My Year of Hopefulness - The Blue Sweater

Inspiration is one of the main reasons I read. To my delight, Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital fund dedicated to eradicating poverty through strategic entrepreneurial investments in the developing world, wrote a book from her heart that is uplifting for anyone who ever had a dream and went after it. The Blue Sweater is a story of encouragement, faith, and determination for people who want to live a purposeful, fulfilling life. In other words, this book is for everyone. And you must read it. 

Jacqueline takes us on a journey from her life as a young college graduate working for Chase Manhattan into Africa where she worked in microfinance back to the US where she attended Stanford Business School and then through her career post-MBA up through her founding of Acumen Fund. Articulate, powerful, and deeply moving, Jacqueline's prose are so fluid it's as if a friend sat me down to tell me her life story. Every page took me further and further down the road of adventure. I couldn't put it down and read it from beginning to end in one weekend. 

With a vivid writing style, Jacqueline introduces each character so clearly that you feel they're in the room with you and you feel compelled to help them in the way that you'd help a friend or family member. I wanted so much to see each character succeed. As their pride welled, so did mine. As they smiled and grew more confident, so did I. And when things didn't go well for the characters, I felt their heartbreak, too. I wanted them to keep going and I wanted to go with them. 

Perhaps the most incredible feature of the book is Jacqueline's humility and her ability to try and try again she made some positive progress in everything she ever attempted. Too often we are reading the stories of people and companies who are too afraid to admit mistakes or failure, who don't want to take risks or step out of their comfort zones. It was refreshing to hear the twists and turns that Jacqueline's career in social enterprise has taken. She owns every success and every failure with grace and dignity. And the many entrepreneurs she has helped throughout her career are all better off for her tenacity and ambition.  

Warning: there is a high probability that this book will motivate you to make a difference today. Be ready.   

My Year of Hopefulness - Acumen Fund, Social Media, and Recruiting

Acumen Fund is looking for a Business Development Manager. Rather than go the usual route of getting the word out about this position, the took an interesting approach both in the advertisement of the position and in the application. Sasha Dichter, the Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund, used his blog, Squidoo, and Seth Godin's blog to advertise the position. 13,000 viewed the post on his blog alone. In addition to the usual resume and cover letter request, Sasha also requested that applicants create a Squidoo Len (webpage) and answer a series of questions in ~250 words each to get at the heart of what the applicants believe and how they express themselves.

There are so many business applications to this recruitment and application method, and I will discuss those in my Examiner.com column. For the purposes of this post, I wanted to explain why the incredible response to Sasha's post gives me great hope for our future. Acumen Fund is dedicated to investing in projects that focus on providing critical services in the developing world. It's a very intriguing hybrid model of nonprofit and venture capital. The position requires people who can put on a nonprofit and for-profit thinking cap; someone who can think both analytically and conceptually, and express themselves in engaging prose.

Not only is this degree of interest in a position at Acumen Fund a win for those who believe they can do well by doing good, it is also a great victory for storytellers and the skill of writing in general. Many people in the world of business think in bullet points on Powerpoint slides. They have forgotten how to create meaningful, compelling prose. The many people who applied for the Acumen Fund show that expressive writing is not dead at all -- it is still alive and well, and garnering great interest among business people.

For people like me who are interested in having one foot in the for-profit and nonprofit world, who wants to analyze numbers and then build out the narrative that those numbers create, it is so exciting to know that there are many others out there with this same interest. My sincere thanks to Seth Godin and Acumen Fund for providing this example and instilling us all with hope!

The photo above can be found at http://blog.acumenfund.org/author/ddoshi/