Maya Enista Smith
In this special series, we’ll take a brief look at various different fearless inspirations from the past week or so. Whether it’s a fearless young changemaker who is taking risks, a new publication that expresses bold and innovative ideas, or an organization that is promoting change and that is not afraid to fail forward—we want to shine a spotlight on them and their work in the hope that it will spark a new movement to Be Fearless.
As Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation says, “The old way of doing things is simply no longer effective in this new world. It’s time for us all to take risks on new ideas, approaches, and initiatives. It’s time for us to be bold, to act with urgency, and to resist the tendency to let caution be our guide. It’s time for us to Be Fearless.” Will you join us?
Q&A on Be Fearless with Maya Enista Smith
This week we turned to Maya Enista Smith, CEO of Mobilize.org, to ask what she thinks it means to Be Fearless. At Mobilize.org, Maya leads a growing and innovative organization whose mission it is to improve democracy by investing in Millennial-driven solutions.
What do you think it means to Be Fearless in approaching social challenges?
The most important ingredient in being fearless is one's ability to be resilient. This work is hard, and there's so much to do and to steal a great quote that I heard at a conference last year; "This work breaks your heart, every day."
Every one finds their own recipe for building resiliency, and mine is Failure + Collaboration + People = Resilient Maya. In this sector, we don't talk about our mistakes enough. One high school student in a presentation that I did at NYLC last year, poignantly asked me why they only hear from successful entrepreneurs, all of whom talk about the importance of failure, instead of hearing from those who had failed — not a little bit of failure, but life-altering failure. I haven't met an entrepreneur yet who hasn't failed, but that student was right that we don't talk about those failures enough and concentrate too much on our successes. We don't have to welcome, or expect failure, but when it happens, it must be taken as a crucial learning opportunity and we must become better because of it.
In the work that we do, organizations are often very propreitory — my volunteers, my funders, my partners — but in order to be Be Fearless, we must recognize that the work we need to do far outweighs the individual ability of one organization to do it, and that's why collaboration is key. For Mobilize.org, this has meant strategic partnerships with organizations like Sparkseed and YouthNoise, that have allowed us to build our capacity, improve our programming, and involve more Millennials.
Lastly, there's a big difference between talking about the work you do and actually having done anything to improve the lives of the people around you, and in Washington, DC, there's a lot of both happening. For me, it's crucial that I spend time with the Millennials in whom we invest, in the communities in which we work and connected to the work that they're doing.
Their stories, the impact they're having and the small role that Mobilize.org is able to play in both, is my key ingredient to getting up when I feel knocked down, hearing no more than I hear yes, dealing with challenges facing our organization, and our sector, and remaining resilient and optimistic through the difficult times.
Tell us about a time when you and your organization were Fearless.
If being fearless is also defined by high risk, high-potential opportunities (and I think it is), then I think one of the most important successes in the history of Mobilize.org was the acquisition of GenerationEngage, which we previously blogged about here on Social Citizens. Now, more than three years after the acquisition, I can reflect on the moment that my good friend Decker Ngongang (former Executive Director of GenerationEngage, more recently hired to lead the Black Male Engagement Fellowship for Echoing Green) and I decided to take a risk to join our two organizations and create an effort that was stronger together than the sum of our parts.
To us, it seemed smart, obvious, and a little bit crazy, and the pay off of that partnership, in every possible way, has been immense. We were also extremely lucky to have the support of our philanthropic partners, particularly the Knight Foundation, that believed in both organizations and even more in our combined ability. If you haven't read Robert Egger's most recent piece in The Huffington Post about the importance of mergers and sharing resources among nonprofits, you must.
What did you learn, and what advice would you give other organizations that are facing a similar decision point?
The most important lesson that I learned from Decker, and the leadership of GenerationEngage, was that it's really not about what the organization is called, or who gets the corner office, or what conferences you get to attend. It's about the work, in whatever form it takes, and in partnership with whomever it takes to get it done. We learned to ask ourselves the tough questions, and I hope everyone else does as well — What is the unmet need that you're feeling? If you went away today, who would miss you? If someone is doing this work better than us, how can we support them? This line of thinking runs against much of what we learn in the nonprofit sector (although I hope that is changing now) — how we're measured and how success is defined.
For Mobilize.org, our Board of Directors (led by the original @socialcitizen, Kari Saratovsky) is owed a lot of credit for their transformational leadership, and challenging me and the Mobilize.org team to think differently about our work and I encourage all boards to have these important conversations.
What inspired your organization to be Fearless (can be a person, organization, campaign, etc.)
We have the privilege of working with Millennials each day who accomplish some extraordinary things, while facing significant challenges. Our inspiration to Be Fearless certainly comes from them, and one example that comes to mind is the work of Team Rubicon, which received a Mobilize.org investment in April 2009. Team Rubicon is an organization that unites the skills and experiences of military veterans with medical professionals to rapidly deploy emergency response teams into crisis situations. Their important work in the devastation following the tornadoes in Joplin, MO, the earthquake in Chile, and most recently in Dallas, TX, after some extreme weather devastated communities, is one of the reasons that we keep working hard to find Millennials who have created solutions to yet unmet needs in their communities and need the investment and support necessary to make them a reality.
From national organizations like Team Rubicon and One Percent Foundation to local peer mentoring programs at Central Piedmont Community College and foster care support initiatives at community colleges in California, Mobilize.org draws our inspiration from the Millennials who are called to address some of the most critical problems that our country faces, and who do so with a collaborative and entrepreneurial spirit, a deep appreciation of the diversity of this generation, and with the technological tools that our generation is pioneering.
About Mobilize.org: It is a growing, dynamic Millennial organization whose mission is a empower and invest in Millennials to create and implement solutions to social problems. Mobilize.org believes that in order to create long-term, sustainable and community based solutions to the challenges facing our country, Millennials must authentically engage their peers in identifying problems, proposing solutions and working together to implement those solutions.
Our program model helps Millennials recognize their leadership capacity by convening them to discuss the challenges that they face, inviting them to work collaboratively to propose solutions, and investing in those Millennial-ledsolutions (financially, and otherwise) across the country. Mobilize.org has convened over 1,600 Millennials in person and more than 20,000 online and invested in 49 Millennial-led solutions on such issues as the obstacles facing Millennial veterans when they return from combat, the lack of financial literacy for our generation and the low community college completion rates in schools across the country.