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🐾 Group Members

#️⃣ Hashtags

📋 About

🎯 Inquiry

Victoria Sweet, Leigh Morgan, Rosita Lucas, Tania Lo, Monique Aiken

#ecosystemmapping2.0 #BuildingTrustThroughMapping

This effort reimagines a ecosystem mapping exercise by adding a 2.0 layer of question that go beyond googleable answers about the stakeholders in a regional ecosystem. The 2.0 layer asks views on power sharing, worldviews, reciprocal goals, and about stakeholder’s goals beyond the stated marketing team drafted mission statement, including being in right relationship with each other and the land to elevate the importance of these answers and ensure alignment.

We hypothesize that if we can transparently share answers to the 2.0 layer of questions earlier on in the interactions between and among stakeholders, we could enable the faster trust building required to more durably, effectively and efficiently fill the needs and/or capital gaps in the region engendering greater flourishing, faster.

Can we elevate ecosystem mapping exercises to also be used as a tool for relationship and trust building thereby increasing their utility?

The goal of any ecosystem map should be to increase the connectivity and clarity within that system to improve system health. However, current efforts don’t always achieve those goals and worse, can even cause harm through objectification of stakeholders and dishonoring those who aren’t financial capital holders when these maps are being created to support capital distribution efforts.

System characteristics of health and resilience

Source: The Investment Integration Project (TIIP)

Descriptions of the 4 Characteristics of System Health

Source: The Investment Integration Project (TIIP)

We asked ourselves, can we intentionally design an ecosystem mapping exercise which foregrounds new information about stakeholders beyond those data related to capital and encourages deeper contemplation on power, non-financial currencies, worldviews, language, reciprocity and alignment instead of the capitalistic defaults that couple wealth/capital and power, are designed for max extraction, devalue non-financial currencies and does not ask whether alignment is had on key terms nor seeks to bridge across cultures typically centering whiteness and inherited patriarchal modes of practicing finance.

Here are the possible headlines if our hypothesis holds:

1. A New Collaborative Emerging from the of the Inaugural Edge Finance Accelerator Proposes A More Comprehensive Approach to Ecosystem Mapping

   Subtitle: Profiles to include perceptions of power and willingness to share power, cataloging of worldviews and questions of culture to help ecosystem players find common ground more quickly to build relationships that enable capital to flow more efficiently to geographic or system needs

2. Edge Finance Accelerator Participants Challenge Ecosystem Mappers to Go Deeper with their Profiling to Enable More Resilient Relationships and Build Trust Faster

   Subtitle: To increase understanding among community members, whether micro-level or meta-level, asking about worldviews, perceptions of power and power sharing and culture, is essential to bridge building

Prototype Parts

Here are some of the draft 2.0 questions we came up with and what they help us transparently understand more about ourselves and our partners each other in the ecosystem.

1. All the way to the left is: Committed to sharing power
2. Middle is, we would like to, but need to learn how
3. Far right is: Uninterested in | Need to foreground the need for power sharing in any interaction between stakeholders and ensure we do not default to presuming financial capital holds all the power in a transaction or ecosystem | | Verifying authenticity | How do you share power? Pops up if they answer 1 above How do you plan to learn to share power? Pops up if they answer 2 | Fill in the box | Clarifies answer to prior question | | Worldview acknowledgement | Worldviews? | Check the box, with each type of worldview having a short explanation according to the framework shared by Taj with will be cited and hyperlink | To ensure the stakeholders points of view are clear allowing for more effective bridge building by ecosystem participants | | No presumption | Definition of key word central to the mapping exercise being undertaken. In the case of the bioregional fund work, thriving would be defined. | Fill in the box | To ensure that ecosystem players are clear about the goal and if divergent definitions exist, that a common goal can be articulated that all stakeholders can share | | Ensures complete stakeholder consideration/inclusion | Who/what type of organizations do you believe you would need to collaborate with to realize this goal of 'thriving'? | Fill in table Name | Type | Brief why (Name can be blank) | Crowdsourcing from the community helps to complete the picture of stakeholders required such that no one is missed who needs to be involved | | Visibilize gaps | What essential programs/resources do you see are missing? | Fill in the box | Ensuring that we see all the gaps in the ecosystem including and beyond financial, particularly if the other needs are leverage points which would allow the “funds” capital to be more effective/additional | | Honoring the wisdom of the crowd | What pathways do you see are needed to collaborate across diversity? | Fill in the box | Showing respect for lived experience and stakeholder wisdom | | Confirming intent | How do you ensure interactions in the ecosystem are characterized by reciprocity and not extraction? | Fill in the box | Foregrounding intentions of ecosystem participants in attempt to counter the western capitalist tendency to extract by default |

We also took a look at some traditional profile questions on a typical ecosystem map to add additional information to help in understanding the current state of the ecosystem.