Civic Dinners is Ready to Sit and Understand

Welcome to our next method profile! Our previous entry focused on using Gold Aim Marketing in social enterprise. In operating any venture, everything flows from your approach, and identifying a proper method helps you effectively fulfill your team’s initiative.

Together, we’ll be profiling interesting social enterprises to discuss an anchor method in their strive for social good. The term “anchor method” is to express the intentional and grounded nature of the approaches propelling a social enterprise forward.

This post is an outside observation of a company for inspiration in social enterprise initiative improvements.

In today’s post, we’ll look into heartwarming Civic Dinners leveraging Novel Model. Everyone is invited to the table with this imitative focused on crushing barriers and building bridges.

Knowing the Company

Civic Dinners, founded by Jenn Graham and Thomas Stokell, builds an experience of sharing and connection over mealtime. A host can initiate the dinner where a casual-sized gathering of diverse guests come to discuss three big questions. Topic options are provided by Civic Dinners to maintain an optimal conversation. Hosts are given a format to follow, ensuring each guest receives an equal time to speak their perspective. On their website, Civic Dinners describes their purpose as the following:

“To help create a more inclusive world where everyone feels invited & engaged in co-creating a better future.”

In the idea of “breaking bread”, the company connects the warming gesture with the subsequent loosening of social barriers. Civic Dinners believes that “when our most basic needs for sustenance, safety and community are met, we are in an ideal state to open our hearts and minds to others, and listen to different perspectives.”

Dinners may occur in-person or virtually. The event can be arranged as a set menu or a potluck. Once the dinner event is over, participants can expect a follow-up email capturing ideas, feedback, stories, and action steps.

Relations First

Here we have a company honoring a theme of connecting with the community/audience first. Emphasis is placed on cultivating a preliminary space absent of solution-urgency. Instead, within the time spent sharing, narrative-panoramas are expanded. Civic Dinners describes their approach to meaningful engagement:

“For us at Civic Dinners, real engagement is all about relationships. Too often, organizations and institutions jump straight to action, whether that’s asking people for feedback on a plan, asking donors for money, or asking citizens to sign a petition or to go vote. This strategy can be short-sighted and feel merely transactional.”

You may feel yourself jerk at that statement. Did you flinch on the section about companies prematurely jumping into action? With all the “just start” encouragement we see these days, a company encouraging the opposite could make someone feel off-track.

Honestly, both are needed. The decision on which path depends which part of your journey you find yourself navigating. Taking action steps is important, but we should not forget intentions and establishing a foundation hold importance.

Civic Dinners runs a business model built from average ideas. Eating at a dinner table and discussing recent hot topics is nothing spectacular. The package the activity is organized into is spectacular. Uniqueness of the business model rises to become a novel idea.

Fulfilling a Separate Lane

Most lucrative ideas sprang up from us challenging what is not in existence yet. Likewise, there’s the idea that the best jobs are the ones you create. Compared to the Niche Description anchor method, Novel Model focuses less on defining a set of values, and more on establishing parameters.

Building a system to frame your work stretches the imagination. The task is no short of the effort it would take to create a fictional world for a novel. Your favorite franchise of a fictional world comes with different rules, different physics, and maybe even a different species. An author needs a unique mindfulness to base a plot and characters adhering to the fictional world. Fans of a franchise become invested in the fictional world the same way participants become attracted to a distinctive business model.

Continuing the novel theme, scaling a social enterprise business model can be equivalent to writing a novel trilogy. All parts must correspond with the rules developed for the fictional world, or in the case of social enterprise, all parts must correspond with the agreed operations.

Applicable Takeaway

An anchor-based on a Novel Model helps your initiative to remove barriers around limits on service. One experiment to re-imagine the parameters you are building your business within, and write down any alterations you might consider.

Civic Dinners’ creative Novel Model completes this profile.

People Helping People Podcast is seeking methods clearly supporting an effective impact. Observations and discussions on happenings in the social enterprise community is a significant part of our contribution to social good. Continue to check-in for more conversation-starting content.