FMS Spotlight: Erick Crockenberg
Erick Crockenberg shares his experience in the Frontier Market Scouts’ 2-week certificate program in social entrepreneurship and impact investing that took place January 2019.
The Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) certificate training offered me a unique opportunity to learn from and work alongside a spectrum of experienced investors, entrepreneurs, and peers – including leaders from Village Capital, Omidyar Network, Candide Group, Acumen Fund, Medora Ventures, ANZU Partners, Zola Electric and MIIS. This direct exposure to practitioners, and the global network of FMS alumni (both students and leaders) is the program’s single greatest strength.
I believe in relationships, experiences, and what we leave behind; the people we love and surround ourselves with, the stories we have to share, and how we contribute to the world we pass down to future generations. I believe there is no issue that will affect my generation – and the values I’ve defined above – more dramatically, than climate change. The world is transfiguring at an unprecedented rate, leading to increasing humanitarian consequences in the form of extreme weather, drought, floods, heat waves, agricultural degradation, poverty, political destabilization, and potential climate-related relocation for hundreds of millions of people. As I shift careers, my personal and professional aim is to help build, scale and invest in businesses and organizations working to reverse global climate change and support those most affected by these social and environmental consequences.
Immediately following FMS, I am building off this network to pursue a combination of fellowships and job opportunities over the course of the next year that ideally incorporate a balance of both international and US-based markets.
Being part of the Frontier Market Scouts community, builds on those goals through deepening my understanding of impact investment, financial lexicon, and social enterprise management strategies – how leading funds and companies have been able to generate long-term social and environmental impact alongside financial returns (and how many, have also failed, what those lessons have been).
Immediately following FMS, I am building off this network to pursue a combination of fellowships and job opportunities over the course of the next year that ideally incorporate a balance of both international and US-based markets (https://www.linkedin.com/in/erick-crockenberg).
Five years from now I want to be able to say that I’ve continued to hold onto and build relationships that are mutually fulfilling and bring me happiness, that through those relationships I’ve created shared learning experiences, and that as result I want to be able to say “I helped build that business, product, or organization, and I believe the world is better because of it”.