In 2022, New Profit convened our communities at The Well: Reflect. Renew. Refound. We came together in Washington, D.C., to discuss what is required of us to power an American Evolution and ”to be present and engage; to release and to rage; to create and reconnect,” as New Profit CEO Tulaine Montgomery put it during the opening remarks. Curating The Well community is hard work…and it is also heart work done in the spirit of joy.
The Well was new in 2022, but New Profit’s gathering of our community has deep roots in time. Nearly 20 years ago, our grantee-partners, funders, and others urged us to convene the leading thinkers from every sector for an open dialogue about the twin challenges of scale and impact in social innovation. A few months after that call-to-action, in the winter of 2005, 75 people came together at Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York to deepen our collective understanding of the barriers to growth and generate ideas for how we could release the potential of social entrepreneurs writ large to dramatically grow their impact. It was a redux of the original convenings that led to the formation of New Profit back in 1997 and 1998—what we affectionately refer to as the original “Idea Team.”
The energy and excitement of the resulting relationships, ideas, and action agenda during our time together at Mohonk led us to formalize and host an annual Gathering of Leaders. The initial dialogue generated a sprawling action agenda with three clear central imperatives: increase access to capacity-building capital; increase access to, and improve practices with, human capital; and connect social entrepreneurs to government partnerships.
The latter imperative was radical at the time. The idea that social entrepreneurs should (or even could) deeply engage in policy advocacy, as a way to direct public resources towards higher impact approaches and build public will behind social innovations, was not widely endorsed in the mid-2000s. In fact, many of the social entrepreneurs in the New Profit network started their organizations precisely because they believed government was no longer the place to drive social change. Still, thanks to an encouraging yet admonishing talk with Presidential Advisor David Gergen at the first Gathering, our community was forced to reckon with the fact that we were putting a ceiling on our impact potential if we avoided shaping the way public dollars flowed.
In the ensuing years, those barriers began to come down, and we’re proud of New Profit’s role in helping social entrepreneurs activate public resources through the work of the America Forward Coalition. Today, the idea is no longer radical and we can orient our annual convenings around other major challenges that require similarly radical solutions.
Similarly, our Inclusive Impact Action Summit in February of 2020 brought together a group of leaders from across America’s broad racial, ethnic, and experiential spectrum for candid dialogue and collective learning about how barriers and disparities in the social sector are holding back progress on social problem solving across the board. During the Summit, we launched our Inclusive Impact strategy aimed at driving unprecedented capital and support to Black, Indigenous, and Latine social entrepreneurs. The need to keep evolving was never made clearer than by the upheavals of the pandemic and the difficult national reckoning with racial equity that resulted. It was not lost on us that, for two long years, the pandemic prevented us from gathering.
When conditions enabled us to come together again, New Profit—and our nation—had shifted dramatically. We reconceived the Gathering of Leaders as The Well. We were moved by Nick Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and President & CEO of NDN Collective, who posed the critical question: “Is it possible that the best days of our people are actually in front of us and not behind us? It’s so important to ask that question because if the answer is yes—if the best days of our people are in front of us and not behind us—then it evokes action today. It requires radical imagination today and it requires urgency right now.”
The word “well” evokes a diversity of strong visions. One is about health and well-being which highlights our collective calling to heal widespread trauma. Another is as a community access point for nourishment and life, a place to share our deep resources, A well is also a gathering place where we can connect, hear each other’s stories, grow relationships and ideas, and restore our sense of hope.
And hope is what we have at New Profit. In 2022, the stories and ideas shared at The Well made it so clear that our future is in very good hands with our Emerging Leaders like De’Vonte Parker who, in a post-event reflection, shared: “Being at The Well with so many like-minded leaders has made me realize that I am indeed powerful and possess everything I need to make the change I want to see.”
What deep waters of our own experience can we draw upon for younger generations to carry with them and continue to replenish our American Evolution? We invite those who gather at The Well to be a source of replenishment, love, and healing. With its roots in the Gathering of Leaders, The Well is an intentional place for dialogue and mobilization, where our community can pursue our country’s greatest possibilities. It’s a place of deep, complex thinking, gritty honesty, and unsentimental vision. But it’s also a place where we hold, love, challenge, and forgive each other. At The Well, you can get what you need—but you can also give what you need.