Julianna and Nicole will hosting this conversation, tied to the question that so many of us have asked — “ok… so what CAN we do?!”
This session would be beneficial to anyone who is interested in re-patterning economic life, is deeply engaged in their places, and/or who is just curious to hear a story of folks trying to integrate everything we are learning into a legacy organization (instead of just starting something new).
Here’s a little background:
I (Julianna) joined a center for entrepreneurship in New Hampshire in 2021 and became its executive director in 2024. The center is almost 30 years old and is well known for being innovative and “doing things differently” when it comes to rural community and economic development. One of the things that’s really different than traditional development is that it is entrepreneur-led and locally embedded, as opposed to your main strategy to be attracting businesses to move to your town.
From the beginning, I had a funny feeling … like economic activity isn’t an end in and of itself. It’s FOR something. What is it for, and is it actually doing the thing it was supposed to do to begin with? And the more I engaged in similar spaces with others doing similar work, I realized that what we were doing wasn’t actually all that innovative, and it sure wasn’t fixing the problems we thought it would.
For a couple years the journey of trying to understand where we were falling short of true regional resilience and vitality was a little lonely. I was reading and researching and talking to anyone who would engage.
After the 2024 national summit we execute ever fall, I got an email from none other than Nicole Civita, who had attended. She said we had a lot to talk about, and wow was she right — we’ve been talking ever since! Sometimes daily haha. She and the education she has introduced me to have been instrumental and my ability to re-envision the org and how we might evolve our work to stop re-creating the same issues we were trying to solve, just smaller, and more local.
So we are moving away from entrepreneurship as a primary focus, and focusing instead on what we’re calling Essential Endeavors.
In this session we’ll share more about what we mean by Essential Endeavors, and how we are both imagining and practicing this in real life.