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Joining Vanessa, Online Editor, for the first edition of #conversationswith is Rahel from Now! Together they discuss the pressures of leading a venture and how what we can do to lighten the workload.

In this piece, Vanessa explores the power and purpose of empathy by redesigning design thinking with social justice in mind. Read all about it  to learn more about how the empathy map canvas can be used as a tool for building empathy, equality, and enterprise.

During the month of February, Vanessa Faloye gave two keynote speeches at UNLTD.org.uk and Queen Mary University of London on the topic of ‘failure’ as a social entrepreneur. Here, she shares the content of those keynotes in the spirit of intelligent failure. She refers to them as the top three failforwards to watch out for before even beginning to build a social enterprise.

Founder-CEO Hanna Naima McCloskey shares her unique startup journey with social enterprise Fearless Futures in a fantastically honest, interesting, and insightful interview about challenging power, creating value, starting from scratch, and the myth of starting up with no money. This is the second part of that interview.

Founder-CEO Hanna Naima McCloskey shares her unique startup journey with social enterprise Fearless Futures in a fantastically honest, interesting, and insightful interview about challenging power, creating value, starting from scratch, and the myth of starting up with no money. This is the first part of that interview.

As social entrepreneur, sooner or later you come across the question how to measure your impact. Social impact measurement is not only important to demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of your practice, it also helps to attract funding and motivate staff and volunteers. Our online editor Vanessa Faloye interviewed Megan O’Neil-Renaud, manager of Social Enterprise and Social Finance at Pillar Nonprofit, on that important topic. Here you find the second part of the interview.

As social entrepreneur, sooner or later you come across the question how to measure your impact. Social impact measurement is not only important to demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of your practice, it also helps to attract funding and motivate staff and volunteers. Our online editor Vanessa Faloye interviewed Megan O’Neil-Renaud, manager of Social Enterprise and Social Finance at Pillar Nonprofit, on that important topic. Here you find the first part of the interview.

During my journey as a social innovator, I have experienced the symptoms of imposter syndrome for two reasons I can think of. The first reason speaks to my previous article (read here) which discusses how the personification and perception of success have been socially constructed to leave most of us feeling left out and below average. Naturally we fail to recognise and internalise our successes when success rarely ever looks like, sounds like, or thinks like we do.

There has been much talk about the woes of imposter syndrome¹. It is something I have seen and felt myself as a social entrepreneur (hustling to save the world isn’t easy). It’s something that the majority of us feel at some point during our professional and personal lives but the question is for how long and how deeply?

There is much debate as to how social impact education can up the ante in building social innovators. (For an expert and very insightful cross-examination of this ongoing debate, check out The Stanford Social Innovation Review: The Future of Social Impact Education in Business Schools and Beyond). But for the sake of bringing something new to this discussion, first let’s reverse engineer this question of how to build innovators for social impact? What exactly does it actually mean to be an innovator?