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🚀 BfE Briefs, Vol. #6

Welcome to the October BfE newsletter! 🎉

Dear BfE family,

Happy November! I hope this email finds you doing well. Over the past few weeks, I've been delighted to see BfE gain momentum across different fronts. The BfE Tech Division continues to impress by successfully launching their Tech Education Programme, the BfE Partnerships team forged a partnership with Satgana, and our Strategy & Operations Division is hard at work planning our next Startup Review Committee to select the Spring 2022 Cohort of BfE startups. Shoutout to everyone who's been involved in spearheading those initiatives 👏

Another recent update worth sharing: on 25 October, BfE officially became accepted as a UK Charity under the Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) designation! This new legal status marks a significant milestone for us on many fronts. When BfE was founded a little over six years ago, we registered as a charity association in Switzerland – and while this designation satisfied our needs in the past, it is no longer fit for our global ambitions. With this new UK status, we are embracing our Cambridge roots and becoming a more credible, transparent non-profit (everyone in the public will soon have access to our annual reports, for instance). We'll even be able to accept donations soon – an option that opens up a world of possibilities for us as we continue exploring innovative ways to support and scale social enterprises around the world.

I'm sure I will have more to share about this news in the future. For now, however, I wish you all a happy and healthy November! Let's keep up the momentum as we head into the New Year.

With lots of gratitude,

Jordan

📋 [TLDR] 5 Main Updates

Missed something within BfE this month? Here's what you need to know:

ICYMI: We've finalized a date for our next Startup Review Committee. We'll be reconvening on December 18 to select the next batch of ~10 startups entering our Spring 2022 Cohort
ICYMI: We're hosting another global event with our partner, Stepchange Africa, TODAY! This event will cover HR best practices and hiring tips for African startup founders, a topic no doubt applicable for BfE Consulting teams
We secured a partnership with Satgana, a European-based climate venture studio, in order to support each other's activities and grow the pipeline of SDG-aligned impact startups
BfE is now a registered UK Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO)! In the works since March, this new legal status helps bring more credibility to our global mission to accelerate social enterprises building a more sustainable world
BfE Tech successfully launched its Tech Education Programme, a first-of-its-kind global initiative to train student developers and contribute to BfE Tech's ongoing development of our intranet

🌍 Global Updates

We've continued to make steady progress on various initiatives at the global level. This month was a busy one. Here's what each division was up to:

📊 Incubation

During the past month, our main focus has been on further curating proposals for new initiatives within the Incubation Division. For the pre-programme diagnostic phase, we had a productive discussion on its structure at our monthly incubation meeting. We have also created the first draft of a proposal for an end-of-engagement incubation sharing event and an investor pitch event. Lastly, we are in the process of reaching out to chapters and divisions to gather demand and consolidate materials for BfE Academy, our BfE-wide educational platform
We are currently still looking for a suitable candidate to become Vanessa's successor. As the Co-Head of Incubation, the person ideally would need a solid network within the incubator, accelerator and/or impact investor community, with a great passion for helping BfE improve its programme structure. We welcome any referrals or self-nominations for the role! The role description is here.

🤝 Outreach

Communications: We have finalized role descriptions to begin recruiting 1-2 new Global Managers to assist with our Medium publication and more! Stay tuned for more updates on that front. In the meantime, we are continuing to work with BfE Chapter Comms teams to develop case studies and other material to better publicize BfE to global audiences
Partnerships: We're excited to kickoff a new partnership with Satgana, a European-based venture studio providing hands-on support and finance to startups building the future of Earth! Satgana's mission aligns well with BfE's to support entrepreneurs aligned with the UN SDGs. We will be exploring co-hosted events, deal flow coordination and a possible co-hosted demo day event for our startups. Also, in other news, we have onboarded Michelle as a new Global Partnerships Manager! 👏

🔋 Strategy & Operations

Strategy:
- Chapter Onboarding
  - The Chapter Onboarding process for New Delhi is running smoothly-- they are an awesome team and have begun recruitment. Please follow them on their socials @bfe.nd (Instagram) and LinkedIn.
  - We're working on creating the New Chapter Handbook as well as a scalable/replicable model guide for onboarding new BfE chapters in the future!
- Strategy & Planning
  - We're working on the creation of strategic planning templates for global divisional goals
- Internships
  - We're putting the finishing touches on the BfE Student Experience Video led by our great intern Darinka Arones!
Operations:
- We're working with BfE Alum Mike Meaney to develop a Jan-Apr 2022 Facebook ad campaign to drive startup applications from Latin America, Southeast Asia and South Asia for our Autumn 2022 cohort
- Onboarded Mun Keong (Raymond) Lee (Global Compliance Manager), who will be working on managing the risks that come with BfE's ongoing expansion (e.g. policies and agreements)

👩‍💻 Impact Research

Yuan (Global M&E Manager) is spearheading the development of our Impact Framework. Her social impact and research experience has been instrumental in this initiative
We're focused on enhancing impact measurement efforts through alignment of existing feedback surveys with Impact Framework metrics
Esther (Global M&E Manager) has evaluated key metrics from Six Degrees Edinburgh's sustainability framework, which we can potentially apply to our startup community
We are wrapping up our ongoing pro bono project with AMNIe who is assisting us with redefining our impact tracking tool for startups

⚙️ Technology

The DataOps team (Edwin, Xue Hui and Charlene) has put in tremendous effort over the past 2-3 months to complete the design for BfE Intranet's central database. We are still short in numbers for volunteers to help migrate data for members, startups, mentors and past engagements. If you have a few hours to spare between 23 Oct and 30 Nov, please consider signing up here 🙏
The Tech event team (Brie, Melissa and Hui Wen) organised our public Autumn Project Showcase on 30 Oct, which featured projects and initiatives across chapter and global tech teams. We are also using this occasion to recruit student and professional developers in React / Django / Database Engineering for our Intranet. For internal referrals, you are welcome to pass this form to anyone you know
Our Global React/Django Tech Education Programme, organised by Tiffany (Global Tech Volunteer), Eko (Global Tech Volunteer) and Kathi (Global Tech Programme Manager), is running smoothly, with 21 participants admitted out of 36 applicants across Cambridge, Singapore, New York and Princeton, and another assessment at the end of 5 weeks to determine entry into chapter and global tech teams. Below is a photo at our introduction session

The UI/UX team (Ian, Brenda, Min and our newly joined Anjli) have completed the full detailed user journey mapping for BfE's members, mentors, startups, partners and engagements (see diagram above), and have started prototyping UIs that will be used by developers at the chapter team
Harry (Global Tech Volunteer) is wrapping up his DevOps project on ML Pipeline to be handed over to the Singapore Startup-Mentor-Matching algorithm team, which will form a key element of our infrastructure to enable ML capacity in our algorithm stack
We are excited to announce that over the past few months, Hua, Omar and Edwin have joined our Global Management team as the Software Development Manager, DevOps Manager and DataOps Manager respectively

📚 Chapter Updates

Our chapters have been busy this month, with the academic year kicking off recently.

🇬🇧 Cambridge

Winter Recruitment: We’re excited to announce that we’ve had great responses from the Cambridge community – across undergraduate, MBA, MPhil and PhD programmes
- We’ll be looking to interview the 40-50 people who have applied to join our Chapter
Impact Investment Panel: Our Freshers’ Panel was held in the 2^nd week of October – with speakers from the Asian Development Bank (ADB Ventures) and Augmentum FinTech
- We discussed important themes in impact investment and the VC space, including the importance of startups having a strong impact thesis for end-users within their community

🇺🇸 New York

We successfully completed recruiting for our Freshman Education Program and the Global Tech Education Program!
On the Programme Development side, our mentorship program is in its final stages and will be kickstarted at the end of this month
On the Incubation side, the Consulting team got off to a great start with its deliverables for Toolkit iSkills (Kenya), and founder Jane Muigai Kamphuis is pleased by the progress. Similarly, the She Wins Mexico Finance Advisory (FA) team has also established a great relationship with founder Cecilia Valdes. After getting off to a rocky start, the Path to Growth Centre (Nigeria) team is also making a comeback and on track to complete its deliverables for the mid-engagement call

🇸🇬 Singapore

SMU Impact Investing Club x BfE Speaker Session
- We kicked off the month a speaker session in collaboration with SMU Impact Investing Club on catalysing impact through the venture space. Special thanks to our speakers Aldrin Tee and Jessica Koh, as well as our very own G&P team!

Training Session with Sealed Network

We also had a training session for BfE associates on expert networks hosted by our partner Sealed Network. It covered an introduction to expert networks, as well as how to optimise usage of expert networks in BfE Incubation engagements

Incubation

Our advisory teams have mid-point calls with our clients, and are working toward their end-point deliverables!

🇨🇦 Vancouver

We are happy to report that Philip Shi has joined us as our new Communications Director. Stay tuned for our updated bios/website appearing on the Vancouver website

🙋 Members Corner

We are so grateful for the outstanding contributions made by the following BfE members this month. Thank you and well done! 👏

From the BfE Global Team: Shoutout to Xiao Yen (Global Partnerships Head) for helping to initiate a partnership with Satgana; Melissa (Global Tech Event Volunteer) for planning and coordinating our event with Stepchange Africa; and Annie (Global Strategy Head) for jumping in and supporting the Vancouver Chapter with their ongoing engagement with Afyaboost (Kenya).
- ⚙️ BfE Technology:
  - Shoutout to Pranav (Global DevOps Manager), Omar (Global DevOps Manager), Eko (Global Tech Volunteer) and James (Global Tech Volunteer) in the React Django infrastructure team for constantly adapting to our limited tech budget and the changing requests beyond the scope of the project to design an infrastructure solution best suited for BfE's Intranet
  - Shoutout to Ian (Global UI/UX Manager), Brenda (Global Product Manager) and Min (Global Tech Volunteer) from the Intranet UI/UX team for speaking with various stakeholders and completing the full detailed user journey mapping for BfE's members, mentors, startups, partners and engagements (see screenshot below), despite it not being part of the original project. Their work introduced structure and clarity to many other Intranet-related projects, from database design to software development planning

From BfE Cambridge: Shoutout to Melvin Loo (Legal Advisory Director) for leading our Legal Advisory recruitment and project direction for multiple projects since joining as our director
🇺🇸 From BfE New York: Shoutout to Sofie Schwallie (Growth & Partnerships Director) and Jamie Han and (Growth & Partnerships Associate) for working so diligently and tirelessly this month on their respective G&P projects, as well as the speaker event we held on Friday 22 Oct. They have been a huge asset to the BfE NY team and we are so grateful for their exceptional work!

💡 Startup Spotlight

Curious what our startups have been up to? This month, we're spotlighting a few in our portfolio for their impactful work:

🇳🇬 Path to Growth Centre: Path to Growth is a Nigerian social enterprise founded in 2018 with the goal of providing financial support and lending services to small businesses and artisans in underserved local markets
- Path to Growth Centre is working with the NY Finance Advisory team this semester! The team looks forward to supporting the social enterprise with its finance and investor readiness strategy

📆 Upcoming Events

We're co-hosting an exciting public event TODAY with our partner, Stepchange Africa. The event will focus on hiring tips and tricks for early-stage African startups. If you're working with a BfE social enterprise and they're tackling HR-related challenges, you won't want to miss this!

👉 Register here: https://bit.ly/2YLoh57

Our December Startup Review Committee event (open to all BfE members!) will be on 18 December. You won't want to miss 2 hours of startup pitches and your chance to hear from those under consideration for our Spring 2022 Cohort 👀

👉 Register here: https://tinyurl.com/bfesrc2021dec