Today, the Trico Foundation team is very excited to share that Aishwarya Khanduja will be joining us from May to August as we are truly inspired by her passion and vision for her venture. We look forward to working with Aishwarya as she develops her social enterprise and learning from her as she brings her venture through our A.S.E.S.S. process.
It has been a busy 18 months at the Trico Foundation as we have been working with organizations to test and pilot our A.S.E.S.S. worksheets. While we continue to learn something new every day, our team is at the point that we want to share where we are at with a wider audience, get feedback, and learn with you on your social enterprise journey.
Therefore we are pleased to announce the first iteration of our social enterprise capacity building workshop series designed for organizations either developing or scaling their social enterprise *. These workshops have been developed to address a number of key challenges organizations face as they build and scale their social ventures.
Happy New Year! The start of 2019 gives us the opportunity to reflect and learn from 2018. The past twelve months brought the Trico Charitable Foundation amazing insights such as crossing the chasm; the 6 key mindsets of social entrepreneurship; the release of 9 A.S.E.S.S. blogs; social entrepreneurs’, summer students’, and Social EnterPrize recipients’ journeys and learnings; and the grand opening of the Trico Changemakers Studio.
With our definition of social entrepreneurship at the forefront, Trico Charitable Foundation is committed to the development of the social entrepreneurship ecosystem by helping social enterprises figure out their key issues.
To zero in on the testing you need, you have to balance two perspectives. On the one hand, you want to be aware of and prepare for all key risks/thresholds as you move from where you are now to what you want your social venture to be when it is in its ‘steady state’ (i.e. your model has proven to be a success and growth is predictable and steady. A typical barometer in this regard is what your venture will look like five years after it starts). This will also help make sure you are building towards your goals rather than building a bridge to nowhere (this is a significant risk for start-ups, as discussed below). On the other hand, a lot of your current assumptions will be wrong, so you don’t want to go into too much detail too far down the road.
This past summer working at the Trico Foundation’s Summer Student Internship, I was able to take my company from an ideation stage that had undergone 2 years of evolution, to its first pilot, to an official launch of operations, to a now rapid scale of production on its way to reaching a steady state within the next 18 months. Trico Foundation’s one-on-one coaching and group sharing through the A.S.E.S.S. program were pivotal to my progress.