The Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (the Partnership) has a unique hybrid model and approach to economic development. As the Partnership’s strategic relations manager, Chad Michael Nash is uniquely qualified to shed light on the concept of social capital. He explained how the Partnership incorporates social capital in all its economic development endeavors and further exemplifies the mission of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2).
What does your job entail?
Chad Michael Nash: My role has two parts. There’s organizational strategy and then there is organizational development. The Partnership has a very innovative funding mechanism, being partly state funded, partly relying on the private sector, partly relying on philanthropy, and partly relying on government grants. Primarily, I think about how to bring all those various partners on board and keep us all aligned and moving in the same direction.
What is social capital and what are some of its tangible benefits?
I’m sure you’ve heard that your network is your net worth. You know, “Make your network work for you.” That’s another way of expressing the value of social capital. Social capital is the ability of your network — your connections, the people you know — to influence change in your world. That might be getting hired, that might be making a project happen, that might be getting in touch with somebody who knows more about something than you do to launch a project or make it more successful.
It’s about the people you know and the relationships you have and their ability to create change. We’re realizing that you can’t just rely on having a great education and all the amazing technical prowess that you bring to the table. If you don’t have the right connections, you probably won’t go as far.
Not only do we believe this is a better model, we have the stats to back it up. For every dollar deployed in communities through the Partnership, we unlock $4.58 of additional investment.
This means that we are working with our groups and partners in such a way that after their time with us is finished, they have learned so much — or been connected so well or have had so much success in their initiatives — that they have been able to successfully apply for other funding and receive it. That means that from the time they’ve come to us, they’ve grown in such a way that now they’re able to achieve a 4.58x value multiplier on the funding we’ve provided — and when you consider that we’re often deploying awards of $50,000-$100,000 at a time, that can quickly add up!
How does the Partnership’s work relate to EI2’s focus on socioeconomic development and the social capital concept?
I think EI2 is on the cusp of a real innovation in the way that we look at how we go about economic development, and the Partnership’s vision is strongly aligned with what [EI2 Vice President] David Bridges talks about regarding socioeconomic development.
The traditional model is often driven by big business, where organizations ask themselves things like “how do we secure the Amazon bid, or bring a huge Hyundai plant to coastal Georgia, or find a site for the next big battery factory?”
Those types of projects are really important, but at the same time what we at the Partnership think about is the human experience, too. So, we ask some additional questions: What do those projects mean for the people involved and how are we lifting people up? It’s great that these large companies bring in additional jobs, but we also ask if those jobs are aligned with the communities and if the residents have the necessary skill sets to fill them. Or if are we going to have to import a lot of talent, what does that mean for the community?
When you’re driving a lot of change in an area, it can be challenging for people who live there. It’s also challenging for the local governments, as they adapt to these larger population sizes. You think about the people who are moving to these places for work and their spouses and their children and how that impacts the local housing market or the school system. If not navigated carefully, these activities can actually be disruptive or even lead to displacement for legacy residents.
Why is the “social” in the social capital equation such an important focus?
To me, socioeconomic development is bringing that human component into it and not just looking at the bottom line in terms of job numbers or economic value. Instead, how are we impacting the human experience for the people these activities directly affect? When you include that as a metric, you begin to realize that what is good for the bottom line might not always be the best indicator of success for these activities and communities.
How does the Partnership incorporate those ideas into its programming?
We have leaned into that socioeconomic development concept and begun pulling apart what it means to us. The Partnership is not a traditional nonprofit organization, and we’re not a traditional grant making organization. Instead, we do both of those things. We call the Partnership a “hybrid” organization, and that’s actually one of our core innovations, because with other organizations, typically, they do one or the other.
When you think about a nonprofit, you probably think about groups like Big Brothers Big Sisters or the Atlanta Community Food Bank — organizations that go out and apply for funding, receive the funding, and then use it to enact services for vulnerable populations.
On our nonprofit side, we have our internship and fellowship programs, where we help connect young talent with public service organizations and high-growth industries throughout the state. We are developing a pipeline of talent for these communities while giving next generation innovators and young professionals that critical internship or first year of actual work experience in a high-growth industry. Our other programs provide services as well.
On the other hand, we are a funder. All of our programs directly inject financial capital into the ecosystem. With our internship program, we are paying a very competitive rate at $16+ hourly for interns. We’re paying a very competitive rate, $55,000, for a year of work for a brand-new person with less than five years of experience. Our Community Research grants of up to $100,000 bring technology out of the classroom or the laboratory and into communities to address real-world problems, and in our Leaders Program, we are making awards of $50,000 towards exciting ecosystem-building initiatives.
As a hybrid organization, we always couple financial capital investment with social capital services and direct programmatic support. So, we’re never just writing a check, and we’re never just showing up and doing programs — we always do both.
You mentioned the importance of professional networks. How does the Partnership facilitate those connections?
We just wrapped up our SCALE (which stands for Social Capital and Leadership Exchange) for Innovation Summit in October. It was our first-ever signature event as an organization — we have convenings for our different programs and services, but we never actually have a full gathering of the Partnership’s network.
We wanted to bring everybody together and we also wanted to capture some kind of sponsorship funding and support through this event. We also wanted to be intentional in making sure that whatever convening we assembled would have value for our network and move our ethos and goals forward as an organization. We started exploring this idea of investing social capital, and one of the low-hanging fruits we discovered was mentorship.
The Partnership’s founder, Debra Lam, started looking at this unconventional idea that mentorship is actually a vehicle for the investment of social capital in the next generation. Unlike when you spend financial capital, however, when you spend your social capital, it actually grows. It’s not diminished for having been given away.
Through our research, we found that mentorship has a lot of ability to impact people’s lives in surprisingly big ways. Among employees who have access to mentorship opportunities, more than 90% of them indicate that they’re satisfied or highly satisfied in their job roles. But that’s just scratching the surface.
You’re five times more likely to be promoted if you have a mentor. You earn more on average if you have a mentor — and it doesn’t necessarily have to be somebody at your organization. This is a very powerful tool that’s very simple to do, but at the same time, we also discovered that nearly two-thirds of people today have never had a mentor.
When we realized that mentorship had all these benefits that most people were missing out on, we saw an opportunity to address a real gap and add value to our network, while also bringing in additional resources for the Partnership and our work. So we got to work planning an event that would intentionally dismantle the barriers to mentorship, and ultimately held the first-ever SCALE for Innovation Summit with over 100 guests this past October. Now, we’re working to help folks continue the conversations we started together, build upon the foundation we set this year, and ultimately scale our impact (pun intended) for 2025!
What did you take away from the SCALE Summit?
Since the event, I’ve been wondering if there are ways that we could better quantify the impact of social capital. It seems like funders in particular are increasingly talking about deploying other forms of capital, but no one is really discussing how to measure that impact. And if we’re not counting something, does it really count?
For every dollar given to the Partnership, we unlock $4.58 of additional investment. That’s very easy for us to measure and report on, but it’s not always so easy to assign a dollar value to a new contact or exposure to a new idea or innovation, or to see how a connection that was made at SCALE unlocked a new job for somebody in the network.
As an industry, we’ve done a great job measuring the economic impact of our work, but how do we measure the impact of that social capital component we keep discussing? If socioeconomic development is something we value, let’s quantify and demonstrate that value. While it may at first seem challenging and abstract, our society has already done something similar for concepts like carbon emissions.
Being in an academic environment at a leading national research university, we at Georgia Tech and the Enterprise Innovation Institute might be uniquely poised to take on this challenge. Can we figure out a way to lead that charge and generate the research that allows us to quantify social capital in financial terms? Whoever leads that conversation might bring about a sea change in the industry as people and organizations start thinking about deploying their resources differently — and imagine the potential impacts this could have on local residents and communities. To me, that’s what socioeconomic development is all about — creating opportunity for human-centric economic mobility.