BAM Ecosystem Builders: How You Can Support the Business as Mission Movement

by Jo Plummer

 

As we began exploring last month, there are many different ways to get involved in business as mission and the BAM movement needs many types of people, skills, experiences and passions. If you are interested in engaging with BAM, there is a path and role for you!

To recap, the two broad pathways are:

1) Getting involved by doing business as mission yourself, in a BAM company context, or

2) Enabling, resourcing or connecting others involved in BAM — through activities such as mentoring, investing, praying, building networks, incubating, training, mobilising, and so on!

God has equipped each of us with various skill sets and backgrounds and He is leading each of us on unique paths.

 

Last month, we started with the topic of getting involved in doing BAM yourself. This month, we’ll continue with ways to support and resource others to do BAM – in other words, how to help build the business as mission ecosystem!

Business as mission companies and practitioners need many different kinds of support and resources to thrive. From obvious roles such as business incubators, investors, mentors, and trainers…

To perhaps less obvious ones, like network builders, recruiters and mobilisers, that enable the pipeline of people getting involved in BAM to flow…

Or communicators and content creators to keep the ideas and stories flowing…

Or perhaps prayer partners to help us all keep in step with the Holy Spirit…

There are many different and necessary roles in the BAM ecosystem!

 

Get Involved Building the BAM Ecosystem

If you are interested in getting more involved in supporting business as mission, chances are you are thinking about one or more of the following:

Providing support and services to individual BAM companies/practitioners, such as consulting, recruiting, investing, prayer, etc.

Building a network or entrepreneurial ecosystem that focuses on a particular region, industry or issue, for example a regional BAM network, a city-focused business incubator, or an alliance or community of practice for a particular speciality.

Contributing skills or services to the global BAM ecosystem as a whole, such as training, mobilisation, communications, prayer, and so on.

And these often overlap. For instance, we pray both for individual BAM companies and the BAM movement every month in BAM Global prayer calls. A city-wide business incubator will also provide services to individual companies. And so on.

So bearing that in mind, here are some different roles in the BAM ecosystem and some ideas for how to get involved in them:

Prayer

BAM Global facilitates a global prayer network to pray for BAM companies/practitioners and the BAM movement. You can sign up to receive email updates here with monthly prayer points and an invitation to the monthly prayer Zoom call. You’ll also have the option to join the BAM Global Intercessory WhatsApp Group. OPEN Network and Faith Driven Entrepreneur also have regular online prayer meetings.

Consulting, Mentoring and Training

There are a number of organisations that recruit experienced business people and match them with opportunities to coach, consult and mentor companies around the world. Some good ones to start with include, IBEC Ventures, OPEN Network, and Partners Worldwide.

Investing

Transformational SME is the longest established investment fund in the BAM ecosystem, focusing on funding growth stage companies in the 10/40 window. Ambassadors Impact Network connects faith-driven investors with gospel-advancing entrepreneurs. Steward Advisors Group helps investors on the journey to integrate eternal purposes into their investments. EquityVest offers the opportunity to crowdfund faith-driven companies. Faith Driven Investor and Pragma Advisors offer connections to investment opportunities and community for like-minded investors. Pragma Advisors also offers a free downloadable study that will point you towards dozens of other funds and groups focused on investing in the BAM/B4T space.

Business Incubation

Sinapis, Itzinya, and Angello are all organisations multiplying business incubation with Kingdom purposes. They also partner to build capacity for business acceleration globally. ECatalyst works with groups to help them build local entrepreneurial ecosystems. Praxis runs a business accelerator program and trains others to build entrepreneurial ecosystems through its Labs initiative.

Member or Pastoral Care

In the mission community services that are in place to ensure the holistic well-being of the mission worker and their family are called ‘member care services’ and in the church we often call this ‘pastoral care’. In addition, many mission workers will have a ‘support team’ of people who might pray for them, financially support them, and/or offer moral support in many different ways. Business as mission practitioners often experience unique challenges due to the work they are doing, but don’t always have the same kind of support in place. This has been identified as a gap in the BAM community and BAM Global is launching a brand new Consultation in 2024 looking at the ‘Well-being of BAM Practitioners and Teams’. If you are interested in this topic and would like to be involved, please do get in contact with us.

Communications, Advocacy & Mobilisation

I never miss an opportunity to say how vital communications skills are to the BAM movement. We need more gifted story-tellers and media creators! Are you a video editor, graphic designer, writer or social media expert? Are you gifted in media production? Do you know your way around the backend of a website? We can use you!!

The same goes for gifted facilitators and administrators. There are countless BAM entities and networks that could benefit from communication, facilitation, and administration skills. Connect with us at BAM Global to find out how you could contribute. And meanwhile, you may be encouraged by reading the BAM Global Report on Advocacy and Mobilisation.

A Final Note on our Four Constituencies

In the Business as Mission Movement, we have four main constituencies:

• Business
• Church
• Agencies (Missions and other Non-profits)
• Academia

Some of the roles above are focused on building an ecosystem around companies, business incubation and business services, and fall broadly under the ‘business’ constituency. However, the other three constituencies are also crucial to the BAM ecosystem and are often involved in supporting and ecosystem-building roles, like business incubation, training, mobilising, prayer, member care, research, education, and so on. We will be covering more on the role of each of our constituencies in the coming months.

 

Discover more great BAM resources at our online Business as Mission Resource Library and The BAM Review Blog.

Are we missing any resources that should be listed? Contact us to share them.

 Jo Plummer is the Creative Director & Co-Founder of BAM Global and the co-editor of the Lausanne Occasional Paper on Business as Mission. She has been developing resources for BAM since 2001 and currently serves as Editor of the Business as Mission website and The BAM Review Blog. 

 

 

 

Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash