Welcome, welcome, welcome, to the Bonfires of Social Enterprise. Romy here back for another conversation with a very inspiring woman, Kate Hayes of Echoing Green. Kate discusses her incredibly interesting journey and love for health human interactions and support.

First, let’s see what Natalie has prepared for our Fun Fuel for this episode.

I’m Natalie Hazen and I am bringing you this episode’s Fun Fuel

Leadership takes all kinds of forms and has many different styles. After all, we are all uniquely made and don’t respond the same way to things.

Let’s take a listen to some top leader’s motivational quotes of all time according to Inc. Magazine because according to them, “Sometimes the most powerful and meaningful things come from words that touch our heart and lead us forward to our potential.”

So Author Ernest Hemingway kicks us off with his quote: "When people talk, listen completely." --Ernest Hemingway

I need to work on that one myself!

Retired four-star general in the United States Army, Colin Powell said, "Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand." --Colin Powell

But I will wrap up with a motivational leadership quote from Harold R. McAlindon. He said,

"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." --Harold R. McAlindon

Let’s tune in with Romy as she interviews this episode’s latest trailblazer.

Thanks, Natalie! So many great leaders have gone before us in history. Let’s turn our attention to a current leader in the impact investing and social enterprise development space, Kate Hayes of Echoing Green and her program, Direct Impact.

Romy: Let's talk about Echoing Green. Let's talk about Echoing Green. It had a unique start.

Kate Hayes: Yes. So, Echoing Green was founded 30 years ago by a group of individuals working in the private sector who wanted to see what would happen if you took the principles of the private sector and applied them to the social sector, and so they started investing deeply in early stage social entrepreneurs, and that has really been at the heart of everything that Echoing Green has been about for the past few decades. So, the core of our work is our fellowship program, where we search the globe to find amazing early-stage social entrepreneurs who have incredible ideas that have the potential to really change the world and solve big social, environmental problems, and we provide them with funding, with support from our staff, from our ecosystem and our community, as well as the community amongst one another where they are each other's best resources as they work to take their organizations to the next step and begin to really grow and scale the solutions that they've identified, and over the past 10 or 15 years, one of the things that we've become more intentional about is building out our ecosystem of support.

So, we know that social entrepreneurs are incredibly important. They're close to the work. They're really dedicating their lives to solving really big problems that exist, but they can't do it alone. So, we wanted, as an organization, to become more intentional about how we create an ecosystem of support for them to really help with making that change come to life. So, with that, we started doing work in the impact investing space, as we saw more for-profit social enterprises join our fellowship program, and we wanted to connect those early-stage organizations with impact investors that were interested in supporting for profits at a very early stage, and from there, we've then developed the direct impact program, which is what I lead, and I can certainly talk quite a bit about, which is intentionally developing the next generation of board leaders to support our social entrepreneurs. So, we're very carefully thinking about every role that needs to exist in working together to solve some of these big problems.

Romy: And Kate, just undoing all of that, I feel like we could probably do about 10 episodes on what you just said, all those interesting things, but for Echoing Green, how does Echoing Green define early-stage entrepreneurship?

Kate Hayes: Yes. We are one of the earlier stage. So, we define that as the idea stage to about two years of operations. So, we will, if somebody has an incredible idea and a very compelling way of stating it, and stating how they're going to solve it, we will fund at that idea stage. We also will fund proof of concept or at a couple years of operations, which makes us really unique in the space, and I think part of what differentiates us is we're really focused on the leader first. We know that by investing in somebody who is proximate to the work, they've lived the challenges that they're trying to solve, they know the communities incredibly well, and they're so deeply embedded in the solutions that they're trying to create, that they're going to, no matter what, be successful.

So, while we, of course, look at the organization, we primarily will focus on the individual and what they bring to the table, and then we'll look at okay, is this an innovative solution to a longstanding problem, is it a pressing problem, what does the business model seem like? It does not need to be perfect because that's an area that we can really support in, but we are very much leader first, and every year, we get somewhere around 2500-3000 applications from social entrepreneurs all over the world. It's one of the most fun parts of my job is getting to read a lot of those applications alongside my colleagues, and we're ultimately selecting around 30 each year. So, we also work to support those social entrepreneurs that apply throughout every step of the process. Whether or not they ultimately get a fellowship, we want them to receive some sort of value from going through that, especially since they're coming in as early as an idea. So, we have a lot of opportunity to help them think through and articulate what they're trying to do.

Romy: That's so thrilling. So many folks in the, I'd say impact investing space broadly, will often make comments like there just isn't deal flow, but it takes a firm like yours to go in and develop the deals so that they can invest in them. That's so exciting. We want to involve you more in Detroit. I just want to raise my hand right now.

Kate Hayes: Absolutely.

Romy: We want to involve you more here. So, back to your firm. Many, many have not figured out this early stage piece, and I love what you said about leadership because we feel the same way. One of the taglines we have is "Supporting people first from inspiring places with productive ideas," but it's the people that make all this happen. We want to support the persons that are leading the efforts and getting them all what they need. How did you guys come to land on what seems obvious, but there's a lot of distractions around the idea sometimes, and people forget about the leadership?

Kate Hayes: You're absolutely right. I think it has just been so deeply ingrained from the start that it's hard to pinpoint exactly when the organization decided that that was the goal. I'll provide an example of one of our very first social entrepreneurs that is no longer with our organization, but I think provides our continued reasoning of why we focus on the person first. So, Cheryl Dorsey was the founder of The Family Van, a mobile healthcare clinic in Boston, which actually will tie back a little bit to my story.

I spent a few years volunteering on this mobile healthcare clinic, and that was what first got me interested in Echoing Green because I learned that that organization and Cheryl had been funded and supported by Echoing Green, and she stayed with the organization for some time, and ultimately, about 8 years later after that initial funding from Echoing Green, Cheryl actually took the reins as president of Echoing Green, and so we're continuously reminded of no matter what our fellows do when they start at the organization, and we do find that many of the organizations