Full Circles Beginnings

by Mary Owen


Full Circles Foundation's pilot program is underway!  I am just one of many new entrepreneurial team members for the Strong Camp summer program.  My name is Mary Owen and I was born and raised here in Raleigh, North Carolina.  I am a recent graduate of Appalachian State University and I am very excited to be a part of this new venture.  My greatest fear coming out of college was that I would not find a job I could be passionate, about but I am in love with this organization! This past week was Full Circles' instructor training week, which was profoundly successful and I thoroughly enjoyed being involved.  People of all walks of life came together to share their experiences and knowledge and to learn and grow together. We talked about a lot of exciting new ideas and how we could turn those ideas into a reality.  Some of my favorite snapshots were our discussions about asset-based thinking and anti-oppression, which helped us to understand each other better as individuals so that we could develop as a group.

Asset-based community development is a transformational way of thinking that sees abundance all around us. Rather than feeling discouraged by the things we lack, like large amounts of monetary resources, we can be creative and compile all of our diverse skills, networks, time, and materials to meet our needs. This way of thinking has proved to be extremely useful to Full Circles Foundation, but it has also been extremely helpful for me on an individual level because it helps me to focus on the positive and let the negative go.

During training week, asset-based thinking tied in well with the anti-oppression workshop because conversations about oppression, for obvious reasons, tend to focus on the negative.  Oppression is something that most folks experience in some way or another and privilege is also something each of us carry to varying degrees; but by sharing our identities and experiences, our hopes and our fears, and actively listening to each other, we were able to honor the differences in our identities and experiences and understand them to be uniquely valuable to our common mission.

I was also excited to learn about social entrepreneurship.  Social entrepreneurship is a way of making change that focuses on finding ‘potential’ (anything that has value) and using it to create more ‘potential’ in a way that exponentially helps the world. Our group talked about social entrepreneurship as a biomimetic concept, which means it is a model based on natural systems. Natural systems tend to employ feedback loops (autopoietic structures), which are named as such because information or energy is fed back into the system rather than being pointed linearly.  Linear models waste hard-gained information, resources, and energy because output is not utilized or reincorporated into the model sufficiently.  An example of a feedback loop is the stomach. When we get hungry our stomachs tell our brains that we are hungry so we eat.  When we have had enough our stomachs tell our brains that we are full so we stop eating.  If there were no interaction between brains and stomachs we would either eat forever until we popped or we would never eat and eventually starve.

Social entrepreneurship is like a stomach because it relies on the transformation and interaction of resources and information. It is a model that engages many forms of ‘potential’ and produces many forms of ‘potential’ too.  In our case, our intention is that by putting our energy into the futures of young women they will in turn contribute to the well being of their communities by being empowered in various ways.  My intention is that we can in some way convey the message that money is not the worthiest goal but rather it is just one of many resources that can be used towards a greater goal.

This week we are all working very diligently to get ready for our first camp, the Strong Home camp, which starts next week. We are calling families, organizing fundraisers, improving our curriculum, and meeting with contributors about cool opportunities for our girls and young women.  The group already feels a lot like family and I am having a blast! I feel intensely connected to the work that we are doing and I hope that our collective energy and ideas will be able to reach some of you out there and inspire you to start something in your own communities.