On April 9th, Claudia and I shared the 54 second Vehicles of Change video intro across our social media channels. The idea was to get our friends and colleagues interested in our project in anticipation of our official launch next week.
Less than 24 hours after sharing our intro video something unexpected happened. A woman we had never discussed our mission with reached out and asked what she could do to help us.
"I truly believe in the journey you are commencing on and I would like to help.... let me know where I could extend a hand." ~Mphatso
While anyone would be uplifted by this offer, my entrepreneur heart was bursting with happiness. You see, Mphatso's offer was the equivalent of Proof of Concept. In entrepreneur world when you launch a startup, you look for early adopters (people who use or buy your product or service) and people that really "get" your mission and vision. If these people appear early in your launch, of their own accord, they're considered Proof of Concept, or evidence that you're "on to something" and going to be successful.
proof of con·cept - evidence, typically derived from an experiment or pilot project, which demonstrates that a design concept, business proposal, etc., is feasible.
In tandem with our efforts to highlight and learn from change makers, Vehicles of Change is exploring the relationship between entrepreneurship and global development. So, you'll get a dose of entrepreneur vocabulary/perspective from me and a dose of global development vocabulary/perspective from Claudia in our interviews and our blog posts.
We believe it is important for our VOC community to be able to communicate across entrepreneurship and global development, and to understand how both sectors work so collaboration for positive change can occur.