Mod. 4 Assignment - Social Impact Innovation Flow

Per the work done in the Social Business Model Canvas outline (1-2 pages) on how you intend to design and tackle your social challenge utilizing the 4 steps of the Social Impact Innovation flow (i.e. Sensing, Visioning, Prototyping and Seeding/Scaling).

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Sensing if You’re Welcome Here

In my SBMC for You’re Welcome Here!, I identify the beneficiaries of my business as new immigrants and refugees resettling in Baltimore. My intuition around the immigrant and refugee experience is rooted in my own family experience. My father and his mother were both immigrants, in addition to many immediate family members on both sides of my family. Drawing from their experiences and stories they have shared with me, I have a sense of where to begin a wide exploration on where immigrants and refugees go during the early stages of their resettlement. Combining that intuition with rational analysis requires that I research what resettlement resource groups exist nationally, and at the state and local levels. Additional research is necessary to better understand the existing federal, state and local resettlement systems that are in place.

Since all of these groups represent prospective customers, it is critical that my discovery period involves delving into learning their models and practices in order to understand how they operate and where their pain points are. Concurrently, my discovery period into my beneficiaries will begin by drawing from my family background and intuition. I saw family members on both sides integrate into the largest and most public gathering places for other people like them. In the case of my Armenian family, this was at the local Apostolic Church, and for my Jewish family, it was attending Shuel and Shabbat dinners in the Jewish neighborhood. I’d like to find in-roads to the spaces where new immigrants gather socially in Baltimore to better understand how they show up in those spaces, and how the space supports them.

Visioning that You’re Welcome Here

Drawing from Dr. McGourty’s article, my social enterprise looks at my “competition” as additional customers and solution providers, rather than a potential blockade or threat to my enterprise. By creating opportunities for each of these groups to collaborate instead of compete to accomplish the same goals, the potential of tremendous impact for the beneficiaries is enormous. My vision is to create a path for all public efforts and nonprofit organizations resources to be consolidated under one roof. This streamlining of resources would bring diverse resettlement experts together with considerably more resources than they had before and allow previously successful efforts to be replicated or retried with the experience and knowledge gained from past trials.

For example, if public sector support groups are struggling to help Afghani refugees resettle and integrate into American life successfully, they could draw from the expertise of a nonprofit group that spent years working with refugees from a similar geographic and cultural background to gain more insight into their values and then guide a new effort infused with the learnings and takeaways from the nonprofit group’s previously success practice.

Similarly, consolidating resources would allow for greater targeting of larger numbers within specific groups. If five public and five nonprofit organizations each attempting to serve Afghani refugees shared their challenges and successful efforts with one another, they could develop a larger effort and resettlement plan that incorporates all of their individual successes into one plan that serves far more people than they would reach on their own.

Prototyping that You’re Welcome Here!

In my SBMC, my primary means for creating pathways to successful integration into American life for new immigrants and refugees is built on Welcome Events designed to introduce these groups to established locals through intercultural exchange that demonstrate and highlight the best of both groups’ worlds. Presuming my customers have all integrated under one umbrella, rapid iterations and trials of different types of Welcome Events could be tested within each one’s pre-existing networks. Using the example of five public and five nonprofit organizations again, organizers from all ten groups would meet to design different iterations to test out their respective hypotheses within a Welcome Event in their own network. Concurrently, they would design a process for subsequent event iterations that either build on successful elements that generated positive results for their respective test group, or try out a new adaptation based on feedback, learnings and takeaways from a Welcome Event that didn’t generate as much success and meaningful engagement. Under the assumption that my customers have not integrated under one roof, the refinement process can still be realized internally within my enterprise to generate new ideas for each group individually, which concurrently strengthens the case for collective collaboration.

Seeding/Scaling You’re Welcome Here!

Since my SBMC’s customers share beneficiaries within their respective missions, the successful practices established from their collective integration could be scaled to other resettlement groups’ efforts across the country and the world. New revenues would be generated by the umbrella organization or my enterprise by creating a network of trainers who are sent out to teach, support, and train similarly designed social enterprises on how to bring all of their respective resettlement groups together. There is also potential for those social enterprises to be acquired by my enterprise, or if no such enterprise exists, I could create a new chapter that brings all the resettlement groups together. Similarly, there is also potential for a singular resettlement group to become a new customer of my enterprise to learn from us how to build out new practices that would generate success and subsequently gain the attention of their “competitors” and create an opportunity to discuss collaboration and consolidation into an umbrella organization.