Awarepreneurs #327 Bridging the Divide Between Funders and Founders with Sarah Sterling
Paul Zelizer 00:00:00 - 00:00:33
Hi. This is Paul Zolizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to be here and to introduce you to Sarah Sterling.
Paul Zelizer 00:00:33 - 00:01:12
And our topic today is bridging the divide between funders and founders. Sarah is the executive director of entrepreneurship for SoCAP, which brings together social entrepreneurs, investors, foundation leaders, government leaders, academics, and more for live and digital experiences. The goal is to accelerate the movement to a more just and sustainable economy. Sarah has worked with and trained international organizations and accelerators such as Mercy Corps, Oxfammer International, Village Capital, Swiss EP, and Agora Partnerships. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Sterling 00:01:13 - 00:01:15
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.
Paul Zelizer 00:01:16 - 00:01:51
You've done a few things in the impact space. I'm really excited about this topic and, and this can be such an interesting dance. Right? It it's both like. Funders and founders need each other, but it also can be a little awkward or uncomfortable. Right? So this is such an important topic, and you're just the right person to help us understand this better. Before we get into our specific topic and strategies, tell us a little bit. If somebody was listening and they're like, I have no idea who Sarah Sterling is, what would somebody wanna know about you and a little bit of your backstory before we get more into the topic?
Sarah Sterling 00:01:52 - 00:03:23
Yeah. I mean, so like you like you said, I've I've had my hands in a lot of different types of work. And so my professional experience, I've been really lucky to be able to have worked both for, like, US government as a peace corps volunteer in El Salvador to impact investing with an impact investment Fund called Pomona Impact in Guatemala for several years as their impact director with SoCAP since 2015 as the leader of their entrepreneur program, which is now called the SOCAP Fellowship. And so I've been and also obviously doing a lot of consulting work with variety of accelerators and incubator programs. So I think my specific journey really kicked off thanks to my Peace Corps experience and being able to work with small women's business development groups. It was the first time that I really got into this concept of business for for impact even at a very, like, microfinance level. But I really got to see the impact of people on the ground, which I think was really the life changing, you know, click for me. And so when I went to grad school at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, I really wanted to find out, like, what is that you know, I thought of it as a silver bullet at the time, which, you know, hindsight is is 2020, but, you know, I stumbled upon this really amazing certificate training program called Frontier Market Scouts, and you learn all about impact investing in social entrepreneurship from practitioners who are actively doing the work.
Sarah Sterling 00:03:23 - 00:04:47
And then you have the opportunity to do a fellowship for 6 months to a year with a social enterprise or an impact investment fund. And so I I chose to go to Guatemala where I had never been before, but I have traveled extensively and lived in different countries in Latin America before that and got to work with Pomona Impact for about three and a half years as their director of impact and really got to see the impact investment side of things, which was really interesting, especially from being in the position of impact measurement, which is a topic we can go into in-depth in another in another podcast for this for this entire ecosystem of impact investing in social entrepreneurship. But I think the thing that I love the most about my work at Pomona was really getting to do site visits and learn directly from the social entrepreneurs, and I got to go to a lot of impact events. And and at the same time, I also did a fellowship with SOCAP. And so I have these two routes of, like, impact investment and then a conference organizer position, but directly supporting entrepreneurs. And I think I really found my passion through the social entrepreneurship route and really working directly from and learning a lot from social entrepreneurs. You know, my my mom's an entrepreneur. She runs her own Montessori preschool, so I was raised with that sort of, you know, business leadership mindset from a very early age.

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