Thursday, November 4, 2010
Challenge
I found it very interesting how Challenge finds new opportunities for business ventures. He mentioned that they are just opportunistic but I feel that this is the same thing as how the other social entrepreneurs meet peope by "luck". I don't believe its only luck just like I don't believe those business ventures happen to fall into his lap. His leadership is very well tuned into what will work with Challenge's mission and who to work with to come across these opportunities.
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I think that part of being a good social innovator is to be able to seek out and recognize those opportunities and to know when to grab them. Timing means a lot, and it seemed that from both Patrick's and Bob's perspectives, the collaboration that resulted in Finger Lakes Fresh happened at just the right time for both Challenge and Cornell.
ReplyDeleteIs that luck, or is that knowing your business and keeping an ear to the ground for new opportunities to open up?
I agree with what Mary said. “Opportunities are for those who are will prepared.”
ReplyDeleteI think Challenge also did a great job in collaboration. The biggest question for me about social enterprise is that how social entrepreneurs could take care of so many things in different, sometimes opposite, areas. How to compete with other pure for profits in such a mature market in the USA while still take care of those who are in need? How to balance all these jobs without causing chaos? “I don’t know how to do it, so I turn to someone who does.” (I forgot if it is from Patrick or someone else). That makes me realize that it is impossible, and unnecessary to take care everything, just collaborate with others make things so much easier.
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ReplyDeleteI would add to Kyle’s post a couple of things that appeared in my mind when I was thinking about the visit to Ithaca. The venture opportunity that both 'Challenge' and 'Finger Lakes Fresh' identified, is the key to successfully face the crisis Patrick predicted will (pretty soon) seriously affect most of the nonprofit organizations. It brings to my mind one of the articles we read in Stephen Osborne’s book for ‘21st Century Governance’ class (“Theory of organizational partnerships”), where the authors speak about 'symbiotic interdependence' in which two organizations are partnering to benefit mutually, mainly pursuing to adapt themselves to the changing conditions of the world. I see this partnership between Patrick and Bob as the pilot experiment of what should be the evolution of the nonprofit sector: a large network of strategic alliances where each organization seeks to offer one of their strengths to help another organization to overcome one of its weaknesses, and so on. If one could get to float over that chaining of nonprofit organizations, one would be seeing the sector functioning as a big whole engine in which a piece gives power to the other, as we could learn from our visit to Ithaca.
ReplyDeleteThere is another thing that comes to my mind and it is the government's role in this new scenario. Currently, the most common role played by government is to be a major funder for nonprofits operations. In this new scenario, its role is also evolving to be a major stimulant for the nonprofits network by purchasing services and products that the network is able to offer... products and services that it has to acquire anyway, but this time it will be from nonprofits, encouraging their sustainability and enhancing the ‘hauling effect’ that has been going on with the chaining system. … I don´t know! Anyhow, as I said before, these are things that ran through my mind when I sat to think about my reaction to the visit to Ithaca.
I was very interested in the fact that Patrick at Challenge discussed the fact that he helped to make over the concepts used to make Challenge grow. The necessity of reinvigorating an organization to allow growth is prevelant in all of the people we have be priviledged to meet this far. Ellen Baxter moved to family housing and now looks at a children's museum in her new building. Each of the other women in NYC had issues with changing organizational mission and/or reducing and changing services. The necessity of change is always there, even in prospering well run organizations.
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