For six years, Fay Horwitt led Forward Cities as President and CEO. As an Ecosystem Healer, she has served on the Board of Startup Champions Network and the Leadership Council of the Ecosystem Building Leadership Network.
And when EcoMap Co-Founder/CEO Pava LaPere tragically lost her life in September 2023, Fay and Kevin Carter from the EcoMap team collaborated to launch a place-based ecosystem building fellowship program in her honor. Just a few months later, PLACE Builders (standing for the Pava LaPere Award for Cultivating Ecosystems) was born.
In the US, you can’t talk about building equitable entrepreneurial ecosystems without talking about – and ideally with – Fay Horwitt.
The 6 Skills of an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Builder
A native of Winston-Salem, Fay started out in film school before joining several nonprofits that nurtured her dedication to supporting women and empowering entrepreneurs. As a first-time entrepreneur herself, Fay experienced the barriers she was up against as a black female self-starter in the startup world.
Long before the field of entrepreneurial ecosystem building had the name recognition it has today, Fay saw the gaps in her community and felt called to fill them. “ In 2015, I didn’t know what ecosystem building was. I had no sense that this was a practice or a way of being, let alone a potential profession. I saw entrepreneurs, business owners and organizations in my community that were struggling because they didn’t have equal opportunities or that were disconnected from resources. My nature was to figure out how to solve those problems. So I just leaned in to figure out how to connect people, how to get them what they needed, how to remove barriers for folks so that they could be successful. And that’s what I did.”, Fay explains.
“ If you had asked me what an ecosystem builder is in the early 2020’s, I would have said it’s someone who is actively working in community to develop a connected network of people to support entrepreneurs, someone who identifies blocks and barriers, particularly from an equity lens, and finding ways to mitigate them.” Fay explains.
“Over the past few years, I’ve had a bit of an awakening around this, because at that time it was about processes and tools, about surveys and councils and a very structured way of thinking about how you identify these challenges and how you address them.
More and more, what I’m recognizing is it comes down to just building relationships. To me, ecosystem building is rooted in building relationships with people being authentic, listening to people’s needs and truly making sense around what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing, “Today, I think of ecosystem building as much more entrepreneurial than I originally thought.”
As part of the PLACE Builders Fellowship, Fay shares her decade of experience with emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem builders from around the U.S. The Fellowship is designed to equip up to eight self-identifying changemakers with the skills and mindsets to build capacity within their community through training, peer support, and community pilots. Professional mentorship, a digital toolkit, community, funding, and a platform to tell the stories about the places they love enable Fellows to identify unique challenges in their community, and to develop and launch a pilot project to either address an ecosystem gap or scale something that’s working well.
“PLACE Builders offers a unique experience for aspiring ecosystem builders. It’s about finding your new group of people, your additional family that can be there to learn with you, to explore, to champion your efforts and to help you process the challenging moments,” Fay described.
The PLACE Builders Fellows are trained in six skills
Asset mapping
Assessing
Alignment
Action
Amplification
Advocacy
Map the assets that are readily available within the ecosystem
What these assets mean, as well as potential gaps and barriers to access
Convening local stakeholders for collective sensemaking
Starting small and building trust within the ecosystem
Tell stories that matter and that highlight what you are doing.
Progress is not automatic. None of these early efforts are sustainable without support.
“Ecosystem building is tough work.”, Fay explains from first hand experience. She continues, “One of the things that’s important to us is not to talk AT our fellows. We have conversations with them. We bring mentors alongside them and guest speakers to show up and support. They share not only their expertise around a specific area of ecosystem building, but also their personal lived experience of what has worked for them, what challenges they faced and how they’ve navigated this from a personal perspective.
A practice of collaborative sensemaking
“We believe that ecosystem building needs to be holistic. It’s not just a practice. For most of us, it’s a lifestyle and we want to support and equip the whole ecosystem builder.”
Making sense of what fellows are experiencing in their communities is a crucial component of the fellowship. Fay explains why we need to relearn how we think and approach problem solving, “ We try to help them to think in new ways, how to process information in new ways, how to think for the collective as opposed to thinking at an individual level. We’re not built that way. We’re not raised that way, nor are we taught this in school. Helping them shift mindsets and be more aware of that along the way prepares them to step into a career of ecosystem building.”
While mindset shifts matter a great deal, that’s not all the fellowship provides. The group is also equipped with practical tools and resources to help execute on the six skills for effective ecosystem building.
While – and perhaps because – Fellows hail from across the United States, site visits and collective conference visits (such as to Startup Champions Network Summits) are built into the program. As it turns out, being community when you’re trying to build community elsewhere is important.
From Individualism to Collective Wellbeing
“ We want them to meet their peers who are doing similar work and learn from folks who have been doing this work for longer. We want to make sure they build an even bigger community beyond their place builder cohort to get them connected above and beyond.”
Leveraging technology for empathy and mutual understanding
Mapping your ecosystem and understanding what is available is powerful for any ecosystem builder. When asked about the role of technology in this field going forward, Fay has a specific need to take her ecosystem work one level deeper, “ I wish there was a tool that helped people understand each other’s perspectives. If I run across someone challenging in the ecosystem, our nature is to think, ‘Oh, I’m right. That person’s wrong. I’m good. They’re bad.’ But that type of binary thinking doesn’t resolve anything, it doesn’t help us move forward. I experimented with AI a few times to see whether it could help me switch perspectives. I put in the scenario, what I was seeing and hearing, what I was feeling. I prompted AI by asking ‘Can you help me understand this situation from this other person’s perspective?’ And it shared back with me some helpful prompts:
* Consider this person’s history and background.
* Their past experiences related to this particular issue might make them particularly sensitive to it.
Then I would ask, ‘How would you suggest I address this situation with them? What’s the next conversation I could have?’ And AI suggested phrases to use or avoid (in case they were triggering) and gave me a set of different prompts to explore this further.
My seeing and approaching this individual and since then our relationship has improved because I am no longer seeing it from only my lens. If there were a tool that was specifically built to help us better understand each other’s perspectives that would be fantastic.”
Fay’s vision for the future of ecosystem building