Acumen Fund Blog

Yasmina Zaidman is Director of Communications at Acumen Fund.

Are you being a linchpin?

I’ve been an avid watcher of “So You Think You Can Dance” for years, and since reading Linchpin, Seth Godin’s latest book, it has become clear to me why. The show’s name is a little ironic. The kids featured in this competition reality show, who audition from around the country for a chance to become America’s favorite dancer, really can dance. Some have years of training, and some are street dancers, but all of them get on the stage and dance their hearts out, with grace, and flare, picking up new styles effortlessly from week to week. It’s a little embarrassing to be hooked on a reality TV show, but I happen to know there are other members of the Acumen Fund team that share my passion for this show.

What the performers on the show do for me is remind me of what it looks like to be an artist. The hunger, the hard work, the courage. And the end result is breathtaking - performances that stay with me for years after the show ends. The show is irresistible because it shows me something, I now realize, that is true about myself. I had never thought of it that way.

Linchpin is about what it takes to be indispensable, to be singularly good at what you do, to create and share the gifts that only you can offer.

Linchpin challenges its readers in a way that previous books by Godin have not. If you’re looking for a new way to think about your marketing strategy, or the best way to harness the power of the internet, this is not the book for you. If you’re willing to consider that you are capable of much more than you are doing now, pick it up. Read it. If you have read Tribes, and have decided to be a leader, then make sure your tribe reads it. If you have decided that you want to make a positive difference in the world, and have ever asked yourself the question - “am I doing enough?”, read it.

But going back to “So You Think You Can Dance,” there is a catch. Linchpin is not about seeking out genius and artistry in others.  I know now that what I love about watching these extraordinary dancers is that it calls out to some part of me that wants to be more. Linchpin has the audacity to suggest that the genius worth watching is YOU.

In Linchpin, Seth is talking, in part, to people whose livelihoods and dignity are at stake in a new economy that ruthlessly downsizes anyone who is dispensable. But he is also talking to people who feel comfortable in their good-enoughness. What’s provocative about the book is his message to those, myself included, who don’t need to become a linchpin in order to save our jobs, but rather to give a gift that we’ve been holding on to. This is the part of the book where I start to wish that “So You Think You Can Dance” wasn’t in between seasons. It’s so much easier to just watch.

The notion of overcoming the resistance, what Seth names that internal sabotage mechanism that keeps us from sharing our gifts with the world, sounds exhausting. And uncomfortable. It means risking failure. But once you see the pattern of your own self-sabotage, which Seth deftly captures as though he’s had a hidden camera trained on you for years, it’s hard to continue as before. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with this daunting set of ideas is to take it on reality-show-style, with a group of peers who share my hunger and curiosity, and are willing to challenge each other to new heights. I know that as more of us at Acumen Fund begin to read this book we’ll be able to create subtle shifts in our own culture - a shift towards more generosity and art, and less credit-seeking and prize winning. We’ll continue to hold ourselves to the highest standards of accountability, but with a new excitement that comes from being a community of linchpins. We may not be dancing, but we are artists in our own way, hoping to bring something new into the world and inspire others to bring their own gifts to the task of ending extreme poverty.

Yasmina Zaidman is Director of Communications at Acumen Fund. She recently returned from vacation in the Dominican Republic, where she personally experienced the importance of access to emergency medical care.

The hospital in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where Yasmina and her son were fortunate enough to receive treatment.

I try not to think too much about work when I’m on vacation, but when I found myself in the back of an ambulance in the Dominican Republic this past week, I couldn’t help but think about Acumen Fund’s work on improving access to emergency care. I was holding my 17-month old baby in my arms as he vomited into a bed pan, while two young medics stood ready to check his vitals. He had acquired an acute bacterial infection, we later learned, that was leading to mild dehydration. This is a problem with a very simple solution – rehydration, with the optional treatment of antibiotics. Yet this simple solution is often not available, and dehydration is the single greatest cause of infant mortality, leading to the preventable deaths of millions of children under 5 each year.

I know how very preventable these deaths are, in part because I just saw it averted for my son. At every step in the process of getting my son the help he needed I found myself asking: “what would we do if we had no money?” First, there would be no emergency transport to a hospital or clinic (though this was only needed in this case because his illness started while we were at an international airport in a foreign country). There would have been no emergency room to check into with the swipe of a credit card. There would have been no instant diagnostics to check his blood pressure, his heart rate, his white blood cell count, which told us that his infection was bacterial and not viral. And most of all, there would have been no treatment, no IV providing the perfect combination of salt and sugar to help his body absorb the fluids that would keep his 22 lb. body functioning properly.

You don’t need a vivid imagination to see how this situation could have played out differently, and my mind kept switching from my own circumstance, in a relatively clean room, with a nurse and blood test results in hand, to a very different one. I pictured a dirt-floored room in a crowded slum or temporary shelter, my sick child in my arms, a dirty rag to wipe his mouth, and futile attempts to provide water, perhaps itself contaminated, to a child who was not tolerating liquids. I would essentially have to watch and wait to see whether his own immune system’s ability to neutralize the infection and its symptoms would outpace the deadly effects of dehydration. And too often, children lose this battle, with the result, over and over again, of death. On the very island where we just spent our holiday, in a small country just across the border, there are 400,000 children displaced by Haiti’s earthquake. How many of them will face the same illness that my son had? How many of them will survive it?

I take the helplessness I felt as I watched my son getting stuck with needles and consider the situation of a parent who isn’t lucky enough to have access to this basic medical intervention and who can’t perform the basic duty of a parent to protect their child from a preventable catastrophe.

Today, my son is his normal bright and bounding self, picking up words here and there, and anything else he can get his hands on. I’ve never been happier to be home from a vacation in my life. Not only because of the comfort of familiarity after this experience, but also because what I come back to is this work we do at Acumen Fund. The work to bring basic, yet life-sustaining goods and services to people who can’t typically afford them. Whether it is access to emergency care from 1298 in Mumbai, or affordable maternal care in Hyderabad, or rural pharmacies in Kenya, or health insurance in Pakistan, basic healthcare for families should never be out of reach. No parent should have to watch helplessly while their child battles infection when a simple diagnosis and rehydration therapy is so simple and so effective. Getting to that point is not simple, but it is the work I come back to with great gratitude, both for my own circumstances, and for the privilege of doing my own small part to bring access to healthcare to other families.

Acumen Fund Community members gather to discuss the Blue Sweater in Nairobi, Kenya.

Blair Miller manages the Fellows Program at Acumen Fund.

Over the course of the past few months, we completed the interview process for the 2011 Class of Acumen Fund Fellows. Through the process, we got to meet bankers, doctors, artists, investors, microfinance experts, brand managers, development workers, academics, and entrepreneurs, all of whom shared a vision of creating social change through market based solutions. In total, we have interviewed 56 candidates in 9 panel interviews across the world (Nairobi, Karachi, Mumbai, London, San Francisco, New York), and have leveraged the knowledge and expertise of over 40 advisors, entrepreneurs, Fellows alumni and partners to help us recruit this next class of Fellows.

Having been the only Acumen Fund team member to interview each of these final round candidates, my biggest takeaway is that leadership is not only critical, it is essential for the growth of the social enterprise sector.  We are at a moment in time where, the world’s biggest problems have real and tangible solutions. The missing middle that can bridge the gap between problems and solutions is the talent, the real leaders who have the financial and operational skills, the empathy and humility, and the influencing skills to create lasting change. This is the corps of social sector leaders that Acumen Fund has been building through our Fellows Program, and I’d like to give you a taste of the inspiring community we’ve been able to build to date.

What are we looking for? – Insight into a current Fellow:

During my recruiting trip, I also spent time with each Fellow at their current field placements. Let me give you an example:  Sarah Dimson, (a Ghanaian American) and Fellow in our current class, has positioned herself as a key part of the management team at AMC, one of our housing investments in Pakistan, run by former Fellow Jawad Aslam.  She is bringing her experience from low income housing in Los Angeles to Lahore and has a vision of returning to her roots in Ghana to continue her passion for low income housing development.   I have no doubt that when Sarah does start her own housing management company, this global perspective and connection will allow her to redefine housing for the poor in Africa.

What do they do after? - Insight into a Fellow Alumni

I also had the opportunity to spend time with many of our Fellow Alumni, all of whom are doing incredible things in the social sector.  For example I met up with Ram Hariharan, from the class of 2009.  Ram was trained as a financier in India and was placed in Kenya during his fellowship at a start up company called UHEAL, providing laser eye treatment for the poor in Nairobi, through a cross subsidy model. Post-fellowship, Ram has joined an enterprise called Bridge International Academies, which is providing affordable private education to slum dwellers in Kenya. They have 7 schools set up, which will grow to 25 in the next year and then 75 in the following year, with the goal of reaching 1 million children in the next 6 years.  Ram’s role is similar to a COO, building Bridge’s systems and processes.  Ram is doing what we had hoped the Fellows Program would lead him to: leveraging the experience and knowledge he gained at Acumen Fund to identify and realize promising opportunities to create positive change at the bottom of the pyramid.

The Ripple Effects of our Talent Investment:

However, Acumen Fund’s Fellowship is not just about the individual. It is about the collective community that is created, as a result of these individuals who have the moral imagination to show the world that the impossible, is in fact, possible.

Let me tell you what I mean.  I spent my last day in Kenya with Suraj Sudhakar, Fellow Alumni who worked at Ecotact during his fellowship, and is now working at PeePoople using innovative solutions to address the sanitation issue in the slums in Nairobi.  In addition to his work at PeePoople, Suraj has become close friends with, and mentor to a promising group of young men in Kibera who are now running TedX conferences in the slums and recently hosted a book club meeting for Jacqueline.  I attended the book club meeting along with around 150 other people, the majority coming from in and around Kibera.  We were also joined by Jocelyn Wyatt (Fellow Alumni, now working at IDEO on their social impact work), Catherine Casey (Fellow Alumni, now working as Innovations Manager at Acumen Fund, a role akin to Jacqueline’s Chief of Staff), and Gamuchirai Chituri (current Acumen Fund Fellow).  As we crowded into the hot and small conference facility in Kibera, surrounded by young people who believed change was possible, the significance of our work in the Fellows Program became so apparent. These were the very men and women who will go on to lead patient capital and social enterprise sectors one day, and I felt fortunate to be standing amongst them.

While Acumen Fund invests in social enterprises, our investment in individuals is equally invaluable to our goal of solving the problems of global poverty. Building a community of individuals with the empathy to see through the eyes of the poor, the boldness to imagine a new world, and the competence to execute with real business acumen, could perhaps be one of Acumen’s greatest legacies.

Stay tuned for the Class of 2011….

Brian Trelstad is Chief Investment Officer at Acumen Fund, where he runs the global portfolio team, coordinating our investment process and post-investment management support.

Every now and again we meet compelling entrepreneurs with nascent businesses that offer real breakthroughs in how to serve the poor.  Sometimes the meetings are pure happenstance, like meeting the PeePoo team at a dinner at the Skoll World Forum. Other times we find ourselves going to the pipeline: as a judge at the Global Social Venture Competition (where we first interacted with d.light, one of our current investments) or as a reviewer for Echoing Green (where we met Embrace).

As an investor who has defined our target investment size as $500,000 to $2,000,000, we are often frustrated that we can’t offer immediate assistance and a smaller investment, say $150,000, to these early stage ideas that need additional proof of concept, market feedback and a more complete team before they are ready for an Acumen Fund investment.

In most cases, we tell people to keep in touch and when they are raising their next round of capital to give us a call.  But for the few with the glint in their eye and unwillingness to take no for an answer, we listen to their pitch, we offer introductions, and we serve as a sounding board during the fits and starts of their early stage of their business’s development.  Ghonsla is one of those teams, whom we met at the Harvard Social Enterprise Business Plan competition in 2008.  They are a building materials company to provide affordable insulation made from renewable and waste materials to underserved markets in Pakistan and beyond.

From their pilot project they have learned that the idea of improving insulation to mitigate deforestation and reduce respiratory diseases stemming from indoor air pollution makes sense. Also the dreadful images coming from Haiti have reminded us that rebuilding places from scratch will happen again and again.  Developing cheap, local and green solutions to do so are as urgent as ever.

Recently, Ghonsla was selected as one of the finalist ventures for the Unreasonable Institute, a 10 week summer program designed to attract and unite 25 high impact social entrepreneurs from around the world, while incubating and accelerating their ventures through rigorous skill training and guidance from expert mentors. The institute also allows for entrepreneurs to connect with seed capital and offers a global network of support. Other finalists include a slew of impressive, early stage companies we’ve met lately – MILLEE, FrontlineSMS:Credit, Global Cycle Solutions and the Rickshaw Bank, to name a few.

So to the early stage entrepreneurs out there, some advice: keep plugging away, don’t take no for an answer and keep in touch.  We may never invest, but we might be able to provide more assistance than money.