From Internship to Start-up

Original post submitted by Ashoka's 30th Birthday on Tue, 2011-06-14 11:27.

This story was submitted to the Ashoka 30th Birthday Card by Courtney Lawrence and Adam Selzer of Green Loop (Nashville).

We met as teenage idealists. Both of us had signed up to be AmeriCorps volunteers with hopes to ‘change the world’. We saw community service not only as an opportunity to develop personally and professionally, but as our civic duty. Day in and day out, we faced a reality that was new to us: entire communities of marginalized individuals, illiterate high school students, and homeless families. At the completion of the program, we parted ways, idealism still intact but now with hands-on experience that led us to believe that improving large and complex social issues required a more strategic and nuanced approach.

Fast forward more than eight years, to summer 2010. We were serendipitously reunited, as Vanderbilt and United Nations graduate student summer interns at Ashoka's Youth Venture and Full Economic Citizenship initiatives. Little did we know that our Ashoka summers would plant yet another seed. We are now co-founders of an organization dedicated to catalyzing market-based solutions to local ecological challenges. This summer we are launching Green Loop (Nashville) - a social enterprise hub for innovative, sustainability initiatives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Over the past several months, Ashoka has frequently entered our internal business development and strategy meetings. We’ve caught ourselves drawing on our experiences at Ashoka's global headquarters in Arlington, Virginia as the analogous patterns of our approach have matched (and undoubtedly been influenced by) the “Ashoka experience”. At Ashoka we learned the power of tackling challenges systematically by looking for patterns and unmet needs; we learned to uncover opportunity by uniting constellations of people and communities that conventionally do not consider their integration complementary; and - perhaps most valuable to the start-up phase of any enterprise - the value of flexible iteration (fail often, fail early is an attitude we embrace)! Although both of us have a track record of starting initiatives, there is a distinction of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ Ashoka that we can gratefully acknowledge. With our Ashoka experience, we can say with certainty that Green Loop is a stronger and more effective organization.

Photo credit: http://www.ashoka.org/story/internship-start