Elevating Impact Summit Reflections: Eric Dawson, Keynote

Guest post by Eric Dawson, Co-founder, Peace First and Peace First Prize, Ashoka Fellow

After having spent a terrific day with an inspiring group of entrepreneurs, investors, and thinkers at the Elevating Impact Summit at Portland State University, I am left with a few big questions:

1. How do we increase the rate of innovation, failure, and learning while staying mindful to the human-scale at which our work gets lived?
2. How do we work to change systems that are desperately in need of improvement — our prisoner re-entry process, early education investment, and capital markets for social enterprises to name a few — while not demonizing people within those systems who are often doing their very best?
3. And how do we design and articulate inspiring sets of measurable impacts, while paying attention to those measures harder to quantify: hope, courage, love?

I’m not sure if I am any closer to answers, but what a gift to explore with such a thoughtful, committed group of people. I may not be cool enough to live in Portland, but I will look forward to visiting!

[Editor: Eric, Portland is as Portland does. Visit often and you may just find your place in it for a good long while.]

If you missed Eric’s short audio story interview leading up to the Elevating Impact Summit, click to hear how he answered the question: “What are your hopes for the future.”