One of my favorite end of the year activities is to fire up YouTube and watch the previous year in search video. This last one so beautifully mirrored what I have personally felt and heard from our affiliates that I just had to share.
Drum roll, please… the most searched term of 2022 was, “can I change,” and I love it.
As we’ve been recovering from COVID, we have seen a resurgence of entrepreneurship- particularly among our youth, women, and people of color. We heard about quiet quitting and the great resignation, then saw as employees turned away from corporate America to forge success with their own entrepreneurial ambitions. People are increasingly saying, “I could”, “I should”, “I can”, and finally, I will – and this is a wonderful thing.
As champions of innovation and entrepreneurship, our role has always been to empower those who wish to make that leap, regardless of place, position or power. We now have the unique opportunity to start again and rebuild our economies in ways that inspire entrepreneurship and encourage one another as builders, with keen focus on inclusive entrepreneurship policy and practices.
It means continuing to advocate for place-based systems approaches to growing entrepreneurial ecosystems, meeting entrepreneurs where they are (starting with language/location, but going well beyond to culture); building new aligned systems of funding and embracing inclusive models, redefined collective economic impact, and shared, celebrated community success.
There is so much work to be done this coming year and I’m eager to get to work alongside our amazing and expanding SourceLink community.
Photo Credit: “Cosmic Cliffs” James Webb Space Telescope, NASA
