Across the city, social entrepreneurs and mission-driven organizations are reshaping how change happens. They are starting new organizations, new companies, and new initiatives to follow their passion for a game changing idea. Many of their founders and teams rely on outside support to grow their idea into a self-sustaining business or impactful organization. They face crucial decisions about legal structures, accounting, operations, team development, marketing, capital, and strategy.
In 2018, Impact Hub and Twilight Quest founded the Strategy School for Service Providers with a strong belief that Social entrepreneurs need a strong ecosystem behind them to make real and lasting change.
The better support service providers can offer to these growing companies and organizations, the better chances emerging social entrepreneurs and mission-driven organizations will have to launch, scale, and thrive.
The six-month program accelerates mission-driven organizations and businesses by developing entrepreneurs and their initiatives simultaneously. Its curriculum integrates visual planning tools to create strategies for business development, marketing, operations, and self-care. Monthly peer circles and weekly group coaching calls supplement online learning modules and enable peer-to-peer exchange and accountability. The inaugural cohort focuses on specialists who support social entrepreneurs. They offer grant writing, marketing, facilitation, legal council, accounting, retail platforms, and storefronts to entrepreneurs across the city. Strategy School enables them to concentrate on their own business strategies to improve service offerings. Graduates of the program will provide a bench of specialists for Impact Hub members and other partners in in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
>> Hear what inaugural cohort member, Aneka Winstead of WATT Business Solutions had to say:
“Strategy School has been great! From the very start, the program has made it clear that self care is a huge key to success when it comes to business. If you don’t take care of yourself you can’t take care of anything else. This is important to me as I am a mother of 3 boys and a wife. Running my business as a sole owner and maintaining a household is difficult but with Strategy School and Q, they help you to learn to balance it all. Marketing has never been my strong suit nor has strategy but with the modules and the Q sheets that the school has created, it has become an easy and worthwhile task. It has helped me to make sense of it all and put an actual picture to my vision. The marketing module is awesome for whether you are advanced or a novice at marketing. As a whole, Strategy School has been priceless. I’ve attended other business cohorts but none as worthwhile as this.”
Aneka began the program with a growing business that was completely bogging her down. She found the beginning of Strategy School, completely focused on teaching strategies for self-care and productivity, to be an extremely significant part of her progress in the program. She was able to employ these strategies immediately, which resulted in an immediate increase in capacity.
In addition to beginning to use self care as a business strategy, Aneka also used the knowledge learned in Strategy School to gain clarity around her revenue streams, get a clearer vision of her target persona to generate more qualified leads through content creation, as well as used her newly acquired marketing knowledge to streamline her process of outsourcing and leveraging resources effectively.
>> Read our feature with Technical.ly Baltimore here!
From February to March 2018, IHB hosted an 8-week collective learning process called Communities for Change (C4C). The objective of this program was to connect leaders of community-led, community-owned neighborhood development initiatives to resources and skills they need to realize their visions of stable housing and strong neighborhoods. To arrive at this objective, Impact Hub and members of the C4C Planning Committee invited people with diverse skills and perspectives to create new connections centered around a shared vision of stable, thriving neighborhoods and advancing the work of grassroots leaders.
This learning cohort included dynamic Baltimore changemakers such as Brendan Schreiber and Candace Chance. While Brendan Schreiber serves as the President and Founder of Schreiber Brothers Development Inc — a start-up that takes a community-focused approach by grounding initiatives in feedback from neighborhood residents — Candace Chance co-leads the Baltimore Intergenerational Initiative for Trauma and Youth (B-CIITY) to allocate federal dollars to community-led initiatives for trauma and youth in Druid Heights, Penn North and Sandtown. Together, these individuals harness a valuable wealth of knowledge that marries the technical expertise of developers to the real, lived experience that long-term residents bring to the table.
At the end of C4C, one group formed around a multi-faceted prototype for regenerative neighborhoods and has begun a housing development initiative in Penn North with the values of community-ownership and leadership at its core. This initiative led by Schreiber Brothers leverages the unique skills of several C4C participants, including architects, neighborhood leaders, community-based facilitators, community organizers, and housing experts. Brendan gained a deeper sense of community through his involvement in C4C. Speaking on his experience, he says
“I came to a realization that there is a mutually supportive network that can not only take my vision to reality, but jumpstart it.”
For the Impact Hub team, C4C demonstrates the infinite value behind convening stakeholders around collective systems thinking, knowledge sharing, and idea creation in generating new collaborations and tangible solutions rooted in newly established trust and understanding across diverse ideologies. Although this article focuses on Baltimore’s C4C experience in addressing community-led housing and community development, similar efforts on local issues have been introduced in conjunction with Impact Hub Boulder, Budapest, Harare, Seattle, and Shanghai. A collaboration among the Impact Hub network that truly is locally-rooted and globally-connected.
>> Learn more about Communities for Change at-large here!
In February 2017, Impact Hub Baltimore hosted Investing in Urban Innovators, an all-day session in partnership with Aspen Institute’s Center for Urban Innovation, Invested Impact, and Art in Praxis. The purpose behind the event was inherently multifaceted. Not only to strengthen connections between actors in the social/urban innovation ecosystem in Baltimore, but also to raise awareness of the particular challenges to access to capital faced by people of color. To highlight the costs when non-profit and for-profit innovators can’t get the very early stage capital to bring their ideas to life. To inform audience how other communities are trying to address the access to capital challenges. To set the stage for action in Baltimore to remedy such capital challenges together.
After a warm welcome from Jennifer Bradley, Rodney Foxworth facilitated a conversation with Ben Jealous on the state of urban innovation in Baltimore. This panel set the stage for the day’s discussion by laying out the current situation, both strengths and weaknesses, of Baltimore’s urban innovation ecosystem, with a particular focus on how people of color in the non-profit and for-profit sector are able to access capital, whether grants, loans, or equity investments.
The following discussions featured panelists who spoke on a multitude of topics, ranging from funding approaches for nonprofits to recognizing, deploying, and supporting human capital among other topics. Thought leaders and attendees grappled with questions asking what does the talent ecosystem in Baltimore and similar cities look like? What are the opportunities for people of color and what barriers remain? What are the blind spots and possibilities? How can the tools and benefits of entrepreneurship be accessible to anyone who wants to take up the challenge?
The latter half of the day set space for final reflections on the event and future steps. The Impact Hub team designed breakout sessions, in which audience members broke into small groups to discuss what they saw as Baltimore’s main access to capital obstacles; existing resources that could be used to fill those gaps; and new resources that could be brought to bear. The goal of the breakouts was to get the city’s leaders excited about and committed to working on this issue, so that conversations borne from the event could transform into on-the-ground change in Baltimore.
>> Read How to Foster Urban Innovation in Baltimore by the Aspen Institute here!
Deepen Connections. Spark new ideas. Inspire Action.
Launched in September 2016, Co-Creating Opportunity was borne from a belief that expanding economic opportunity in Baltimore is a game-changer for the future of the city. Leaders across the city were already shaping strategies to grow economic opportunity, build community wealth, strengthen neighborhood businesses, resource diverse entrepreneurs, and prepare our workforce. Co-Creating Opportunity challenged participants to think bigger — “How can we grow these efforts through collaboration?”
The format of the event followed the Community Design Lab format developed by the Impact Hub Baltimore team and engaged 80 attendees, as well as 11 leaders of economic opportunity work in the city. These leaders included individual social entrepreneurs, community developers, large nonprofits, grassroots organizers, service providers, and government programs. Initiatives ranged from the idea stage to re-imagining large, resourced programs. They each address economic opportunity from a unique angle, supporting different groups including youth, moms, makers, formerly incarcerated, under-resourced neighborhoods, Latinos, and small business owners.
Featured leaders had a chance to present their work to new audiences, generate new ideas, and increase their focus on particular initiatives or outcomes. Facilitated conversations were centered around a specific question or challenge each person faced in their work; ranging from “How might we market and sell the work of young black artists by focusing on their talent and creativity rather than their traumatic stories of struggle, racism, and oppression?” to “How might we expand opportunities for the formerly incarcerated to build self-sufficiency by engaging the tech industry and civic coding community?” During the course of various sessions, participants voiced their ideas, connections and support to strengthen featured initiatives.
At the closing of the event, leaders and attendees alike were asked to reflect on their experiences engaging in Co-Creating Economic Opportunity. Getting to meet new people with diverse backgrounds in a collaborative and supportive environment was a strong underlying sentiment. Other participants also cited the opportunity to learn about the “multitude of different initiatives happening in Baltimore” and the intimacy of conversations. Lastly, leaders highlighted the opportunity to present new ideas to different audiences and gaining new perspectives.
Impact Hub Baltimore was one of fifteen cities within the regional North America Impact Hub Network looking to create change through collaboration during the series titled “Co-Creating the Future of Our Cities.”
>> Read more about Co-Creating the Future of Our Cities here!
