Wednesday, August 01, 2007

A road-tested vision

In the next few weeks this blog will migrate to a completely revamped Evergreen Leaders web site. Yesterday I began to work with a web designer on the new site.

Our original site was developed by an intern, Kevin Behrens. He did a great job given the fact that Evergreen Leaders was a vision that had not been road tested.

The vision has been road-tested. Now we're ready for a new site that can translate the road-tested version of EGL online.

As I reflect on the road-testing of my vision for EGL the last three years, I wonder what prompted me to launch a new nonprofit in my 50's. I've answered that a number of different ways. First, it's been a call from God. Second, it fit's my passions and talents. Third, I think nonprofits that serve low and moderate income people need our services to help their nonprofits thrive.

As I've founded EGL I realize I have a lot in common with entrepeneurs. Recently I read a column in Inc. Magazine that quotes The Theory of Economic Development published in 1911 by economist Joseph A. Schumpeter who says that entrepreneurs have:
  • "...the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself…There is the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one's energy and ingenuity."
I don't recognize within myself the impulse to fight or prove myself superior but I do recognize within myself "...the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one's energy and ingenuity."