join the online movement is critical to the balanced growth of our global presence online as a sector / movement / force / impact in world. The current proliferation of prizes is disruptive to offline work and requires too much of an "all or nothing" effort. Small scale and new initiatives, in particular, need welcoming spaces where they can call out for other kinds of help and crowdsource topical knowledge.
3. Here in Belgium, there is currently a wave of young social investment funds looking to finance new socially entrepreneurial ideas. I've got appointments with 2 and am told by both friends who arranged those contacts that one of the common issues they face is finding initiatives to invest in. We need transparent investor-friendly spaces that invite engagement and observation. We need to be documenting our social change portfoilios and making our track records easier to find.

So with all of that in mind, I am working toward developing a model for a paid membership site ($5/mo) which borrows a page from the MLM industry to redistribute the membership fees equally to participants, their favorite orgs and member developed/voted collaboration efforts. In addition to generating a bit of reliable monthly online income for the people and orgs participating in the system, $1 of every monthly fee will go into a prize pot to support collaborations.

Should have maybe shared this part too, which points more to the why:

The socialchange space has changed dramatically since I last spent a significant amount of time in it. Immediately apparent is the sheer number of new soldiers in the Better World Building army online. We are emerging as possibly the most vibrant sector / movement / market / force in the online economy. I also very strongly believe that if we start to get ourselves organized around building systems and collaboration environments for putting our knowledge and financial resources together toward mobilizing solutions, we can start to multiply our impact and kick healing change on a global scale into overdrive.

Geez I sound so pompous. Who the hell am I to think I can do something like this?