 Thank you, Lindsay. Good morning, everybody. Okay, we got to do that again. Good morning. Great. Thank you so much. I'm absolutely thrilled and honored to be with you all. I'm also incredibly honored to have followed such fierce leaders like Lisa Hall and Ann May Chang. So I'm super excited to spend the next 12 or so minutes with you guys. Another shout-out to Socap for having us. Socap has long been a great friend to Echoing Green and we're really excited to be an innovation partner for this year's conference. So by my count, there are about 50 or so Echoing Green fellows, alums, and staff coursing their way through Socap this year. So for all of you out there, it's gonna be hard not to stumble across, bump into, or connect with someone from the community. And I really encourage you, take some time, hang out, get to know them, worth engaging in these conversations and forging some terrific relationships. I know I look forward to it. So as Lindsay mentioned, I run Echoing Green. Echoing Green has been around for a long time, about 30 years. Echoing Green created a new model for funding and supporting early-stage social entrepreneurs and has become the premier leadership accelerator for finding talent and unleashing it for the social good. We do this in a couple of ways. We first find rare and exceptional next-gen global leadership. We build and sustain a community of social innovators. We accelerate these leaders to impact the world and we mine the insights, the lessons, approaches, and challenges faced by these leaders and create new programming to support a more robust social innovation ecosystem. So today, Echoing Green has supported about 700 social entrepreneurs who've worked in more than 70 countries around the world. They've leveraged our seed funding and gone on to raise in excess of $5 billion in additional funding for the public good, impacting positively millions of lives. So, you know, I was about to say that it's a really interesting time for Echoing Green. But as you all know, it's always a really interesting time for those of us who work in this space. Nonetheless, I want to walk through a couple of themes that we're seeing from our purview at Echoing Green that I think are worth highlighting and that I believe will give us some sense of where the field, where the social enterprise field, is heading. So I'm going to quickly flag five areas. First, getting real is the pioneer gap in impassable gulch. First, second, the growing role of purpose as part of the double bottom line for companies. Three, connecting the dots and making explicit the connection between social enterprise and equity issues. Four, moving beyond an institutional frame for social impact, talking more about embracing distributed networks and communities of practice. And five, how the inextricable link between talent and value creation in the modern economy could, could mainstream social impact work. So I'll walk quickly through each of the five. First, is the pioneer gap an impassable gulch? So Echoing Green's impact investing program stems from our long history of seeding, selecting and supporting social entrepreneurs. In the past decade, we've helped seed the growing momentum around for profit and hybrid business models. So for example, in 2006, only about 15% of those in our applicant pool were proposing for profit or hybrid models. In 2015, that had increased to 50%. And you know, despite compelling research on the pioneer gap and frequent acknowledgement of the lack of seed stage financing for social enterprise, the most promising early stage ventures still face crippling hurdles in accessing capital. You know, we're hearing from a lot of our social entrepreneurs that in addition to individual fundraising challenges, their lack of access to aligned early stage impact capital is a result of systemic structural market problems. Now that they've launched their impact businesses, they feel isolated and far too often adversarial with the impact investors with whom they had hoped to partner. They also recognize that it is not only a disappointment to them, but that impact investors are also having difficulty reaching the goals and milestones that they'd enter the market to achieve. You know, we at Echoing Green are taking a number of approaches to address this. We're working with other funders to provide blended capital, both philanthropy and investment to catalyze innovative solutions. Second, we're convening social entrepreneurs and investors discuss frankly these issues. And third, we're continuing to provide research to better inform the field. You know, this afternoon, we'll be participating on a panel blended capital to support early stage entrepreneurs about this topic. And we actually just released a new white paper in partnership with USAID called Deviation from the Standard to share key learnings about the types of investment readiness support and financing that early stage social entrepreneurs need in developed and emerging markets. So that was pioneer gap. Second, the growing role of purpose as part of the double bottom line for companies. So in 2011, we became one of the first organizations to name and invest in the development of an emerging purpose field. When we launched our signature work on purpose program with the vision to help young people, mostly young people make career decisions that are right for them and good for the world. Companies around the world are also using these principles to try to recruit and retain a diverse pipeline of talent. And to do the work we want to do as social entrepreneurs and organizations with a social mission, we need staff as well that are as committed as we. So companies are really listening and are increasingly paying close attention. This generation of millennials who are eager to find meeting and purpose in their lives and work are influencing companies to institute and increase new corporate recruitment and engagement strategies related to purpose. So for examples, Ben and Jerry's is testing new ways to champion purpose within their company, including equipping employees to lead and sit in on purpose exploration workshops. We actually hosted one of their workshops last month with Ben and Jerry's staff. They have a purpose team at Ben and Jerry's. So their purpose team, which is a cross departmental group, is dedicated to determining how the corporation can further instill an emphasis on individual purpose into their work. So today, employees want more and research shows that they're actually serious benefits to this kind of focus. So for example, employees with a strong sense of purpose are at least four times more likely to be engaged in their jobs as other employees. And also during a time in which workplace engagement in this country is remarkably low, companies that are driven by purpose have employees that are three times more likely to stay with that company. Purpose driven companies also outperform the S&P 500 by 10 times between the years of 1996 and 2011. So purpose. Third point, connecting the dots and making explicit the connection between social enterprise and equity issues. You know, in 2007, I was at a conference similar to this where I gave a talk tracing many of the predicates of this field to the work of social justice and critical social movements, including the civil rights movement, a human capital development approach and investment in next generation leadership, a focus on opportunity and leveraging the power of narrative to shift norms and change behaviors. Widely. So the next generation of social entrepreneurs at Echoing Green are now leading on this front, really digging in on how to think about systemic racial equity in and through the lens of social entrepreneurship. They are smartly examining questions of differential access to networks and the impact this has on financial capital flows, as well as on building the kinds of bonding capital that's critical to achieving lasting social impact. They're looking at inherent biases of funders and what it means to fund otherness and unpacking frames like culture and fit as too exclusionary for the abundance of talent that's really needed to take on and solve the challenges before us. And over the next couple of days, there are a number of really important panels here that will include some of these social innovators that I really encourage you to check out. There's a panel tomorrow morning called Measuring Racism, the prerequisite for diversity and equity. It will explore ideas from leading racial justice research and begin to assess social entrepreneurship's role in the inequitable power dynamics created by racism. There's another panel on tap this morning called Funding Otherness, the impact of race, culture, gender and other identities. And on Friday morning, there's a panel called Breaking Down Barriers to Inclusive Organizational Culture. I think these are incredibly important conversations that will allow new spaces and leading innovators to dig in deep on these very important issues, so equity and innovation, the nexus. Four, moving beyond an institutional frame for social impact, embracing distributed networks and communities of practice. I mean, we all know that throughout history, social change has been possible only through the contributions and engagement of both individuals and organizations connected in both tight and loose groups. Positive developments, disruptive innovation and scale will all be increasingly linked to ongoing actions through a network of relationships. So what does this mean for a community like Echoing Green? So as our network has grown to be 700 plus social innovators and many friends and supporters, we're beginning to invest heavily in opportunities for collective learning and engagement and facilitating communities of practice by issue area, inflection point and geography. So for example, next month we will convene our currently funded fellows and alums in Johannesburg over the course of a week in partnership with USAID. We'll have close to 200 social entrepreneurs with us for peer learning sessions, engagement with local leaders, industry roundtables. And in addition, over the past two and a half years, we've piloted a cohort model of learning, bringing together small groups of social entrepreneurs confronting similar challenges to then work through those issues together over the span of 15 to 18 months. And thus far we've hosted about three of these cohorts around topics of raising impact investing dollars, scaling your human services delivery model and scaling your work through idea diffusion. Finally, we're really interested to watch how social innovators themselves are starting to create distributed networks that are organic and dynamic and truly open source. So it's interesting to note that a lot of these networks are really predicated in large measure around human capital development framework. So for example, we're now seeing second order effects where Echoing Green funded enterprises are now seeding next generation talent and networks which are then coming into the Echoing Green space. It's a trend to watch and an important mechanism for social change in the 21st century, which brings me to my last point. How the inextricable link between talent and value creation in the modern economy could mainstream social impact work. So, you know, while 100 years ago, natural resources were really considered the economy's most valuable assets, talents rise to become the key asset in the modern economy began about 50 years ago, with an extraordinary flowering of creative work that required substantial independent judgment and decision making. So while in the for profit sector, this really drove a focus on compensating talent and we know some real downsides about overcompensating talent. There's actually been a lag in our sector and the social sector around this conversation beyond the concern for the coming talent deficit. There's really an increasing push for next generation talent to engage in social impact work, providing not just an outlet for creative thinking, but also because there's a growing cachet of this type of professional path. And from our perspective, this really offers a real opportunity to double down on this linkage between talent and value creation, because at the end of the day, that's what we're all here for, value creation socially, economically and environmentally. And in fact, Echoing Green is presenting the 21st century talent content track at this year's conference. And today you'll have the opportunity to hear from two of my colleagues along with other speakers who will be leading sessions on how to land and retain top talent and answer the question, what does it take to prepare private sector talent for non-profit board service, for example? These are just some of the trends, some of the themes, some of the conversations we're having in Echoing Green. We'd love to invite you all into that conversation informally over the next couple of days, or if you guys have some free time this evening, we will be at Stock and Trade at 2036 Lombard Street, 530-730 this evening. Come by for some food, for some drinks, some good company. We'd love to continue engaging in this conversation with you and we appreciate your attention. Thank you.