SIF Graduation Speech (Maya Faulstich-Hon, 12/2016)

Hi everyone.

I’m honored to be speaking tonight. In a way, it feels strange, because so much of this fellowship has been about the importance of closing your mouth and listening. So, I’m going to close my mouth now and ask you all to give this speech tonight. Nah just kidding.

If future me had told past me that one day I’d be standing here graduating from the Social Innovation Fellowship, I would have laughed and then googled “social innovation.” But here I am. And here we are. And what a journey it’s been.

I’d like to take you back to the retreat in January. I keep a journal, and this is what I wrote in it that night:

Look at this cohort. We come from so many different places. We’re retreating into the woods together, relearning, regrouping, meeting and breaking bread. We’re retreating in order to advance, eyes bright. Look at us! We’re all different people. But we have a few things in common: we love garlic bread, staying up late playing board games, and we are not apathetic.

Some of us came to that cabin in the woods with years of fluency in business plans and bank accounts. Some of us had already been working on our ventures for a few months, or years even.

And others of us were just beginning to conduct research: bottom-up, top-down, coming at old problems from new angles. I fell squarely into the subset of us for whom “entrepreneurship” felt like a mouthful of gravel—entrepreneeuuurship—entre-pre-neur-ship—so foreign, too many r’s and e’s, and not phoenetic in the least.

A lot of the past year for me has been figuring out how to wear this word. I’ve learned that starting something new isn’t about starting something new: it’s about learning to ask for help. It’s about seeing wisdom in everyone. It’s about navigating friendship and leadership and scholarship and all the ships. It’s about growing bugs in the parking lot behind your house – I believe the term is “bootstrapping.”

A few thank yous are in order:

MJ, though she’s not here tonight, was a professor and mentor to many of us in Leading Social Ventures.
Likewise, a huge shout-out to Stef who was our fabulous TA. // Many of us took the class Leading Social Ventures, and a huge shout-out to Stef who was our fabulous TA.
Cat—I’m so glad you joined us—it’s been a blast getting to know you while counting bugs.
Jyoti—thank you for your calm, clear wisdom. I am forever in awe of the way you listen, see, and then speak.
Liz—I don’t even know half of everything you do behind the scenes, but getting an email from you is always pretty exciting.
Professor Warshay—even though I haven’t had the chance to work with you directly, I know you’ve had so much to do with the fact that the word “entrepreneurship” sounds less foreign to a lot of people.
Viraj—I am so grateful that ResLife randomly assigned us rooms across from each other freshman year. You are my best friend and my fellow bug-grower; but notice that friend comes first.
Lizzie – Alan – the two of you are the lungs and the heart of this program. I know I speak for all of us when I say we are slack-jawed grateful for all the love you pour into what you do. It goes so much farther beyond working hard and being really good at what you; you imbue it with humanity.

Here is something from us to say thank you.

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We don’t live in easy times. I don’t have to begin to tell you about the many challenges that face us, that threaten human freedom and coexistence on and with this planet. Wicked problems require wondrous solutions, and we need all of them in the years to come.

We need music education.

We need delicious vegetable buns and children’s multivitamins, we need mental health peer counseling, and we need amazing headshots for students.

We need to link researchers with subjects, case managers with those experiencing homelessness, and people with healthy, affordable food.

We need innovative education in China and we need representative literature in Zimbabwe.

We need better grading systems and better air filtration systems. And, I hate to break it to you guys, but we need bugs.

Just as importantly, we need to have courage and humility to confront our own ideas and know when to retreat, when to regroup and re-evaluate instead of pushing ahead blindly.

I leave you with some words from the artist, activist, and educator Maxine Greene who died two years ago at age 96. She says:

“We must not evade, deny, or take for granted actualities, we must not be willing to remain passive, to coincide forever with ourselves. We must, instead, seek more shocks of awareness as the time goes on, more explorations, more adventures into meaning, more active and uneasy participation in the human community’s unending quest.”

To the Brown Venture Fellows and Social Innovation Fellows of 2016: Thanks for being a part of this quest with me.