Why Human Connection is Good for Your Social Enterprise
By Devin Hibbard, CEO and Co-founder of Street Business School-by BeadforLife.
Incredibly honored to be featured in the podcast Finding Impact, run by the brilliant and refreshingly human @AndyNarracott.
In it, I talk about how true impact happens in the last 18 inches.
What I mean is that creating change – true transformation – at the end of the day has more to do with the human interaction between two people than it does behind the theory of change or the evaluation metrics behind the work. Let me explain.
At Street Business School we are working with incredibly poor women providing business skills training. Women who have been told by their parents, their husbands, their neighbors, and society that they aren’t worth much. That they really don’t matter.
To help a woman in this situation transform her own life, much more than business training is required. The first – and most important step – is to help her start to believe in herself.
If we meet her for the first time – standing 18 inches away – and refuse to sit down in her mud house, or don’t greet her children because they have runny noses, we have already lost the battle. As brilliant as our curriculum might be, we have told her in so many conscious and unconscious ways, that she is isn’t worth much.
If instead we enter her home knowing that not only are we there to coach and support her, but that she is also our coach, with as much to offer – and maybe more – to us that we have to offer her, then we transform that situation. We see her as a fully brilliant and capable human being and what we communicate in that moment has more power than any curriculum ever could.
Not enough people in this world, and especially those who are working to eradicate #poverty understand this, and Andy is one of the beautiful souls who does.
