Tracing the Root: From Idea to Impact (Hub)
Impact Hub has settled into its space on North Avenue by now. Members spend hours doing their work. Office tenants arrive early in the morning for their meetings. Artists have exhibits shown in the large glass windows facing the sidewalk. Yet, only several years ago, Impact Hub Baltimore did not exist at all.
How did Impact Hub Baltimore begin? Perhaps most importantly, where is it going? Among conversations with Impact Hub’s Managing Director Eric Lin and Co-Founder Michelle Geiss, I spoke with Jess Solomon, the Principal Consultant at Art In Praxis, who currently serves on Impact Hub’s Advisory Board. Jess is a longtime member and was also one of the earliest community leads at Impact Hub Baltimore. She explained her own perspective on Impact Hub’s core values, its history, and where the organization will go next.
A grid of smiling faces, all posed in front of the geometric curvatures of the iconic Impact Hub mural. Names and organizational titles scrawled messily with multi-colored sharpies. Above the pictures, You Belong Here letter by letter affixed to the wall. The member wall is an iconic fixture of the Impact Hub space, reminding all those who enter that everyone in the hub is truly an individual.
Several years into Impact Hub’s work, something as simple as a photo wall embodies what Impact Hub aims to do in Baltimore: to elevate and empower the city’s grassroots leaders. This tradition of making visible the faces and work of grassroots leaders and, in turn, fostering connections between them, speaks to some of the core values Impact Hub began with, before it was even Impact Hub. Ultimately, Impact Hub holds itself to focusing primarily on the people behind the work and asset-framing all of their initiatives, their community, and the city at large.
In 2012, co-founders Rodney Foxworth, Pres Adams, and Michelle Geiss began convening SocEnt Breakfasts to bring social entrepreneurs, city agencies, community leaders, nonprofits, businesses, funders, and other community members together in the same room. Within a year, the SocEnt Breakfasts were engaging over 1,500+ community members. By 2014, the team entered into the global Impact Hub network. Each Hub is locally run, governed, and has its own set of priorities, initiatives, and projects responsive to its local community.
This makes each Hub unique, and Baltimore’s space is no exception. As we all know, organizations are made up of people, and it is the beliefs, values, and strengths of those individuals that inform and develop the organizations they are a part of.
Values in Practice
Managing Director Eric Lin explains that Impact Hub’s core values are not only embedded in the work the Hub does, but also in their business decisions. For instance, the Hub discounts and donates the usage of the space more often than it charges it outright. All the events the space hosts are oriented around social impact — to that end, while the space could be used to host events like birthday parties, they focus on workshops, pop-ups by businesses owned by people of color, and other social impact events.
“We’re focused values-wise on providing space and fostering a community around individuals who understand the need for social change, predominantly in Baltimore city, to right historic wrongs that sideline specific populations, mostly Black and brown people, but also immigrants and others. More broadly, to bring positive social change in the world, so people who want to see Baltimore be a space and be a nurturing environment for that type of work. It shows up in everything we do.”
Namely, he lists Impact Hub’s business model holistically — how memberships are priced, how they structure certain offerings, what decisions they have in regards to projects, programs, and initiatives, etc.
For Eric, Impact Hub is a community involved with many other communities, and what defines a community is a shared destiny. He wants to ensure that not only does Impact Hub offer a robust list of programs and services, but that the space itself is pleasant and welcoming.
Emergence and Iteration: How Impact Hub Evolves
Jess Solomon, the principal consultant at Art In Praxis, is a longtime member of Impact Hub, even so far as being one of the earliest community leads at the North Avenue space. Her current work at Art in Praxis, what she describes as a social impact firm, concerns the organizational development support of progressive leaders and organizations primarily in arts and cultural, philanthropic, and social justice spaces.
Given both her current work and her long-term involvement with Impact Hub, she knows what social impact work looks like, with all its complexities. Having moved back home to Baltimore from D.C, where she also was a member of the local Impact Hub, Jess decided to join and become a community lead at Baltimore’s hub to meet new people and plug herself back into the community. Still a member now, she explains how she’s seen Impact Hub grow in the last few years.
“I’ve seen the Hub wrestle with very real challenges and opportunities around practicing equity. How does that show up in the space? I’ve seen the Hub try to create opportunities for other organizations and institutions to also wrestle with those ideas and challenges through hosting workshops, hosting talks. A lot of times the Hub has modeled where it wants to be through the programming that it’s done for the larger community which I think is really great.”
Likewise, Jess explained from a non-team member’s perspective what she sees as the core operating values of Impact Hub Baltimore.
“It’s been emergent and iterative. Both of those things are important in Baltimore, in the neighborhood the hub is situated in. If there’s a commitment to that community, there has to be a spirit of emergence and iteration. You learn and then you grow, you adapt. Adaptability has been so important. I see those elements as being part of the culture from early on.”
To this end, Jess specifically cites what she refers to as a “season” of Impact Hub’s early life when the Hub encouraged all its members to give them feedback. This spirit of conversation, of listening, and of feedback, she believes, persist to this day.
One factor she points to is how Impact Hub Baltimore has also developed into a hub of arts and culture, with the murals, the exhibits, and how artists are attracted to the space. That development, she says, arose out of emergence, based on the presence of people who worked at Impact Hub who were artists and the Hub leaning into those tendencies.
The Importance of Trust
Michelle Geiss, a Co-Founder of Impact Hub Baltimore, also uses this example when speaking to the organization’s propensity to grow and transform.
“We never set out to be an art space, and now many people who talk about Impact Hub would describe it as an art space. It was never even a goal and it’s great that it is, but it’s an example of how we’ve been a response to what people are looking for. Having exhibits, having performances, having poetry groups be based here — that was all never on the radar.
We were thinking of social enterprise in this narrow, focused way. Creative enterprises, creatives, and artists were this constituency that showed up and were like, “We’re in.” It turns out that entrepreneurs and artists have a lot in common; that creative processes are very overlapping in that questioning of systems, in questioning why the world is the way it is, and pushing it forward to some new state.”
To that end, perhaps what defines Impact Hub is a focus on trust — between team members, between members of the space, between the Hub and the larger city ecosystem — and doing what they can to honor and steward it.
Michelle recounts that Impact Hub was built on trust and trusted relationships. What feeds trust, for Michelle, is accountability: making sure that Impact Hub is always holding in mind the constituencies of people, even and especially when those constituencies are not at the table with the hub.
In other words, it’s about following up on the promises you’ve made to your community. It’s also minding the details of every project and initiative before implementing it, and trusting your own power and expertise in your specific niche without trying to be everything for everybody.
This can be especially hard due to the pervasive histories of violence and disenfranchisement in Baltimore City, Michelle explains.
“Trust has been degraded by a lot of historic inequities, patterns of disinvestment, and separation. When we’re talking about the context of trust in the context of a diverse community like Impact Hub, it is slow and steady work to spend time together and get to know each other well enough that you understand what it even means to keep each other’s interests in mind. Trust is there when you’re still at it, when you’re still together on something. It ebbs and flows.
There’s so many degrees of difficulty in what we’re doing, not just as a team but also the community we’re in. People are taking on big, inextricable challenges, big faceless heartless systems, big historic inequities, and also we all have lived in that context that we’re operating in and on. What trust is really practicing and practicing to be in healthy relationships with one another and avoiding any harm that comes to the people or the projects they’re leading.”
Preserving, cultivating, and prioritizing these relationships has remained a hallmark of Impact Hub, before it even was Impact Hub. These relationships have always informed what the organization is doing and where it is going. Trust simply propels Impact Hub along its trajectory.
The Future of Impact Hub
But, what does the future hold for Impact Hub Baltimore?
For one, more robust program offerings. With Q Ragsdale now on the team, Impact Hub Baltimore is poised to roll out several programs for social entrepreneurs — new implementations with Strategy School and a partnership with GoDaddy, to name a few. Part of the latter program involves cohort programs and neighborhood outreach, which means the Hub will be operating on a larger scale around a specific type of offering meant to bring more skills and resources to social entrepreneurs directly.
At the same time, the Hub will still be committed to its tenants of adaptability, iterance, and emergence. Eric articulated his own understanding of what the Hub’s trajectory will be in the near and far future.
“There’s an unpredictable element to the future, but I see us leaning a lot more into consulting. I see us leaning into deepening engagement with policy makers. I see us playing more of an advocacy role in guiding some of the policy or telling stories that influence mindsets in thinking more strategically about systems change. We’re looking for ways to more actively and intentionally incorporate some of the information we receive into what we end up doing. That would come down to any number of manifestations but the idea is to incorporate our membership more directly into the community.”
After all, the Hub’s community, down to the crucial act of just being seen, whether spending time together in the same space, or seeing a face of a member on the wall, is what is most important to the Hub’s team. Connecting, supporting, and empowering members of the community, whether social entrepreneurs, artists, or activists is built into every decision they make through a civic wealth lens. In short, Impact Hub works to take every small part of the ecosystem and make something bigger out of them.
Jess, in explaining what brings people to Impact Hub Baltimore, agrees with this point.
“People who join the hub have a sense of what the Hub is about and that’s why they join. It’s not just because they need wifi or coffee. They want to be a part of something bigger, something that feels connected, something that feels like it’s making an impact in Baltimore.”
Reflection Questions & Additional Reading
- Where do you come from? How has that made you who you are?
- What are your core values? How do they show up in your work?
- Where are you going? What are the things you want to transform into?
Enjoyed this piece?
This story is the third installment of the Designed to Be Connected Series created by Ryan Aghamohammadi, Impact Hub’s talented JHU Community Impact Intern.
The five stories making up the series cover topics ranging from member spotlights, to Impact Hub’s origins, to what it means to do ecosystem work. They can be read in order or as standalone pieces. We hope these stories serve as an introduction (or re-introduction) to Impact Hub and the people who make it up.
