Accelerate South Dade, an entrepreneurship center and incubator located in Cutler Bay and sponsored by Miami-Dade County District 8 Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava, hosted a free two-hour workshop on “Project Planning for Social Impact” on Friday, Apr. 27.
The workshop was conducted by Sarah Emmons, managing director at Radical Partners, and was designed to help small businesses, charitable organizations and others learn how to plan and execute projects successfully. The PowerPoint presentation and discussion was attended by eight people who braved the heavy rain that day, with attendees including a wedding photographer, theater arts person, as well as other entrepreneurs and staff of a local charity.
Danilo J. Vargas, CBBA president and manager of Accelerate South Dade, introduced Emmons and participated in the discussion.
“We as entrepreneurs and nonprofits seek above all else to have impact,” Vargas said. “Impact depends upon execution. Execution depends upon great project planning.”
Emmons said that project planning can help avoid the pitfalls and improve the process.
“We’ve all had projects gone awry,” she said at the beginning of the session. “We try to do something on our own; we wing it, and it goes wrong.”
She then went through seven project planning steps to set goals, organize tasks, areas of responsibility, working as a team, creating a timeline, seeing it through to completion and analyzing the results to learn for future projects. She had the participants split into teams of two each to compare notes on their own projects and approaches needed to achieve results.
Emmons said afterwards that she was pleased with the workshop and the opportunity to help.
“I think that first and foremost it was really exciting for us to be able to do this down here in South Dade, in partnership with Accelerate South Dade, to bring some of the project planning tools and resources that we have to folks in different communities outside of central Miami,” Emmons said.
“This year, thanks to the Peacock Foundation, we’ve been able to offer free community workshops about once a month and also offer office hours about once a week, which is really exciting for us. We also offer cohort programming, so twice a year we do programs called Social Entrepreneurship Bootcamp in the leadership lab which provides 10- to 12-week accelerator programs for social impact leaders.”
Anyone wishing to learn more can visit the website at www.radical.partners/workshops-coaching or send email to Sarah Emmons at s@radicalpartners.net.
Accelerate South Dade is located at 10700 Caribbean Blvd., Suite 301. For information call 786-732-0774 or send an email to Danilo Vargas at dvargas@nanafl.org.
