Vicki Pozzebon On The Prime Opportunity For Local Businesses To Initiate Grassroots Social Impact
Vicki is the CEO and principal consultant of Prospera Partners, a social-good consulting firm that works with small business owners, social entrepreneurs, and nonprofits on thoughtful business planning, systems change, transformational leadership, and more.
At Prospera Partners Vicki designs and facilitates retreats, workshops, and communities of practice that inspire community leaders and social entrepreneurs into transformational action. She also works with nonprofits and social entrepreneurs to grow programs and businesses with thoughtful social impact strategies for success. Her training in the Art of Hosting and World Café methods of facilitation, and early days as a theatrical director, playwright, and an activist performer help Vicki bring humor, heart, and actionable tasks to anything she designs or leads.
Her articles appear in The Nonprofit Quarterly, Philanthropy Journal and others. Vicki also hosts Prospera Partners’ podcast Impact Out Loud for conversations on creating real, positive change for communities.
Vicki discusses why local businesses are key to creating grassroots change and generating sustainable outcomes for communities through practicing transformational leadership and systems thinking.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in impact consulting and social entrepreneurship?
[Vicki Pozzebon] - From my background in the theatre arts (I was just thinking about this recently), I was doing a lot of social justice type theatre and directing shows that put issues on stage back in my twenties and early thirties.
Then I started working in a whole different industry. I worked for a passenger and freight train which also did tourism and re-enacted some historical events on the railroad. This was here where I'm based, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We were the first green train West of the Mississippi, and what that means is we were recycling everything on board, using solar panels to power all the music and everything we needed on our train cars, and we ran on biofuel. We were a very socially conscious business, and I had never worked for anything quite like that before coming from the theatre world.
I was the marketing and PR director at that company, so I started thinking about socially conscious businesses and what their responsibility is to the community? That led me into being on the board of directors of an organisation called the Santa Fe Independent Business Alliance, and I became the executive director of that organisation which was deeply rooted in creating community impact for locally owned independent businesses. We were really fighting corporations, big box stores, legislation, and policy, while instead advocating for locally owned independent businesses. I did that for about six and a half years, and then I started my consulting company in 2012.
As the Founder and CEO of Prospera Partners, can you share more about your current work, what you were doing and the services you're providing to impact led businesses?
My interest in starting my own consulting business originated in wanting to work with and alongside the business owners and folks who were doing economic development. This was in city agencies, municipalities, local and state governments.
I started working with folks who wanted to create better local economy systems, and that led to strategic planning and community engagement work where we host public conversations around impact.
Sometimes we host these conversations with our clients specifically for their own organisations or work in creating systems. For instance, some of our work has been in the local farm and agriculture movement. We are creating economic systems around farming supply chains to help them sell into bigger or different markets, such as anchor institutions, restaurants, or directly to consumers. We do strategic planning, community engagement processes, facilitation, design, and host workshops for leaders in the non-profit sector on transformational change in the impact sector.
What superpowers and advantages do local businesses have compared to large corporations when creating a social impact?
I love this question; locally owned independent businesses have huge superpowers around their numbers. If they can get together to form alliances, organisations and networks have a stronger ability to advocate and go up against legislation and policymaking.
That’s an important superpower that they have, through using their voice as business owners.
I think that they are much more agile and flexible when responding to community needs. We hear stories about corporations being able to donate to special causes in communities or sponsor events, and they set up foundations to give away profits.
Locally owned businesses are in the community. They are our neighbours and friends who are deeply rooted and invested in their own communities, and that often means paying better wages to attract and retain employees. It means truly having an impact, even if it's just for their neighbourhood.
They’re providing a service, like being a local mum and pop owned grocery store on the corner. They’re in their neighbourhood just to serve their neighbourhood because there isn't a grocery store within a certain radius serving their community. They're often providing a better, healthier product, and I use the case of local bookstores (to explain this). Locally owned independent bookstores provide so much more conversation because of the events that they're hosting. The authors they're including in their events are mostly going to be smaller, regional authors. Those locally owned independent bookstores can be a hotbed of great conversation and community engagement, so I love local businesses for these reasons.
What is the concept of transformational leadership and where are there opportunities for social entrepreneurs to apply this practice?
There are so many ways to approach and explain transformational leadership, from the academic perspective to the more intuitive, spiritual level. For a lot of folks, it’s about conscious consumerism, and conscious business owners often means they are spiritual or getting into the mindfulness space.
Transformational leadership means working within a framework I call “I,” “we,” and “it”. I is me, who am I in this work? What do I need as a leader in the work, but then it’s who are we as leaders in this work together and what do we need as leaders to do it, the work itself.
To transform systems and our work, we must transform ourselves. We must start with I and then we must integrate into working with others in the community and in our own organisations and projects. It’s then about being able to focus on the work through that transformation.
What is required to mainstream the business for good movement and to create thriving communities?
Recovering from the pandemic, we have gone through so much globally, locally, and regionally. I think we need consumer awareness and education around what it means to be a socially good business. What does it mean to be a social enterprise? These terms have been around for a while now, and while they are starting to become more common, they are still misunderstood.
I believe in a much bigger umbrella of social enterprise that includes non-profits and locally owned independent businesses that don't consider themselves to be social enterprise, but they are. They are rooted in their communities and sometimes creating a community impact without calling it these things. Getting consumers to be more aware is crucial, we want people to be educated enough to say, "I'm choosing this business over this one because of its values and the impact it has because of its connection to the community. That public awareness is key to everything.
What key piece of advice would you share with a social entrepreneur or community builder who is starting out on their journey to make a difference?
There's no one way to make an impact, everyone has a different way to come at this work and a passion for why they're doing it.
Tap into your passion and be clear on what it is that you want to do or the social impact you want to create; what connects you back to your community or the purpose of your business, organisation or non-profit? Remember, it's okay to not have all the answers.
I work with so many entrepreneurs who think they must have it all figured out straight away, but you won't because none of us did. None of us do, and it's okay to not know those answers yet. It's also okay to hire people who are smarter than you!
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?
It's tied to what I just said about needing more awareness around social enterprise. However, I also think there is more awareness now, because as we saw during the pandemic, folks were becoming so hyper focused on their local areas. People were saying, “I need to be able to walk to my neighbourhood store safely,” or, “I need to get what provisions I need.”
We saw in my hometown here in New Mexico a pizza joint that began selling items they were getting in mass quantities. They delivered these goods for their own business, but people in their community could then buy eggs, milk, and staples like that. It was a smart way for them to stay in business and to serve their community in a serious time of need when the supply chains were cut off.
We've come to a point of more awareness, and that inspires me to keep doing this work. Also, just meeting people in this work like you and others who are interested in getting into social impact inspires me too. It takes each of us working together to do the work.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?
It's a shameless plug for self-promotion here, but we have a resource list on our website. We also have a bookshop where we list all our favourite books, everything from leadership issues to non-profit and social enterprises.
I do want to plug a good friend of mine who is in this world. He owns a coffee shop in Ohio, and he wrote a book recently called Radical Business: The Root of Your Work and How It Can Change the World. It's a great book because it's accessible and breaks down how-to do-good business. It includes the local independent business owner voice, so it's not just about social enterprise but also being a good business. The author is my friend, David Gaines and his book Radical Business is also available in our bookshop on our website at prosperapartners.org.
