Too Small to Fail: Debt Relief for Social Entrepreneurs

Hi SocialEdge,

I'm looking forward to a lively discussion on the subject of debt relief for social entrepreneurs. Personal debt is not a topic we often discuss openly. But I think it's important to do so. There are a lot of funders/investors out there who probably don't know the extent to which cash-strapped social entrepreneurs are putting themselves on the line.

Here's an opportunity to draw attention to the issue, highlighting both the vulnerability that personal debt creates as well as the opportunity to build better systems to help social entrepreneurs get out of debt and avoid it in the future.

I invite you to be as open and candid as possible in drawing attention to this issue. If you have a story to share, don't hesitate to share it. We'll all benefit from casting light on the issue. Of course, if you would rather discuss the subject in the abstract, please feel comfortable to do so.

As I'm sure will surface in the course of the discussion, I have had my own bout with the debt monster recently. Fortunately, I am fully recovered and won't be heading back there anytime soon. But during those extraordinary dark days of mounting debt, I found myself questioning my motivation for pursing the work I love and the value I had placed on committing myself to social innovation in the first place.

Personal debt is one of the most unjust aspects of what I believe to be a broken system of funding for social innovation. What do you think?

Hello Peter,

I really appreciate this post, as I have been asking myself similar questions. I have touched on some of those issues on my "Social Actions" blog and what disturbs me the most, is what seems to be a lack of business integrity in SE.

I almost get the impression that business is treated as a dirty word, as if making a profit was a sin in this wonderful world of social endeavours. Frankly, I don't get that at all.

As you correctly stated in your post "it’s par for the course to move on when a project has proven financially unviable."

My question is: Why don't all SE exercice that same business sense?

If the commercial part of my business doesn't prove viable, am I going to continue banging my head against the wall or abandon my pursuit of social good deeds?

Of course not! I am first and foremost an entrepreneur and that means I am a problem solver. I will continue to explore until I find a commercially viable business model, so I can fulfill my social aspirations.

It's certainly puzzling Ingrid and something that's come up on a Linkedin group I run - Social Business, Profit for Social Purpose.

There's a tendency I observe, to cling to the nonprofit mantra, by using terms like hybrid, when really we're talking about the simple concept of business taking on a social objective.

There's also a tendency to discuss the concept as if some unattainable holly grail. In several instances, I've found my contribution deleted for attempting to suggest that it's already happening.

In both the US SIF and the SEIF I note the exclusion of the profit-for-purpose business approach.

Returning to Peter's question. There was no philanthropic capital when we started, we were looking for loan funding having spent several months preparing a business plan. Fortunately and unfortunately we gained a revenue source on the death of a colleague who left me with ongoing business for our core operations revenue. We're on basic subsistence incomes, battling with non-paying customers, but we are not going to go into debt.

Hi Jeff, Thanks for adding to the discussion. Your experience highlights the difficulty of accessing capital in our sector. Getting by on a revenue source created from the death of a colleague must be difficult.

Your experience, however, has me thinking that funds for social innovation could be created on the 'planned giving' model. The wealthy (or anyone for that matter) would leave a portion of their money as growth capital for social innovators who are yet to identified or to support the field as a whole. This approach is quite different from leaving money to a single organization. But even if more people did this, it wouldn't solve the immediate problem of helping the social entrepreneurs who find themselves in tough situations today.

Any other thoughts on how to move more money to high-impact social entrepreneurs who could use it?

Peter, I do indeed have other thoughts.

Out 1996 founding paper a critique of conventional capitalism, which was presented to the Committee to Re-elect the President, prescribed a profit-for-purpose model and a trust fund mechanism for seeding other "business that did things differently from inception".

The UK paper in 2004 proposed using profit from community broadband to invest into CDFIs. This was put forward as a national scale srategy for digital and economic empowerment along with references to our earlier critque.

Again, in 2006 the social investment concept was described in a strategy paper for microeconomic development in Ukraine. One component was a social enterprise investment fund, into which profit from broadband deployment was invested along with donations funds from forward thinking business.

All of these things had been brought up here in conversations on Social Edge from 2004.

Interesting after the warnings made about capitalism and debt in 1996 became reality in the credit collapse of 2008, our UK government through the medium of a quango re-served many the ideas from our 2004 paper and before in a project called 'Reboot Britain'. It has already cost millions just to talk about it.

Given the above, I'm in support of what's been written below in another response, about protecting intellectual property.

Jeff
Jeff

Hi Jeff, Thanks for the link to Reboot Britain. Sounds like a great event. I'll have to browse through the video and text archive to get a sense of what was discussed.

Hi Ingrid, Thanks for jumping into this discussion and for your blog entries on My Social Actions.

I'd suggest that not everyone sees social enterprise as you do. For many, it overlaps with the nonprofit world and that fact opens up the possibility for donations and grants to either scale up or sustain social innovations... particularly those innovations that have proven finacially 'unviable' (I'm now questioning whether 'unviable' is a word).

I agree that individuals who identify as entrepreneurs first have an obligation to hone the business model above all else. And then grow and have a social impact from there. For those who identify as social innovators first and have created worthwhile initiatives that simply aren't viable from a business perspective, philanthropic capital should be available to keep them going.

All this aside, the main question I am raising is that of the large amounts of personal debt that social entrepreneurs (for-profit and non-profit) seem to be taking on. I couldn't be the only one who found myself in a very tight situation after several years of pursing my initiative. There must be others.

Do you have suggestions for those people? What course of action would you recommend for them?

What tends to be overlooked, is anyone who is a social entrepreneur, who is also a member of an excluded group - and has no credit cards to use, and no house to sell.

Consider the situation of a parent whose own children have supported the project, going without new shoes (going to school with their toes hanging out of their shoes), living in a freezing house, with little food, while understanding their parent's project needed a website to be paid for, marketing, graphics, software, laser printer etc.

Imagine being the child who has gone without, knowing that their parent's project offers hope for their future climatically - knowing also, that across the world people are dying because they have even less.

The talk of funding leaves me to ask "what funding???" - "what social inclusion???"

In the UK, the media has continually maligned lone parents as irresponsible, benefit scrounging takers - having children with behavioural problems which are apparently down to their ineffectual parenting, and what they suffered at the hand of absent parent.

Imagine what it is like to:
1) Bring children up alone (in safety)
2) Work freelance (design consultant) to be at home for your children at all times
3) Have irregular (erratic/sparse) earnings (and no maintenance courtesy of the CSA)
4) Found a (regenerative) sustainable community living project, offering affordable eco-homes (co-opertive housing) to those willing to work on Earth restoration projects (on Community Land Trusts)
5) Work flat-out unpaid on feasibility stage (unpaid for all your work)
6) Find that there is NO funding available (grants of up to £75,000 payable for consultants services - but not for your work as a consultant!) - even though the proposals comply to all government and local authority guidelines, and the community is formed of people in proven need.
7) Put together a series of proposed NPD's to help other people by having the potential to cover the start-up costs of others founding sustainable communities, innovations, and the third sector (unable to even pay the website editor to finish the website, it has cost me over £1000 of money I hadn't earned, working over £125,000 in man-hours 'for free'. Voluntary work is something you can afford to do, and chose to do, not something you HAVE to do without pay)
8) Become a social entrepreneur and read on Social Edge that it is better to continuously campaign for funding, than it is to accept the money of a 'sugar daddy' - sugar daddy's may indeed be 'bad for your teeth', but at least you would be able to afford the dentist

Poverty is NOT always the root to crime or greed, (from where I sit, I see those who have already eaten the apple as being those whose appetite's have no end). Surely, the over-demand of all Earth's resources is fed on the passion to continue to be 'at the TOP' of the ladder, rather than those with nothing, just wanting 'enough'.

N.B.
A man in the developing world is unable to prove his innocence, because it takes money to buy the copies of hospital and police reports he filed - while a church representative in the UK, assumed his criminal tendency based upon his poverty.

A man in the developing world is asking for his human right to be seen as innocent until proven guilty, and is asking for 'someone' to investigate his case.

I am trying to help him. I have to. I am working without earning, and he was working for a UK international company which withheld half the workers wages and denied employing anyone in his homeland. (The church representative is a friend of the HR director of the UK International Company)

We have no human rights without money to buy them.
(Full details available confidentially to anyone who is in a position to help)

Hi Linda, Thanks for joining the discussion.

You're right to point out that my discussion introduction assumes credit cards as a source of capital. Nevertheless, in situations where credit is completely unavailable, I like to think that incredible social innovations can still emerge.

Your comments remind me that the trick in social entrepreneurship is to align the scope and design of one's social venture with the resources available. It's the unbalance that breaks the bank and drains the passion.

Good luck in your pursuits.

Ok, first of all, the reason a commercial entrepreneur bails when the business becomes unsustainable is that they are listening to the market.

Second, it is highly likely that there are far too many nonprofits in the ecosystem. In the business world, when two organizations merge, we hold a party. In non-profits, we hold a wake. So perhaps a more enlightened view of organizational change and growth is called for.

And yes the funding model is broken, and true patient capital is sorely needed (and that can only come through an equity based investment.

So, the real question is how to save the intellectual property.

Perhaps rather than nailing ourselves to the cross, we should think about patent and trademark laws.

Debt relief is not the answer (just ask Maurice Greenberg).

Hi Jim, Thanks for your thoughts. I don't necessarily agree that there are too many no-profits. Perhaps there are too many non-profits that ignore each other or attempt to undermine one another, but that's another issue.

Can you elaborate on the question of intellectual property? How would revisiting patents and trademarks help to keep social entrepreneurs out of personal debt?

Re Maurice Greenberg of AIG, if a handful of hot potatoes like AIG are too big to fail, why aren't a few million small potatoes with world-changing too small to fail?

I'm not suggesting a government bail out of anyone and everyone, but social innovators are a special crop. Freeing them to produce social impact over the long-term should be a top priority for governments, foundations, and social investors.

Jim, as I discovered recently, here in the UK we have a Business and IP centre run by the British Library which aims to help innovators protect and develop their ideas.

Unfortunately, I've already detected some of our own IP being used there and attributed to others. So I'm hoping for some lively discussion myself on a group they have on Linkedin.

http://www.linkedin.com/gro[…]995887&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Jeff

My view of the current situation is that universities train social entrepreneurs to appeal for philanthropic capital and government funds. Social entrepreneurs get to spend other peoples money which is OK until the money runs out. Then the brainwashing from university political propoganda kicks in and the social entrepreneurs become reckless.
In particular, major universities are not providing the proper training or reference materials to social entrepreneurs who wish to be effective in helping BOP personnel. For example, many of the world’s poorest people are subsistence farmers living on less than two acres of land. To help these people, social entrepreneurs should be very familiar with the following fields of study with emphasis on arid and tropical agriculture:
• Improving grain production
• Improving production of vegetables
• Improving fruit orchards and fruit nurseries
• Improving poultry production
• Improving small animal production such as goats and pigs
• Improving general purpose micro-farms
In urban areas, many of the poorest people are essentially migrant workers who are willing to go anywhere and do anything for a job. To help these people, social entrepreneurs should be very familiar with the following fields of study:
• Business process reengineering of small and micro businesses to make these business profitable (this is a field created by industry and is full of “industrial secrets”; university and Government personnel generally don’t know what industry does to make themselves profitable)
• Methods for creating jobs for people who currently earn $1-2/day including single mothers
• Development and maintenance of supply chains (How are you going to distribute 10,000 micro irrigation systems, fertilizer, and other supplies in Kenya without losing money? What high value food commodities are you going to grow in Kenya so that people will double their income each year? How are you going to repeat the UN FAO West Bengal India backyard poultry success in Kenya? (see “A Backyard Poultry Value Chain Increases Assets, Income and Nutrition”)
The proper textbooks and reference material are not being provided on subjects that can help BOP personnel. Instead, there are thousands of textbooks on “policy studies” that may be suitable for NGO fundraising but little else. I prefer to call these “policy studies” texts “political propaganda studies” due to their limited value to people working in the field.

Hi Paul, Thanks for joining the discussion.

Can I sum up your point as, "social entrepreneurs don't know enough about the fields they are entering to develop profitable social enterprises."?

And/or are you saying, "social entrepreneurs aren't being taught how to run profitable businesses, which would be independent from philanthropic capital and government grants"?

I'm not familiar with the university programs in question, but I would tend to agree with both points.

Over the past two years, I have had my own crash course on how to run a small business, everything from financial management and business planning to product development and marketing/communications. To Ingrid's point above, there was a time when I raged against all of those terms.

I suspect that there's a widespread naivete out there that ends up driving well-intended social entrepreneurs into personal debt. I like to think that I've turned a corner on my own naivete.

Many social entrepreneurs (particularly those entering the field from the non-profit or activist communities) would be well served to learn more about how businesses operate. Once you have an organization on your hands, you have business administration implications.

All this to say, perhaps the debt relief I'm calling for can and should take the form of better training and preparation materials for those committed to seeing their social enterprises succeed.

Lots of very valid points above.

Peter, to specifically address your question: No, I don't know of other sources for funding, or how to implement new ones, besides the ones that have already been mentioned.

As you pointed out, it's completely unacceptable to get into personal debts, as romantically involved with the project as one can become, going down that road rarely has a positive outcome.

Yes, there are plenty of worthwhile NPO's out there who deserve funding to keep going, but the reality is otherwise. From a philanthropist's point of view, there is a never-ending stream of candidates, all with good causes.

So perhaps NPO's should focus on better selling their "product". Whether you are selling an actual product or an idea, if you don't make a good case for it, it won't sell.
Philanthropists, investors, people at at a fundraising event: all want to see a return on their money. You must give them something they can weight it against, not just words.

In fact that brings to mind John Wood's book (founder of Room to Read). Although it tells the story of his NPO development, it's also a little business gem. Not too surprising given his Microsoft background. If you haven't already read it, I would suggest it.

I often wonder if there is a naive assumption in the NPO community that NPO's don't need to be run as a business. That good actions alone will somehow carry them and everyone else will see the light too.

I think you really hit the nail on the head with your closing paragraph.

Btw, I had to laugh, I don't unviable is a word either!

Ingrid

Hi Ingrid, I'm enjoying your continued engagement with this thread. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'll definitely track down a copy of John Wood's book, "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World." Books are definitely a great way to step back from the day-to-day operations of a social enterprise and gain a fresh perspective on the why, how, and what next.

How do you SELL an idea if you cannot afford the slick graphical representation expected by a world used to high cost media marketing campaigns - if you have no money?

Does a university degree qualify you to see the 'holes' which need filling from the base line of society upwards?

How do you put yourself through a university degree, if you cannot afford to eat? - Money does not buy intellect, it just buys a good education.

The world's poorest people are already denied their right to be heard. Forcing everyone to be qualified to be allowed to 'speak' their own 'speak' (or case), would mean that the rich were representing the poor - and that hasn't worked for them to date, has it? - If it had, surely there would be no need for anyone to become a social entrepreneur!

I totally agree that any enterprise has to be viable, otherwise it would just become another sink, and any entrepreneur must appreciate size of the commercial operation they are founding just as much as the market potential, but 'selling it' is difficult when society alleviates itself of all guilt by wearing a red nose one day in every two years.

Seeking any investor at all is a nightmare when there is no high profit return for their investment, and unless there is a completely different way of financing social enterprises, it is difficult to imagine that things will ever change.

Peter - Great summation
As you might expect from my website at http://home.comcast.net/~prigter/site/, I hope to help the University of Cordoba (Colombia) prepare business plans on the following:
1) A company that would sell tropical fruit tree and moringa seeds produced in all of Colombia and Haiti to NGOs working in the Caribbean and Latin America
2) A company that would sell tropical fruit tree nursery stock produced in Cordoba and Haiti to BOP farmers in northern Colombia and Haiti
3) A company that would repeat the UN FAO West Bengal India backyard poultry success in northern Colombia and Haiti. See “A Backyard Poultry Value Chain Increases Assets, Income and Nutrition”.
4) A company that would prepare the nursery stock necessary to reproduce the reforestation solution of the Gaviotas II project in other parts of the world including Haiti
5) A company that produce micro-irrigation equipment in Haiti and Colombia for use throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.

My son-in-law, PhD Candidate in Agriculture Economics and winner of a major award at a recent conference in China, and my future daughter-in-law, former campaign worker on State Senator Barack Obama’s US Senate campaign, will help me as necessary. The BOP farmers, students, and University professors in Cordoba are doing everything they possibly can to improve my business concepts. One main problem is the lack of water in the dry season in Cordoba.

Hi Paul,

Good luck with the business plan development. Sounds like you've assembled a great team.

Peter

Hi Peter,

"Debt relief" suggests that the social entrepreneur is in a state of suffering and his condition must be relieved.
I'd say that social entrepreneurs who suffer are not entrepreneurs at all, but idealists. An entrepreneur is a denizen of the department of long shots who takes only* calculated risks. If the concept isn't elegant in the scientific sense, if the numbers don't add up, if it doesn't happen on the page of the business plan, if it it doesn't find investors to survive beyond infancy, don't do it, cure yourself of your emotional attachment to the venture, don't put more and more of your own skin in the game.

If a social entrepreneur is an innovator of solutions to society's most pressing problems -- that have been ignored by the market and public sectors --he should be able to count on reliable sources of investment for his work ... from others. Collaboration between investors and innovators should be one of the foundations of social enterprise infrastructure, or else let's forget all the feel-good bromides we hear at social enterprise conferences about the intersection of money and meaning and call it a day. Irish rocker, Bob Geldof, organizer of Band Aid, the precursor of Live Aid, wrote about meeting Mother Theresa while he was on the ground in Ethiopia in the '80s during the famines there. She simply said, "We both have to do it. You please do what you do and I will do what I do, but we both have to do it." So in social enterprise, the entrepreneur and investor both have to do it. This is fundamental.
 
As I'm growing my own venture, RainWorks OmniMedia LLC -- a producer of attraction experiences and events for the family market
to benefit girls literacy and clean water programs -- I am realistic enough to draw a line in the sand about my own financial investment in the venture, and understand the critical role of investors in my venture. We both have to do it. I can't and won't do it alone.

Hi Gail, Thanks for joining the discussion. I appreciate the stern advice you have articulated for the would-be entrepreneur who's still an idealist only, as well as your reminder to investors to put their money where their mouths are.

What would you suggest to cash-strapped social entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their social enterprises? Should they work part-time elsewhere to avoid running out of resources? Or set aside a certain budget and commit themselves to working on the project until the budget has been exhausted, investors attracted, and/or revenue created?

Hi Peter,
Didn't mean to be stern. I don't think any social entrepreneur should assume personal debt that cripples him. We ought not to delude ourselves that the rightness of our cause will guarantee future success. There's a 50% chance that the venture will fail, despite our noble intentions and best efforts. Part-time work to finance a venture is such a good idea; pull the cord only when investors have been secured. For small loans, it is possible for social entrepreneurs to form a money club along the lines of the Korean ggeh or the South Indian cooteh, where a group of several dozen people contribute an equal amount and disburse the total to an individual in order of priority and loan amount.Over the course of 18 to 24 months, loans could be cycled to meet the needs of nearly all members of the club. I'd like to hear from a CPA how this could work with IRS codes and rules in play.

Hi Gail, Great suggestion. I've come across the model your describing under the term 'Savings Based Micro Finance' through work of Marcia Odell.

http://www.pactworld.org/cs/worth

It would be very interesting to look into the tax and financial law implications of attempting something similar in the North American context.

Please let me know if you learning anything on the subject.

And yes, social entrepreneurs really shouldn't ever assume personal debt. It happened to be me because I wasn't paying close enough attention and didn't fully appreciate the extremely slow pace of most grant-making and client acquisition.

I've learned my lesson many times over and am hosting this conversation with the hope that other cash-strapped social entrepreneurs / idealists in similar situations won't make the same mistakes I made.

Thanks again for contributing to the discussion.

Gail. What you describe in pooling resources to offer microfinance loans to thrird parties, might suit the Open Capital model of shared asset investment that Chris Cook advocates.

http://www.opencapital.net/

Ingrid and I have been discussing the P-CED approach which is for social business to contribute to a investment trust managed by civic leaders, from which seed funding for new business may be loaned or granted.

When our government had a summit about social enterprise last year, I pur forward the suggestion that an alternative to helping banks might be to offer both business and individuals the opportunity to invest in such a social enterprise trust with incentives.

http://www.box.net/shared/ckzbep5h26

For some unexplained reason my suggestion had been deleted and I acquired a copy from Google cache. It seems that the message got through however, from what was written after.

http://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/[…]/social-enterprise-summit.html

This for us has been a perpetual problem, our efforts and original concepts being served up and credited as the work of others.

I'd blogged today on the subject as Davos 2010 opened and afterwards visited The Tactical Philanthropy blog, which led to an article by Michael Edwards, where your name is mentioned, Peter.

Edwards thinks that the SIF offers an example, in spite of it being distributed to nonprofit foundations and believes that it will lead to massive CEO type salaries for social bu8iness. If only he knew.

My blog relates a key meeting at Davos 2008, where the most prominent advocates of Philanthrocapitalism had gathered, what was happening then and has happened since.

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=143428

Hi Jeff, I've seen the article by Michael Edwards. I'd love to connect with him at some point on this topic and others.

What worries me is that while governments, foundations, and academics debate the pros and cons of social finance, social innovators on the ground are falling through the cracks.

The field of social entrepreneurship needs more talk (with more diverse voices) and more action.

Over time, our country has put a dollar value on social entrepeneurship. For many socially-guided projects, sustainability actually makes the project better. For some other projects, there is just no funding model besides philanthropy. There are so many issues that the market does not solve because it is not profitable and many of these problems are strutural or systemic problems that must be solved. In our society, it is important that the issue of debt relief is visited and I am thankful for this conversation -- so many social entrepeneurs seek to create new models for greater equality and freedom for the disadvantaged and often there is no funding model for that. Once there is more equal distribution of opportunity for every single person, which includes a level playing field in education, internships, jobs, the marketplace, social circles etc. then we can finally say that we are cultivating a creative, fair, and equal society.

I find that the best and most change-creating foundations are the most open to new ideas. I also find myself working without any funding on political issues because it is important to develop campaigns without seeking funding first. I work on anewwayforward.org and the issue of debt for political equality is tantamount. We have no funding as of now.

Hi Tiffiniy, Thanks for joining the discussion. I like your focus on the equal distribution of opportunity. I guess that's what this discussion comes down to... those without money basically don't have the same opportunity to act on the opportunities they see to address any number of social issues. Meanwhile, the people and institutions with money have immense opportunities but often fail to seize them, fearing the risk/cost or lacking the vision. All told, I'm a fan of bootstrapping where possible (but not recklessly) and receiving grants/loans when necessary (but not counting on them). Good luck with your initiative.

I've literally just joined Social Edge, within the last two minutes, and the very first article I see is one which has been personally close to my heart for a very long time. So much so, that I have considered (on many an occasion) giving up The Hysterectomy Association simply because it is a drain both mentally and financially. And yet, something keeps me going.

Perhaps it is that we have enough income to keep it chugging along quite nicely ..... or perhaps it is the fact that it is my 'baby' and I'm loathe to let it go; perhaps it is the number of women I hear from every week who tell me how much they value the service provided .... or maybe it is just something else, something bigger.

The problem I have is that we do have enough income generated to cover it's costs and running costs (and even to give me a small income), but we don't have enough to expand, build or grow the organisation.

One big advantage though is that because of the financial constraints, I've had to look for innovative ways to achieve the goals I set myself and the organisation and this has led to a consultancy business which provides the rest of my income. I think I'm lucky, my passion has driven not only the social enterprise, but an additional career that I love. However, I still need to address the issue of how to grow the association without adequate funding!

I guess it's not a question that's going to be answered quickly or easily :-)

I'm especially heartened by finding this topic as i just finished speaking to a banker about the viability of securing a small business loan for my social enterprise startup of 2 years--not likely unless secured by my small retirement or house. The catch-22 for SEs applying for USAID grants is that if you have no assets, you're not considered a candidate for a grant--so the same traditionalist nonprofits continue to secure funding for projects that have had questionable sustainability in the past. I'm sorry to sound a bit bitter, but i come from 4 decades of senior and executive management in the nonprofit sector. I decided after researching SE to not form a nonprofit, so that i would not waste time with Board's slow decision making. I never anticipated that finding funding streams for capacity building using ICT tools would be so difficult or that those I pitched would 'extract' my intellectual property from proposals they asked me to prepare as potential collaborators. I say all of this as my credit card debt and home equity loans mount for the first time in my life. With the IRS' lack of SE recognition, the limits on funding availability for SEs from USIAD for example, and the questioning looks from most nonprofit types or World Bank staff about motivations--all combine to discourage. Tenacity tends to be my middle name but in this economy I'm beginning to wonder how to do the work so clearly needing attention--after months of trying to get a reasonably priced website design finished and web designers thinking I'm not in their league of 8-20K website costs, I'm questioning the viability of continuing despite building an ever growing consortium of universities and professionals who believe in my agency's mission and strategies. Finding a job to sustain this work also doesn't come easily when you're over 60 and time spent searching in this marketplace seems a loss to the current effort needed to gain SE traction :)