Get to know VillageCanMarket-Activators identify, recruit, and develop-leadership; build-markets around leadership; build-power out of markets. Activators bring people together, challenging them to act on behalf of their shared values and interests. They develop relationships, motivate-participation, strategize-pathways, and take-actions that enable people to gain new appreciation of their values, resources to which they have access, their interests, and a new capacity to use their resources on behalf of their interests. Activators work through ‘’dialogues’’ in relationships, motivation, strategy, action carried out as campaigns. Activators interweave relationships, motivation, strategy, actions so that each contributes to the other. One result is new networks of relationship wide and deep enough to provide a foundation for a new market in action. Another is a new story about who this market is, where it has been, where it is going, and how it will get there. A third result is a strategy envisioning how a market can turn the resources it has into the power it needs to get what it wants. And a final result is action as market mobilizes and deploys its resources on behalf of its interests - as collaboration, claims making, or both.
Market-Activators develop new relationships out of old ones- sometimes by linking one person to another and sometimes by linking whole networks of people together. Relationships grow out of exchanges of interests and resources, the commitment to sustain them, and the creation of a shared story. Market-Activators engage people in discerning why they should act to change their world- the values and how they can act to change it- their strategy. Market-Activators motivate action by deepening people’s understanding of who they are, what they want, and why they want it, their values. Mobilizing feelings of urgency, hope, anger, self-worth and solidarity that facilitate action, they challenge feelings of inertia, fear, apathy, self-doubt, and isolation that inhibit action. Activators engage people in articulating this call to action as a shared story of the challenges they must face, the choices they must make, and the hope that can inspire to courage that make these choices now- a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now. Market-Activators engage people in deliberating about how they can turn what they have (resources), into what they need (power) to get what they want (interests): strategy. Power is that influence our resources can have on interests of others who hold resources that can influence our interests. Market-Activating often requires using our resources to mobilize power interdependently with others whose interests we share to challenge the power exercised over us by others whose interest conflict with our own.
Market-Activators challenge people to take the responsibility to act. For an individual, empowerment begins with accepting responsibility. For an organization, empowerment begins with commitment, the responsibility its members take for it. Responsibility begins with choosing to act. Market-Activators challenge people to commit, to act, and to act effectively. Market Activators work through campaigns-highly energized, intensely focused, concentrated streams of activity with specific goals and deadlines. People are recruited, programs launched, battles fought and organizations built through campaigns. Market Activators build market by developing leadership. They develop leaders by enhancing their skills, values and commitments. They build strong markets through which people gain new understanding of their interests as well as the power to act on them- markets which are bounded yet inclusive, communal yet diverse, solidaristic yet tolerant. They develop a relationship between a constituency and its leaders based on mutual responsibility and accountability. @Maurice Olunga, The Social Enterprise Executive Developer (THE SEED), VillageCAN PROJECT
