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Teaching Missioneurship at the European Creative Cities Conference in Warsaw
I’m writing from Warsaw, Poland just one hour before leading a “masterclass” on missioneurship at the European Creative Cities Conference.
I’m surrounded by young social entrepreneurs from places like Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, England, Ireland, Thailand and, yes, the good old United States — although I’m one of only two Americans here.
The social entrepreneurs here get missioneurship, they really do. It’s intuitive to them to put mission at the center of their universe and to treat entrepreneurship as a means to that end. They get the importance of driving revenue from their core services, even though they don’t know how to do it. They understand that by building mission enterprises, they can revolutionize their communities, even when governments and established institutions aren’t willing to help (or actively oppose them).
What don’t they understand? Above all, me! Sometimes they ask me to repeat myself because they can’t understand my English or I talk too fast. I adjusted my presentation slides to make up for this, with lots of text slides so that they can follow along when they have trouble understanding me.
Here are the complete slides from the presentation I’m about to give. I was asked to address the challenge of balancing mission, entrepreneurship and community. I answer that you shouldn’t balance these at all, and I pivot from this topic to a discussion of how to build community and how profit can be used to set social enterprises free.
I have a not-so-secret mission that someone from this conference will go back to their country and create a missioneurs chapter. If that might be you, email me at my first name at blakejennelle.com. You’ll make my day!
Updated 3/25: New videos of the conference released
For me, the best part of the conference was meeting so many remarkable missioneurs from all over the world. Seeing them on video is nothing like spending three days with them. Nevertheless, these videos should give you a sense for how these incredible people talk and think. I also make a few appearances.
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We're a community of mission entrepreneurs separated for decades by the types of organizations we lead. Now we're coming together around our common sense of mission and hard-nosed entrepreneurial approach. We're why people. Together we can solve any how.
