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Personal Milestone: Finding a Place to Live in Baltimore

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Personal Milestone: Finding a Place to Live in Baltimore

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This was my second time visiting Baltimore, first time visiting for a few days. Despite it being January and snowy / cold, I really loved the atmosphere and felt a lot of excitement in getting to live here.

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I was excited to be in person and being in a space where I'm meeting everyone for the first time. This kickoff felt like the official launch of the fellowship.

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Personal Milestone: Arrival to Baltimore

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Personal Milestone: Arrival to Baltimore

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I drove 8 hours from Charlotte, NC to arrive in Baltimore and stay at an Airbnb for the first few days. I enjoyed walking around and starting to find my way around the city.

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1st Project Goal: Interview Network Partners

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1st Project Goal: Interview Network Partners

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Based on conversations with Impact Hub team members and meetings with Network Partners, I decided that I needed to receive feedback from partners about the future of the Network, before any other action items.

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During an interview in April, I received complicated feedback from a network partner, which prompted a lot of internal thought about what type of actions is the Network ready for vs. what would be great to do in an ideal world

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Another in-person event to be in community with Fellows and ERC partners. Reviewing the resources provided during the sessions, it became clear that there were gaps in how this data could be integrated into my project and the work with ESOs & small businesses.

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After I finished the interviews, I thought I could review the transcripts with Impact Hub team members and collectively generate insights, but there ended up being time and project blockers that made this shared task complicated. In this period, I decided to review all transcripts & generate insights and share my conclusions so that we could move forward with action items.

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Network Interview Insights Presentation to Impact Hub team

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Network Interview Insights Presentation to Impact Hub team

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Based on my interpretation of the insights I gathered from the Network Partner Interviews, I wrote a report and presented my insights, action items & recommendations to Impact Hub team members.

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A day before I was set to present the report to Network Partners, the Impact Hub team and I had a discussion about whether changes were needed to the report prior to sharing with partners on our weekly call. This was the first point of friction I experienced with my host and figuring out how my role and the host org's role differ from each other.

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Co-Design Day: In-person session with Network Partners

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Co-Design Day: In-person session with Network Partners

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Although I had limited scope on planning for this day, I conducted a feedback sessions with the attending partners on Network Foundations and on an initial version of an equity promise. This was the first direct feedback session with Network Partners on work I was doing outside of weekly partner calls.

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Michelle and I discussed activities for the rest of my ERC fellowship, and how the work could be split between the two of us, as separate drivers, while still moving the Network towards a shared goal.

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Michelle, Brennan Murray and Andy Cook, representing BASE Network partners, and I presented at a one-day data conference put on by the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA). We talked about civic wealth metrics and micro-business data points and how data being collected can better reflect business & community outcomes here in Baltimore.

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Personal Milestone: Back to rowing on the water!

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Personal Milestone: Back to rowing on the water!

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Over the last 15 years, I've intensely missed being on a river and rowing with a team. This day was the first day in 2024, that I was back in a crew boat and rowing with others.

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We launched work groups, four committees focused on Network priorities - Education, Capital Access, Navigation and Advocacy, giving groups of partners time during our weekly call to discuss priorities and make plans for action. Partners coming out of this first meeting seemed energized by the conversation and stayed past the meeting's end to hear recaps from each work group.

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Although I interacted with partners weekly during our Tuesday meetings, there wasn't space to speak about the work I was doing outside of the weekly calls. I created these infographic updates to provide more transparency into what I was working on & thinking about beyond the week-to-week work.

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This in-person session provided a ton of great time bonding with my fellow fellows. On this particular day, I gained a lot from the sessions I attended, and took a lot of really good notes about other initiatives that could be applied well to my project.

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The Great Halloween Lantern Parade in Highlandtown

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The Entrepreneurship Funders Network (EFN) had their annual convening in Baltimore, and I was part of a breakout panel about Fellowships & Entrepreneurship.

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Collective Action Does Include Shared Knowledge

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Collective Action Does Include Shared Knowledge

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As the work groups wrapped up, I received a lot of great feedback from partners about the 6-weeks of work group time. Based on the feedback, Work Groups are not a sustainable long-term activity, but a viable way to identify priorities for the full Network to focus on. This catalyzed an epiphany I had about these work group conversations providing great context for partners to continue these conversations at events and in discussions out in the world, which provides a non-linear approach to action collectively.

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Our Breakout Session hosted for small business owners and ESOs to collaborate and share feedback on the local ecosystem had an excellent turnout with at least 75 attendees. We were able to share some information about current and future vision of the Network and facilitate feedback sessions with attendees about their small business experiences with the ecosystem.

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To prepare the Network for 2025, I facilitated a couple of partner meetings were we discussed leftover items from 2024 and asked partners for any events or topics that would be helpful to discuss in Q1 of 2025. These will help introduce more shared responsibility of running weekly partner meetings as we move into the spring.

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Answers to Questions Here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ln2PzcuCUA-wHj2FvO4jgITmWXuBobrG/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106675029794548596878&rtpof=true&sd=true

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Form for Step 4--Critically analyzing my timeline.docx