Ecosystem Builders
Anika Horn posted on LinkedIn talks about institutions that build communities:
The institutions that fund our work were designed to count outputs: startups launched, events hosted, jobs created. They were not designed to see the relational infrastructure underneath those outputs, the years of trust-building, coordination, and showing up that made any of it possible. So when budgets tighten, the hardest-to-measure work gets cut first, even when it is the work that holds everything else together.
And the effect of losing their jobs in the middle of an economic crisis:
When an ecosystem builder loses their role, the ecosystem does not immediately collapse (that’s just the nature of complex, adaptive systems). It just quietly becomes more fragile. Partners disengage. Founders stop getting connected to the right people at the right time. Programming gets paused.
And the consequence is
And because the deterioration is gradual rather than sudden, nobody names it as a loss until it’s almost impossible to reverse.
What she writes about resonated as a practitioner of business architecture.