3 Jan, 2018

Keeping Your Sanity as a Solopreneur, Part One: Mindset

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:07:16-04:00January 3rd, 2018|Categories: Consulting|Tags: consulting, Solopreneur|2 Comments

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2018 will mark 2 years for me in full-time self-employment. For my one year anniversary in May 2017, I shared 10 lessons learned in my first year self-employment.

Those 10 lessons haven’t changed much since I shared them, but for the next three months in the Ask Nicole series, I’m going to speak about three important aspects of self-employment, from the perspective of a solopreneur.

A solopreneur is a business owner who works and runs her or his own business alone. Different from an entrepreneur (who goes through more traditional means of building an running a business), a solopreneur can choose whether to contract out or outsource certain types of work they may not have the skillset for or the time/patience to do).

Over the past few months, I’ve seen several friends and colleagues make the leap into working for themselves. It’s exciting to see! I’ve offered to share with them aspects of my journey, lessons learned, and tools that are currently working for me.

Five themes have come up when I’ve spoken with my friends–mindset, tools and processes, ways to bring in income, support, and work/life balance–and I’m going to touch on each one this month. Today, let’s talk about what I think is the most important aspect of maintaining your sanity as a solopreneur: Mindset.

Transitioning from Employee to Self Employed

With the exception of one family member, no one in my immediate life at the time had worked for themselves. Plus, I come from a family of employees that stay with their employer until retirement. When you don’t see examples of what you want to do, it’s easy to think that what you want isn’t feasible.

When I started thinking more about building my consulting business, it was with the intention of wanting to make extra income on the side. When I got to the point where I enjoyed working with my consulting clients and getting paid for speaking engagements (essentially #ReclaimingMyTime) more so than doing work that someone else handed to me, I started fantasizing about how working for myself could look like. I also sought out people who were working for themselves. When you see people doing what you want to do, it’s easier to imagine it for yourself.

And as it turns out, handing in your resignation letter is the easy part. Transitioning from employee to self employed is as much a mental game as it is a physical one.

Solopreneur myths, busted (and what to put in their place)

There are lots of myths out there about solopreneurs. Here are some common ones:

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15 Nov, 2017

Are You Focusing on The Process or The Impact?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:00:56-04:00November 15th, 2017|Categories: Strategic Planning & Sustainability|Tags: program evaluation, Strategic Planning|0 Comments

Over the past year, I’ve become intentional in transitioning away from focusing solely on designing and implementing evaluations to working with my clients on building their capacity to do it all themselves.

And sometimes, I like to offer aspect of my services for free as a way of establishing a connection with a potential client. From a skills perspective, this helps me keep everything sharp. From a networking perspective, this puts me on the radar for future paid consulting work and referrals.

Recently, I offered to revised an evaluation tool for an organization providing small grants to community groups seeking to reduce abortion stigma. They want to develop an easy-to-understand evaluation tool that measures stigma pre and post grantee project interventions and measures overall project success.They are finding their current tool–a survey requiring grantees to provide open-ended answers–to be challenging for most of their grantees to understand, and want something that makes the process of giving feedback easier to obtain and to analyze.

In my work with past and current evaluation clients, some themes I’ve observed related to evaluation are A) a level of anxiety around evaluation as a whole given that evaluation tends to get a bad reputation, B) an interest in developing engaging ways to gather feedback that builds confidence in evaluation, and allows them to do the necessary follow-up with staff and the stakeholders, C) a question in how to implement feedback, or D) a mixture of A, B and C.

I see this more so with clients who are more grassroots or have a community organizing background as they ultimately go by direct community engagement for feedback, rather than on evaluations. Also, there is a sense of feeling protective of their programs, services, and campaigns, and no one wants to see that what they’re doing isn’t resonating with the communities they serve. So, finding a way to gather meaningful feedback and be objective of feedback that may be interpreted as negative is a balancing act.

For some background information, grantees receive small grants to develop a project/intervention that speaks to a level of abortion stigma: individual, community, institutional, media, and policy. Grantees have free reign to create what they want, with support from the organization, I made some preliminary edits to the organization’s evaluation tool, and provided some additional feedback:

First, before starting any process, understand what you want to evaluate. In this organization’s case, the current tool focuses more on the process the grantees went through in developing their project/intervention from conception to implementation. This is called a process evaluation.

An impact evaluation, on the other hand, would focus on the impact the grantees’ interventions had on their target audience(s). If a grantee expects A to occur as a result of their target audience(s)being exposed to their projects, did it really happen? If not, what factors may have contributed to this and how can they be addressed.

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1 Nov, 2017

Ask Nicole: How Can I Be More Culturally Responsive?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:06:50-04:00November 1st, 2017|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting, Equity|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Two months ago, I facilitated an evaluation meeting for one of my clients. The client, an organization that specializes in community-based health peer-to-peer training related to pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and early parenting, received funding for a multi-year birth equity project that also includes program evaluation capacity building.

During the meeting, the staff and I had a conversation about the various aspects of program evaluation, from planning and implementation, to data interpretation and measuring impact.

A takeaway message I gave to the staff is that, try as we might, it can be difficult to design and implement and evaluation process that is unbiased. Why? Situational Awareness.

In the general sense, situational awareness is being aware of your surroundings. This keep you on your toes and more likely to sense danger. In the context of program evaluation, situational awareness can help you spot red flags as well as help you become aware of not only your surroundings, but also what your presence is adding to that environment.

So, I asked the staff:

“How can you and your organization become more culturally responsive?”

Many under sourced communities are already leery of researchers, evaluators and anyone coming to their community to collect data. As a Black person and as a woman, you’d think it would be easy for me to go into a community where I share the same race and/or gender. But sometimes, that can be where the commonality ends.

There’s a power dynamic at play, intimidation, a history of mistrust of researchers and evaluators, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities being viewed as subjects or statistics rather people with important and valuable stories to tell. And I’m at a point in my personal and professional life where I can acknowledge the various levels of privilege and power I have.

It’s very easy to become comfortable with our commonalities, because those commonalities can be the “in” we need into a community setting. But you still have to do the work before, during, and after to ensure you’re being as intentionally responsive to a community’s culture as possible. And “culture” is more than just race/ethnicity. It encompasses age, gender identity, religion, language, ability, sexual preference, geographic region, physical and mental health, how an organization operates, and more.

More importantly, you have to be aware of your biases and motivations, as well as know who has the power, money, and political ties to make decisions within the organization you’re working with and within the communities they serve. You also have to know the systems people are operating under that can impact cultural responsiveness. Just as I reflect after a project has ended, I also pinpoint the context that a project is operating within before I start a project and during the project. Here’s a 3-part reflective process I use to reflect on my level of cultural responsiveness. These questions are adaptable to any situation where you’re interacting with a client and a community or cultural group:

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19 Oct, 2017

Should I Pass You the Mic, Or Speak For You?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:58:15-04:00October 19th, 2017|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: activism, community organizing|0 Comments

With the rise of storytelling as a form of advocacy and resistance, and various forms of research and evaluation that place communities, researchers, and evaluators on the same playing field gaining in popularity, I’ve been refining my thinking and processes in develop more effective strategies for centering the voices and lived experiences of women and girls of color.

When I’m working with my clients, I always have in the back of my mind who I’m really working for. And it’s not my clients. My clients are essentially the gatekeepers. They provide the programs, services, and initiatives that are designed to reach women and girls of color. Depending on what I’m doing with clients, I’m tasked with finding ways to engage women and girls of color to share their experiences in order to measure the program, service, or initiative’s impact. But before I’m an evaluator or program designer, I’m an activist and community organizer.

The Center for Evaluation Innovation’s 2010 brief, “Grassroots Action and Learning for Social Change: Evaluating Community Organizing”, posits that evaluating advocacy initiatives and community organizing campaigns should be participatory, more prospective rather than less retrospective, learning-based, culturally responsive, and less academic. The brief also shares a framework for evaluating community organizing campaigns, which includes:

Craft evaluation questions that are relevant and useful to organizers to generate buy-in and participation
Set clear yet flexible interim benchmarks that focus on outcomes related to various organizing components (such as participation and membership, organizing wins, and organizational capacity)
Utilize data collection methods that fit the style of the organization and tailored to capture various components of organizing
Develop buy-in and trust for successful implementation
Set achievable expectations to maximize learning and sustainability
Use evaluation results to create impact
Clarify what “success” means

Innovative and engaging frameworks and methods like these is what making program design and evaluation fun for me. And you’d think that processes like these are a no-brainer, but they aren’t for many organizations and communities.

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13 Oct, 2017

Try This: The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:57:47-04:00October 13th, 2017|Categories: Speaking & Facilitation|Tags: reproductive justice, Try This|0 Comments

“The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now” is a reflective call to action process that frames our experiences, highlights the commonalities of our lived experiences, and connects our stories to the current social climate to promote action. I first learned of this process from Jamia Wilson. Jamia shared it with me as I was preparing to speech related to young women of color several years ago.

Here’s what you need:

Sheets of paper
Something to write with

The steps:

This process connects your personal story to current problems our communities are facing, and to the larger vision of a world we want.

Using the topic of Reproductive Justice:

The Story of Me: Share your story of how Reproductive Justice connects with your identities. Use a personal story that brought your attention to various reproductive oppressions and injustices.
The Story of Us: Share the current state of how reproductive injustices are impacting your communities. Use prompts such as “We live in a world where…” or “When I look around my community, I see…”. This can be related to policies that do more harm than good, lack of sex education in your school, or historical or current events such as the shackling of pregnant prisoners during labor and delivery or involuntary sterilization of women of color
The Story of Now: Share your vision for reproductive freedom. Use prompts such as “We will have reproductive justice when…” What would be the end game to have Reproductive Justice? What would that look like in your community?

You can do this process alone or in a group. If in a group, have participants identify the commonalities in their stories and develop a strong call to action (CTA). Try this exercise and let me know how it goes.

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RAISE YOUR VOICE: Share one way you can use The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now process below in the comments section.

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Keeping Your Sanity as a Solopreneur, Part One: Mindset

Transitioning from Employee to Self Employed

Solopreneur myths, busted (and what to put in their place)

Are You Focusing on The Process or The Impact?

Ask Nicole: How Can I Be More Culturally Responsive?

“How can you and your organization become more culturally responsive?”

Should I Pass You the Mic, Or Speak For You?

Try This: The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now

Here’s what you need:

The steps:

RAISE YOUR VOICE: Share one way you can use The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now process below in the comments section.

Like this post? Subscribe to the Raise Your Voice newsletter to receive resources, advice, and tips to help you raise your voice for women and girls of color.

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