I’m facing a classic social entrepreneur’s challenge: balancing my time between doing what I do and talking about doing what I do.  As you can see, I haven’t posted a new blog post in way too long.  If you’ve been following this blog, you may have wondered to yourself ‘what happened to FORGE? Are they still doing anything?”

I don’t blame you for asking, because I’ve broken a cardinal rule of nonprofit leadership: if you don’t maintain strong and open communication, you can’t expect people to trust what you are doing and how well you are doing it.

But man, it’s hard!  The irony of course is that it’s just when you are doing the most that you have the least time to tell people about it.  The last four months have brought a whirlwind of advancements and milestones for FORGE: we have designed, refined, and launched a new Collaborative Project Planning Process that puts the creative control of the projects in the hands of the refugees themselves, we have trained and placed new staff in the field, we have been working hard to advance and improve our Microfinance Institute, and we have been building a new, state-of-the-art, interactive website to partner with our new project model…and a lot more.

Yet unfortunately, I’ve been talking about none of it.  I started this blog for a purpose: to communicate with the world about the thing I am most passionate about - the work that FORGE is doing to improve the lives and future prospects of people displaced by war in Africa.  My goals through this blog were to a) inspire others to think about the tragedies and opportunities of forced migration in Africa, b) share some of the challenges I’ve faced and lessons I’ve learned as a founder of a ambitious international NGO with other social entrepreneurs, and c) advance the conversation about how ordinary citizens can contribute to social progress in meaningful and intelligent ways.

I still believe in those goals, and I don’t want to fail on any of them anymore.  So…you’ll be seeing more of me on The Edge from here on out.

-Kjerstin Erickson

www.FORGEnow.org