Hi and welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. I'm Paul Zelizer, your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs make the world better and it costs you nothing. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Cole Hoover and our topic is creating Effective Impact networks in Chaotic times. Cole Hoover has spent 17 years designing the spaces where social impact leaders learn. Together, he's built fellowships, cohort programs and learning communities, serving over 1500 change makers globally. From social entrepreneurs in Ghana to corporate partners navigating sustainability transitions.

His work focuses on community infrastructure, the peer networks, shared analysis, and coordinated capacity that determine whether movements survive and scale. He is the founder of Ponto Social Impact Consulting. I'm super excited to welcome Cole Hoover to the awarepreneur show. Welcome, Cole.

Hey, thanks so much, Paul. Such a pleasure to be here.

We connected because of a wonderful LinkedIn series of posts you were doing about impact networks. And there's a lot going on in the impact world and we're going to talk, talk about all that. And I was super excited about your posts and reached out and said, hey, we should talk about this, but before we do that, just to give people a little bit of background about you. You've been building social enterprises and building impact networks for a really long time. Give people a little bit of sense of your backstory.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, Paul. Really, really excited for this conversation. You know, my. My backstory, like the beginning of my career, I've realized, really, really influenced the last decade of my work in these communities of practice, around this community infrastructure. I was lucky enough to be a part of a handful of teams growing some really, really exciting social enterprises in the kind of early aughts. And during that time, one thing that really stood out to me was how much I was learning. Not only in the communities of practice that I was even either invited into or selected for, like a fellowship or something that maybe a funder was putting together, but also these informal communities.

Whether it was at a co working space like an impact hub, or I got my start in the microfinance and international development space where I'm based in Seattle. There was an event called Microfinance and Microbrews. Just these community infrastructure spaces where I got to speak with other leaders, hear the things that they were experiencing, the challenges they were addressing, maybe the mistakes that they'd made that they were generous enough to share with other leaders. So they didn't have to repeat the same ones. And, you know, after about a decade working and building these social enterprises, being a part of teams, either starting or scaling the work, I began to shift into more and more focusing on how to get really good at designing this community infrastructure, these fellowships, communities of practice, learning and collaboration communities. I saw in my life what an impact they were having, and then over the next decade saw what huge promise and potential there was if we could really nail it in creating these spaces for others.

So we just got started. Colin, you've already used the word community of practice. I don't know, half a dozen times maybe, right?

Yeah.

So I was going to ask you later on, but define your terms. Tell us about what is a community of practice. Some people might say it's similar or different than an impact network. And why are they important in 2026?