It has been about a month since I have returned home from Colorado. The two months I spent in a little rural town on the Front Range has greatly impacted how I will continue to move forward in my professional work. More importantly, I believe the time I spent at The Avery Center will influence and shape their work too.
Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship can touch any industry, any social problem, or any community. When I arrived at The Avery Center innovation and entrepreneurship were not foreign concepts to their team. The nonprofit itself was borne out of a new concept, a drive to impact the world in a positive way, and a plan to use market-based solutions to do so. Each staff person, volunteer, and intern has something unique to contribute and new ideas they hope will change systems. However, with rapid growth and a global pandemic, their programming was suffering. The job program specifically had taken the worst hit, as their formerly financially sustainable model folded under the weight of a global economic crisis. The organization had iterated but were they ready to reiterate? Through ingenuity, I am confident they would have found a way forward, however, I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to be a part of falling in love with the problem, investigating the nuances of the issues, and being part of brainstorming many possible solutions.
After deciding that my original intent of developing a new program at The Avery Center was not adaptable or appropriate to meet the needs of beneficiaries and the organization, I dove into supporting the staff in their reshaping of the job program. These were team members who had spent the last 18 months working hard to keep the program afloat and sustainable in an ever-evolving world in crisis. After facing such hardship, the team needed an infusion of creative confidence, a new common language to discuss the problem, a shared vision everyone could buy into, and to re-focus on what matters the most. There were technical problems to solve, which required finding the right solutions, such as utilizing the right software and technologies, and the more complicated issues of tackling adaptive challenges.
Achieving these goals required empowering the staff to see their individual strengths and their strength as a team. Many staff were feeling burnout and stuck in the way things were. Through encouragement, motivational interviewing, and sharing resources from the Foundation of SIE class, the morale of the team seemed to shift over the weeks, and new ideas began flowing with ease. The resistance to new ideas faded and the team started to embrace the challenges they were facing as new opportunities! As their confidence grew, the team began to believe in their ability to make an impact. An impact not just on the lives of the local and remote participants they currently served, but for many more survivors, through employment at The Avery Center and beyond. The team worked hard to peel back the layers to get to the root of the problem they sought to solve, looked past their most favored solutions, and come to an agreement about their shared vision.
Ultimately The Avery Center's goal was to empower survivors, economically, but also in other ways. With the "How might we" tool, the job program began to be seen as just one way to execute that goal. When the team knew their common purpose, the how was negotiable and adaptable. With this open mindset, the team was able to seek out sustainable solutions that would have an element of anti-fragility. They were able to really address how not prioritizing sustainability would take away from their shared purpose of empowerment. Furthermore, the team started to consider the impact they could have beyond the beneficiaries they directly served currently and in the future. The model they were created, could have the impact to change how job programming is designed in the future, for survivors of trauma and to address other wicked problems.
During my last week at The Avery Center, Professor Manciagli and Linda Alexionok facilitated a Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship workshop for the whole service side of the organization. Together we learned brainstorming skills, practiced framing the problem in a way that inspired people, explored tools and concepts that would help us become more efficient, and came together as a united team. At the end of my internship, all the details hadn't been worked out. There are countless hours of brainstorming, planning, and developing, and reiterating to be done. Addressing the issue of empowering survivors after their exit from the sex trade isn't a technical problem. It is complex and adaptive. Agility and innovation will always be necessary to address this problem and the broader issue of trafficking as a whole. However, even with more work to be done, I watched a tangible shift happen at The Avery Center. The culture shifted and hope for something new and something better took root. I'm excited to see how The Avery Center adapts now and continues to innovate in the future. They are creating the model on what it looks like to empower survivors and their innovations will impact so many!
Comentarios