Community Update

04 Dec Community Update

Dear Fellows,

I’ve received a very warm welcome to the foundation and have had the pleasure of meeting up with a few you over the past weeks. It’s a privilege to be working with the foundation and to be part of a community of current and future high impact entrepreneurs.

Thank you to Dan Hampton:

I’d like to thank Dan for the many years of service to the foundation as both an Entrepreneurial Leadership Officer (ELO) and most recently as Association Director. We appreciate the help he provided as a custodian of the Association and thank him for the inspiration, guidance and assistance that he provided to the community. Dan has started his new role at Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropy and is helping to extend the reach of the group into Africa. Thank you, Dan. Good luck on your new path. We hope to see you in our social circles soon!

Strategy for 2019:

The Association team (including the foundation, Association exco and fellows in residence) are currently in the process of finalising the strategy for the 2019/20 financial year. We’re exploring several exciting new initiatives and will be communicating these to you early in the new year. Keep an eye out. 2019 promises to be an exciting one.

“It’s about the entrepreneur, not the venture”:

We are incredibly proud of all of you that have been admitted to the Association of Allan Gray Fellows over the past 12 years and we expect the family to grow to just under 400 fellows early next year. One thing that I’d like to stress to each of you is that being an entrepreneur is a journey, not a destination. We, as an Association, are focused on high impact entrepreneurs and not simply high impact businesses (although this would be nice). Some started their ventures early on while others may start later in life. Your journey as an entrepreneur, however, began a long time ago – at the very latest, this journey began at the time you were admitted into the Scholarship/Fellowship program. With this thinking in mind, we are here to support you on your entrepreneurial journey. Always remember, it’s not about your venture, it’s about your ad-venture!

With the above in mind, it is important that we acknowledge that we are here to support each other on our respective journeys. I’d like to suggest that when you have a chance to check in with other fellows that you ask the question: “how is your entrepreneurial journey progressing?” rather than “how is your business doing?” or “do you have a business?”.  Becoming a high impact entrepreneur is part of your journey, let’s focus on ourselves as people and entrepreneurs and trust that the ventures will come. The talent, skills, competencies and passion are in abundance in the Association. Let’s harness this together to reach our full potential.

The vision for the Association:

I’m sure that you are all well familiar with our purpose of fostering an active community of Allan Gray Fellows who are further inspired, motivated and developed to become high impact, responsible entrepreneurs. The Association team at the foundation is ultimately here for you, the fellows, and we are therefore accountable to you. Whilst we may report to the board of the foundation our main objective is to serve the fellows that make up the Association.

It is our responsibility as a collective to develop, support and maintain initiatives in the Association that help us deliver on our overall purpose. Please reach out to the team should you have any thoughts, suggestions, queries or comments as to how we can enable the Association to achieve its purpose. We are all custodians of the Association and together we will achieve our objectives.