Impact Hub’s Global Impact Report pulls together data and stories from around the world to illustrate the massive effect individual social entrepreneurs are having on the ground.
April 24, 2018, Vienna, Austria
How does change actually happen at a global scale? According to Impact Hub’s Global Impact Report 2018 , it starts at the local level, with social entrepreneurs who are tackling the world’s biggest problems. Social entrepreneurs like Sidiki Sow of Protera Farms, who is developing edible insects as feed for livestock at Impact Hub Bamako in his native Mali. Or Corinna Grace, the co-founder of Seres based at Impact Hub Antigua, which helps young people in Guatemala get an education and develop their technical skills in order to not only get ahead, but also pass it on to their communities.
In addition to inspiring stories of entrepreneurs who are doing well while doing good, the report includes valuable insights from Impact Hub’s more than 10 years of building communities for impact around the world and five years of gathering data about it — insights that other organizations and groups can learn from on their own work with social enterprises. The report also features a section specifically on the support needs of social entrepreneurs, offering a detailed outline of exactly what these organizations need to grow and thrive, and inviting other people and organizations to contribute to scaling impact.
“It is possible to create impact at scale without losing local context through standardization by ensuring that local roots remain present at all levels,” Impact Hub Global Executive Director Gabriela Gandel says. “Moreover, you need a backbone organization that focuses on the curation of innovation, the hosting of connections, and catalytic opportunities for all. However, this does not have to be always centralised but rather collectively coordinated to allow for leadership from the network. And thirdly, it is essential to find common impact issues that bring together various network entities and external partners to make a bigger, bolder difference.”
However, Impact Hub isn’t just expecting that the Global Impact Report will inspire and guide other social entrepreneurs, networks, and organisations as they move forward. They are also applying the lessons outlined in the report across their 100+ locations strong network. Moving forward, Impact Hub will focus on mobilizing and connecting communities for global action; accelerating translocal collaboration on key issues of which many are related to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals; and shaping the support infrastructure to prototype the future of business and society.
But in order to achieve these big goals and drive solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues, it takes strong collaborations across players and sectors, which is why the report strongly calls for partners to create impact at scale.
People and organizations interested in collaborating with the Impact Hub community can learn more in specific sections of the Global Impact Report or visit the nearest local Impact Hub .
About Impact Hub:
Impact Hub is a global network focused on building communities for impact at scale. With 100+ communities of 16,000+ change-driven entrepreneurs in more than 50 countries across five continents, Impact Hub is the world’s largest community and accelerator for positive change.
Impact Hub supports building ecosystems to drive collaboration and entrepreneurial innovation around the Global Sustainable Development Goals through locally rooted Impact Hubs, as well as partners and allied networks.
Press contact:
Flora Rosenow
Brand and Communications Manager [email protected]
As part of her West Africa working trip, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Ghana’s capital Accra on Thursday, 30th August 2018. This invitation follows the invitation of President Nana Akufo-Addo.
On her visit Merkel will be accompanied by the German Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development Gerd Müller, and a high-level business delegation consisting of representatives of German companies.
Apart from meeting the President of Ghana and attending a business roundtable the Chancellor wants to interact with young Ghanaian entrepreneurs. According to Merkel’s video podcast released on 26th August on YouTube, she wants to talk about the possibilities ‘opening up an economic perspective’.
Chancellor Merkel wants to discuss issues regarding Ghana as an investment destination. In her podcast she says, Africa and Europe are growing ever closer due to globalization and digitization. Therefore, the Ghanaian start-up entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to present their innovative and, in part, digital business ideas to the Chancellor and her business delegation at Impact Hub.
On Thursday evening, the Chancellor Angela Merkel will continue her Africa trip. After Senegal and Ghana, Nigeria is completing her visit.
This annual week of action, awareness, and accountability for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) takes place alongside the UN General Assembly. Launched in 2016 by Project Everyone, UNDP, and the United Nations Foundation, Global Goals Week brings together governments, businesses, individuals, international organizations and civil society to build momentum to achieve the SDGs and ensure no one is left behind.
Impact Hub will participate by hosting events in New York, across the globe, and by publishing inspiring stories connected to the SDGs. As one of the world’s largest impact accelerators, Impact Hub uses the SDGs as a lens through which to view its impact on the world, and for more than 10 years has empowered locally rooted communities to progress towards them in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
The network’s 2017 Community Impact Report for instance has revealed striking insights into how the SDGs are being addressed worldwide, reporting that SDG 4: Quality Education and 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, are the topics that Impact Hub members are most devoted to overall.
Achieving the SDGs by the year 2030 is a huge challenge for today’s change-makers, but Impact Hub believes that this can be accomplished. Using Global Goals Week to showcase the incredible work that’s already being done by innovators in the network, the organization’s ambition during this week is to inspire others to join forces and do the same.
Accelerate2030 at Global Goals Week
Accelerate2030 is a program designed to scale the impact of entrepreneurial solutions for the SDGs. One of Impact Hub’s 200+ acceleration programs, Accelerate2030 has positively impacted developing economies in 19 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Co-initiated by UNDP, ITC and Impact Hub Geneva – and with two editions of the program implemented so far – the program has enabled 50+ national finalists and 15 global winnersto scale up their ventures towards the SDGs and has so far reached over 2 million people. Accelerate2030 supports the most innovative ventures with tailored support for scaling and developing sustainably, accessing investors, gaining strategic partnerships, and professional leadership coaching.
The 2017 international finalists have been invited to New York for a week-long boot camp, which includes investor meetings and an enterprise ecosystem tour, and will be speaking at the two events hosted by Accelerate2030. The bootcamp in New York will conclude the 12 month support Accelerate2030 has been offering to the international finalists. The next edition, co-created and newly improved by participating Impact Hubs, is already in the making with applications planned to open in early 2019.
During Global Goals Week, Accelerate2030 will come to New York to host the following events:
– Accelerate2030: Entrepreneurial and Innovation Ecosystems for the SDGs, focusing on how to foster entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems for the SDGs. 26 September, 4-5.30pm, Conference Room B, UN Headquarters, New York.
– A2030: Scaling the Impact of Entrepreneurial Solutions for the SDGs, exploring examples of collaboration between ‘Unlikely Allies’ for SDGs, including startup-corporate partnerships, and the need to focus on creating tangible impact through collaborative approaches. 27 September, 6-8pm, Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave, New York.
Now more than ever we are being called to tackle urgent social and environmental issues. At the same time, our governments and economies are facing significant disruption, but this isn’t really a series of problems, this as an opportunity for transformative system change.
We believe that the only way forward is by joining forces to build a future where business and profit work in support of people and planet. That’s why we created the world’s largest acceleration and collaboration platform for positive change — what is now known as the Impact Hub network.
How did it start?
In 2000, a young, idealistic group of graduates from Wales’ Atlantic College decided to test the boundaries of the status quo. Securing London’s Royal Festival Hall for a millenium event, they wanted to initiate debate on the connections between global environmental, social, and political issues, persuading Nobel Prize winners and influential thinkers to speak. Even the Dalai Lama was enlisted for a video address.
Their boldness saw them invited to host an NGO event for the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. But instead of accepting it, they chose to create a more meaningful alternative — a people’s summit. They joined forces with local activists in Soweto who were transforming a township wasteland into the Soweto Mountain of Hope, aka ‘SoMoHo’, an arts, environmental education, and community hub, which outshone the UN summit and touched heads of state, as well as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Back in the UK, they wondered how they could bring these perspectives into the world of work, and thereby help people consider more purposeful careers that tackle urgent world issues. Looking into it, it hit them: People were already trying to action impactful ideas from their kitchen tables, not reaching their potential in isolation. Their growing group of collaborators changed this in 2005, when they found a space to bring these isolated entrepreneurs and innovators together: a run-down London loft that would house the forerunner of Impact Hub.
Hub Magnetism
The concept of ‘The Hub’ came to life, bringing changemakers together with the shared workspace, community, and events needed to advance their ideas and create new collaborations. Soon transformed with a community-designed interior using recycled and reused materials, The Hub met London impact makers’ needs for a collective action space and quickly filled up.
Months later, The Hub’s rapid growth made its hosts reach out to their networks, keen to discuss how to best support their expanding impact community. To their surprise, the resulting gathering in 2007 had little to do with member support but instead was full of people eager to find out how to open their own local Hubs all over the world.
An Impact Movement Is Born
So the team examined the principles of space co-creation and community building that were born in Soweto and tested in London, curious to see if Hubs might also work elsewhere… By 2008, there were nine Hubs on three continents.
The new spaces became rallying points for people passionate about building a radically better world, and the new Hub founders also connected — seeking inspiration in London and traveling to each other’s spaces to find out how to turn societal challenges into opportunities.
Dozens of would-be Hubs emerged following a centralized body in London, which envisioned the blooming network of Hubs developing as social franchises. But, by 2010, the founding teams came to a realization: Their future had to be a collective one.
Collective Growth
This realization led to the creation of a bottom-up, democratic governance model. It came to life in late 2011, marking the Hubs’ transformation into a genuine collective: one with a co-leadership structure and shared practices to shape a new way of doing business together, in and for the world.
In 2013, the empowered network reinforced its focus on purpose-driven innovation and, with this, chose a more fitting name: Impact Hub. Over the next four years, Impact Hub expanded its global reach and more than doubled its community of entrepreneurs and innovators to over 16,000 members across the globe. Instilling conscious leadership around social and business innovation, Impact Hubs inspire, connect and enable positive change across diverse contexts and economies to prove that the future of business is found in profit that serves people and the planet.
In 2018, as a truly global network, it is now tackling its next challenge: Impact at scale.
When I was finishing my second year of college, I remember getting asked how much money I wanted to make after graduation. Easy question for a business student to answer, right?
The expectation was to respond with a dollar figure. Instead, I responded, “I want to work for a company who values me and my work.”
There is so much context packed into this one statement. One, I attended college because I knew education was the only way for me to help my family move forward. Yet, I did not want to be driven strictly by money. Two, I always wanted to work for a great company, but never imagined entrepreneurship would be in my future. Three, I wanted to be valued as a person and I wanted my work to be recognized.
In 2010, I transferred to the University of Houston and started volunteering with the Hispanic Business Student Association (HBSA). The notion of giving back began growing its roots in my heart. For the first time, I had the opportunity to connect with other Latinos of a similar background as me who were driven to accomplish something bigger for themselves, their families and their communities.
Through HBSA, I helped organize career development opportunities for nearly 2,000 middle- and high-school students from low-income communities in Houston and Pasadena. The more I stood in front of other youth to share my story, the more driven I was to give back.
Shortly after my college graduation, I started my career as a natural gas and LNG analyst. Continuing my community work from college, I served as a volunteer board member for the Bauer College Alumni Association (BCAA) and the Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA). My role on these boards focused on student outreach, professional development, career advancement, and community engagement. As I advanced in my career, I spent countless hours mentoring students with efforts to close the gap between where they were and where they wanted to be.
In 2014, my husband and I decided to find a solution ourselves to barriers preventing students from accessing professional programming to advance their college careers. We pulled our resources together, formed a team, and developed a two-day professional boot camp and suit scholarship. In two years, the program impacted the lives of 50 deserving college students who did not own a suit. In 2017, building on the pillars of creativity, youth and education, we turned the suit scholarship into a non-profit organization called Creative Vida. Our mission is to educate and empower youth through creative experiences.
Over the last couple of years, I began thinking more critically about time and how little time we have on this Earth. I contemplated how I was going to write the next chapter of my life and career. On paper, I was in a prime position for my career. I worked for the first LNG exporter in the US. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was allocating my time to fully living out my values. Through prayer and mentorship, I realized the time I was putting into my volunteer efforts was insufficient to make the impactful change needed in our city. Thus, I made the decision to transition out of the LNG industry to focus full time on community work.
Now, I work to create a world where individuals who want to make an impactful change in their communities have access to the education and resources needed to best accomplish their efforts. This is why I joined the Impact Hub Houston launch team last year. I believe my unique combination of corporate and non-profit experience is a great asset to our city’s current and future social entrepreneurs. Before last year, I had never heard of the term social entrepreneur . Others words I had never heard of were social impact, social venture, impact investing, innovation ecosystem, b-corps. The lists go on and on.
How is it that someone like me, a business person who has been extremely involved in our community, did not get exposed to the “impact space” prior to 2018? When my husband and I registered Creative Vida as a 501(c)3, we did so because it was the only relevant business model we knew at the time. Participating in Impact Hub’s programming over the last few months is allowing the Creative Vida team to think more creatively about our revenue model to scale our impact in the coming years. Exposure and education definitely make a difference!
Houston needs Impact Hub Houston because we need a better support system for problem solvers trying to make a change.
In the short term, my goal through Impact Hub is to connect with individuals who have an idea to solve a local or global problem but are not connected to the community of people ready to help bring those ideas to life. I want to allow everyone an opportunity to find their place within this community of change makers, social entrepreneurs, and supporters. Will you join me? #CambiaElMundo
As I dig into my own research on organizations changing lives for the better, it’s only fitting this month’s UN theme be Human Rights. Uniformly, I find the businesses and charities championingnhuman rights (through economic inclusion, physical safety, or personal autonomy) and thriving put one thing at the forefront of their work.
Their humanity.
What better way to move the needle on the world’s challenges (like human rights violations) than to remember our own humanity? The more founders embrace who they are, and infuse
themselves into their work, the more traction and attention their work gets.
It’s easy to see why that’s the case. Humanizing our work builds culture and it’s culture that creates loyalists and communities invested in our success. The social capital that comes with community investment beats out tote bags and hashtags any day.
As you put your own solutions out into the world I challenge you to take the more “humane” approach to business by remembering a few things:
Lean Into the Messy
In the world of decks and pitches, there’s a ton of pressure to have all of the answers and execute. Thing is, you’ll never have all of the answers. Even worse, if you preoccupy yourself with finding answers you’ll miss some pretty interesting problems.
Move yourself and your team away from the need for certainty, and embrace the humanity of evolving. Curiosity is one of the best ways to explore empathy, and empathy is how you get to
the root of a successful solution.
Build in a student mindset and I promise you’ll start to see new ways of integrating clients, engaging beneficiaries, new solutions to thorny problems, and identify growth opportunities that fit who you are and who you serve.
Talk About Yourself
Don’t mistake this for prattling on about yourself endlessly. What draws people into adopting, supporting or not protesting solutions is understanding your relationship to, and passion for, the problem. Why is the problem so important to you and your team? How are you touched? What have you experienced?
Talking about your interest(s) in the problem creates transparency, trust, and humanizes it for the listener.
People move when they are moved.
Chunk the Persona
So listen up, we have all read the same twenty or so startup books with the same advice and mantras. So when you copy and paste these into your pitches, donor materials, or projects they tend not to stand out because we have all seen it before.
Even worse? When we co-opt based on the lens of another there’s almost always incongruency between who we say we are and what we do.
Make it easy, and be yourself. Infuse your values, mission, and vision in all that you touch. If democratic and inclusive discussion are paramount to you, your legal business structure should reflect that. If you support wealth-generation and equity, your supply chain should reflect the local economy. If you want to fundraise in a way that builds wealth and equity, really think about venture capital versus a crowd-funding approach.
If we look at a list of your dreams, mission, and vision then look at your business operations, model, and recruiting there should be alignment between the two.
Own Your Impact
The research is in, and it turns out we as humans like to be liked. There are a number of historical and anthropological reasons for this, but the bottom line is it’s uncomfortable to be different. Which is why there’s a gut inclination for some impact organizations to apologize for not fitting neatly into boxes the philanthropic, corporate, or venture create. Either squeezing themselves in or erasing their distinctive nature.
But projects solving the world’s largest challenges are complex and messy because the WORLD is complex and messy. Organizations moving the needle understand this and embrace it.
The next time you feel the need to apologize because someone doesn’t understand why you do what you do, fight the urge to apologize and translate instead. How does your business model
educate and promote more charitable behavior? What are the economics behind inclusion and mental wellness?
Don’t shrink when confronted, expand.
Create Your Own Definitions
I’ll end with saying, not everyone’s dreams will be your dreams; nor should they be. There are milestones startup media heralds as indicative of “success.” Thing is, those milestones may not work for you and what you’re doing. Organizations solving the problems others haven’t dared touch, such as human rights violations, must define for themselves what success looks like…for them.
I truly believe running a business, charity or project should never require we co-opt someone else’s experiences or discard any parts of our own. The best way to have a positive impact and move us all into forwarding change will come when you embrace that you have a perspective and experience that no one else has had or will have again. Use that to your advantage and see how much progress you make.
Impact Hub Houston thanks Erin McClarty for authoring this piece. Erin is a mix between a business coach, attorney, impact architect, and vision doula. She helps people run businesses, foundations, initiatives, and movements that are unique to the founders. In doing her work, Erin works to carve out spaces that are the truest of expressions of who they are, allowing them to heal themselves while they heal their communities. Learn more about Erin and the services she offers by clicking here to visit her website.
In continuation of the spotlights we promised in our campaign launch post, there are several passionate people behind Impact Hub Houston we want you to meet. Carlos Sotelo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlosotelo/) shares how his experiences growing up and helping students as a college counselor led him to join the Impact Hub Houston launch team:
Growing up in working-class Pasadena, I learned some of my greatest values from family and friends who called this hard-working, aspirational community home. Resilience. Echale ganas. Determination.
Still, I longed to expand my horizons beyond the endless refineries located just blocks down from our family’s apartment. I wanted to honor my parents’ sacrifices by taking advantage of every opportunity I could find. As an undocumented student, sometimes that meant creating a few along the way too.
Here, I also learned about what occurs when access to opportunity is limited for those that need it the most. Immigrant day laborers robbed of promised wages. Uninsured individuals unable to afford preventive health care. Financially-stressed parents with more options for predatory payday lenders than asset-building opportunities. Residents putting up with broken infrastructure and regulation-breaking industry. Students falling through the cracks at under-resourced schools.
I took these experiences with me to college. There, I studied public policy to learn how to find solutions to social problems. Thanks to those who helped me overcome the barriers of my educational journey, I believed in the power of education as a driver for positive social change.
The ladder of social mobility needs to be widened for the future of our country. As the one making the generational leap in my own family, I wanted to address the inequities in access to opportunity for all as I began my career.
So when I began serving as a college counselor, I connected with so many of my students who aspired to be the first in their families to go to and graduate from college.
Still, advising them on how to navigate the process of obtaining a postsecondary degree/certification of any kind was not enough. Too many of our students were failing to show up to their first day of college classes. Further, data shows that far too many students of a low-income or underrepresented minority background were not graduating.
With these problems in mind, I went to my first Impact Hub event last year: Open Project Night. I had hoped to just listen to what other people’s challenges or ventures were. Yet, something else happened. I got pushed to present about the problems I faced.
After jotting notes down on paper, I nervously spoke to the crowd about the experiences of my work and students. Soon, my two minutes were up and I started talking with people who came up to me. Just as quickly, my nerves went away. The free beer probably helped too, I may add.
The collaborative energy was infectious. Everyone was friendly and encouraging. People offered helpful advice and their contacts. Feeling uplifted, I returned the favor and visited the other presenters to offer my own support.
I joined Impact Hub Houston because I got pushed. I’m glad I got pushed.
Because that’s what Impact Hub Houston intends to do for the community of problem solvers. Push them forward towards enacting solutions. Push them to connect with one another to work smarter together than harder alone. Push resources and opportunities in our paths. Push the envelope for what sustainable impact looks like. Push social entrepreneurship as a viable option for addressing our most critical issues.
Being part of the Impact Hub Houston community is an opportunity to ensure a better future for a more equitable and prosperous Houston for future generations. Now, as we get ready to launch, expand our programming, and build our community, I push anyone who cares about making a difference to support and donate to Impact Hub Houston. You’ll be glad you did.
Activists and organizers are mobilizing to end discriminatory bail practices, small businesses are providing vital space and sustenance for neighbors, and we’re all checking on one another amidst the smoke and pollen swirling around.
I’m excited about our future! I attend dozens of events weekly where I’m constantly energized by seeing people work through methods both old and new to make Houston better. Solving problems is what we do, and Impact Hub is the embodiment of that collaborative spirit.
I met Grace Rodriguez and Shiroy Aspandiar at an Open Project Night years ago. Open Project Night is a space where people collaborate to drive ideas and projects forward to make Houston a better place./em>
Shiroy and I had a shared interest in education technology since I had just left an ed tech startup. Shiroy was developing One Jump, a platform that connects under-served students to enrichment opportunities to the shorten the opportunity gap.
Seeing Shiroy tackle a major problem for schools helped me realize just how little our education system has changed despite all the new innovations we have at our disposal. It also reminded me how much power we have to change it ourselves. I’m basically One Jump’s biggest fan and I tell every student I encounter about how invaluable it is for summer opportunities.
Meanwhile, Grace was supporting Writers in the Schools as a board member. Watching Grace wield her unique amalgam of experiences for good constantly pushes me to be more creative in my own work. I’ve been hacking for Houston alongside them ever since.
I love this city and I want to see us all thrive. In my experience, thriving begins with creating robust ways to invite people into our work. Here are a few ways I want to build community and solve problems with you:
Let’s develop communities of support for educators through EdCamps
Let’s imagine and build more equitable futures by training high school innovators to become TiE Young Entrepreneurs
I shared those examples because it’s important to consider the many ways that change making is already happening in our neighborhoods, especially in communities of color. I want to connect that innovative spirit to institutional resources and knowledge that can help advance Houston.
To that end, one major project I’ll be working on through Impact Hub is to map out support pathways for social entrepreneurs. How can we better define pathways to success for problem-solvers? If you want to share the story of how you navigated this process, please reach out to me!
Also, we’ve built up quite the community of change makers over the years but we can’t do this work without partners. If your organization is solving problems in Houston, I want to know about it. We want to amplify your voice, expand your impact, and look for ways to partner with you.
Houston feels different. America feels different. Everything is changing. Can you feel it? We invite you to subscribe, volunteer, mentor, and — if you’re feeling our mission — slide us some coins for our crowdfunding campaign to help us increase our capacity for programming! Let’s shape and embrace change together. I can’t wait!
We’re proud to announce that we’re working with the Houston Health Department to help HOU win the IT’S TIME TEXAS #CommunityChallenge! Aligned with the #GlobalGoal of Good Health and Well-Being (SDG3), Houston’s participation in the challenge is part of the ongoing #GoHealthyHouston initiative supported by the office of Mayor Sylvester Turner:
“When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, our motivation to keep on a healthier track can fade as the weeks pass. That’s why we at the Houston Health Department encourage you to participate in the 2019 IT’S TIME TEXAS Community Challenge. The statewide competition helps you create healthy habits while competing against other communities for bragging rights and grant money.
The Challenge runs January 7 to March 3, 2019 and it’s free to participate. Here’s how it works:
Take healthy selfies whenever you’re eating healthy or participating in a physical activity — use the hashtag #CommunityChallengeHOU and #GoHealthyHouston so we can track it! You can upload seven selfies per day for 200 points each.
Connect your FitBit and/or use the site’s fitness tracker to earn points throughout the day.
Watch the living healthier video lesson and answer a few questions for 200 points.
Host a community event for 250 points. It must be a free, public, fitness-focused event for the entire community to enjoy.
Your community leaders also play a huge role in the Challenge. Elected officials, school representatives, businesses and organizations can earn points by signing pledges and participating in other activities.
In addition to earning bragging rights over our fellow Texas cities, *the five winning communities will receive funds to put toward future health-related projects.*
Help us get Houston on the path to better health — grab a glass of water and sign up to get started!
Grace Rodriguez, who spent much of her childhood in Houston and would later return as an adult in 2000, has long promoted Houston and its innovators. She strived to change the city’s perception during the six-year run of the “Houston at SXSW” promotional effort; helped Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez create the first Mayor’s Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee during his tenure on the Houston City Council; and worked as a lead organizer for Women In Tech: Houston and TEDxHouston.
In 2016, she was one of four founders who started Station Houston and helped grow it to 184 startups, 139 mentors and 351 members. The organization has become a driver for the city’s efforts to become a hub for high-growth, venture capital-attracting technology companies. And Station Houston fit well with her track record of working behind the scenes to found and nurture young organizations. But this time around, Rodriguez will take the next step in her career as the CEO and face of an organization.
Impact Hub is a global network with more than 100 hubs in over 50 countries. Roughly 6,400 startups were founded at its hubs between 2012 and 2016. Starting an Impact Hub is a long process that requires approval from the global network. Shiroy Aspandiar and Natasha Azizi co-founded Impact Hub Houston in 2016 and then reached out to Rodriguez this past summer.
“Grace has the right mix of mindsets, character, experience,” Aspandiar said, “and also just a true love for helping people that I think would make her a natural fit to be able to lead the helm of an Impact Hub.”
Others in Houston’s startup community likewise saw Impact Hub as a natural fit.
“She’s had such a focus on all social issues,” said Russ Capper, executive director of Houston Exponential, a nonprofit tasked with marketing and connecting Houston’s various innovation initiatives. “She likes to integrate them deeply into innovation and startups.”
Learn more about Grace, her background working in Houston’s creative, startup and innovation communities, and her crazy path to becoming the new CEO/Executive Director of Impact Hub Houston through her interview on “Working Wisdom” podcast from the C. T. Bauer College of Business:
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