Key Challenges

We offer The Agency as the solution to four key challenges faced by agents of the transition.

There is a gap in financial services to support those building the new economy and the transition to it. We can solve around this together. The strain of creating something new and struggle to access resources can drain a change agent. By coming together, we can keep energy high. With restricted financial resources, creating transformational projects, like most forms of entrepreneurialism, requires creative resourcefulness. Together we can help resource each other and share learnings. And potentially, we can develop products and services for our own field that generate the financial resources to fuel our ongoing efforts.

1. Financial Market Gap
   Pathway to self-funding. Many face challenges of self-funding, double-work, or family patronage – in a space that is not very well supported by traditional funding. It often lacks the scale and predictability sought after in investment funding. Also, passion projects can be too much of a blur or hybrid between for-profit and non-profit (it is for-benefit) to be the sort of direct-service that is well-funded philanthropically. These are small experiments on the edge of a new economy.
2. Game on! o/
   Transformation work is very tricky to justify to others. The ideas inspire, but the challenge of metrics of success thwarts funding opportunities. Highly experimental, bridge-building work requires an openness to emergence and a trust in collective evolution. The timelines for proving success and for clearly attributing success to an individual intervention is fraught with perils. Thus, the ability of change agents and bridge builders to know, qualify, and quantify their work and impact is a tremendous challenge. By coming together to discuss these challenges, we may learn faster and feel “with” others into solutions. A potent form of “not-alone-ness” that keeps the personal emotional motivation high. This is part of the important “game mechanics” of nourishing the movement – keeping the energy of the builders “leaning forward” together.
3. Share Assets and Talents
   Watching inheritors burn through stockpiles exploring the edge, I have learned this is an area where no matter what your financial resources, finding ways to make action happen without having to transact in dollars can extend, enliven, and even mobilize efforts that would otherwise fail. In fact, success is more highly determined by collaboration and cooperation than by besting the competition. We strongly need models for mutual support and asset-sharing. The edge is ripe where we notice a sharing economy emerged.
4. Skill and Asset Mapping
   Transition – Many in this space have past-careers interrupted by: job loss, market shifts, and/or personal value shifts. What skills and qualifications have worked before do not apply as readily today. A space to develop our sense of self as bridge-builders and the skills we offer of real immediate value can help us support our ongoing work in the space of transformation.

Together, on The Agency, we can be stronger, wiser, and more energized in the important work of creating a more thrivable world.