What would commerce look like if our business professors talked about: bearing witness, regeneration, emergence, beauty and wisdom?
Erica Dorn, Managing Director of Etsy.org, can’t talk about business education without weaving these themes in. In this discussion, Erica shares the newly formed Etsy.org’s focus on re-imagining business education through their Regenerative Entrepreneur Program which is in the middle of their first pilot.
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Abbreviated List of Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:
About Etsy.org

Etsy has become a billion dollar marketplace for handmade & vintage goods. In the course of a decade, the artisan platform has greatly reduced the barriers to entrepreneurship for creative makers (numbering 1.6 million and growing) while opening access to a global audience in an unprecedented way. In June 2015, a new & independent organization named Etsy.org was announced with a focus on entrepreneurial education.
Etsy.org is a non-profit organization that builds evolutionary, entrepreneurial educational programs that foster the human capacity, wisdom, insights, and community needed to build regenerative businesses. It works to support Etsy’s mission to reimagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world.
The Regenerative Entrepreneur Program is designed to be participatory, emergent, and experiential business education. The program blends personal development, exploration of our social, economic and natural systems, and business training, to prepared entreprenuers to build businesses that regenerate themselves, their community and the planet. In addition to lectures and lessons from successful entrepreneurs, each participant will spend time in nature, partake in group and individual reflective workshopping, and receive mentorship.
About Our GUEST
Erica Dorn is Managing Director of etsy.org, whose mission is to reimagine business education so that all entrepreneurs are able to develop the skills, wisdom and connections to build and run businesses in ways that regenerate their communities and the earth. Erica has been dedicated to a mission-driven career working in U.S. microfinance, community economic development, and small business education. Erica served as the first U.S. Kiva Fellow launching the peer-to-peer U.S. lending program for Kiva.org. She then ran business development and lending for Accion New York, the leading microlender in the United States.
Erica established a consulting practice – Consulting for the New Economy, providing services to mission-driven food and farm businesses in New York and San Francisco. In these positions and her own consulting practice, Erica has provided hundreds of small businesses with access to capital and business growth strategy. She’s also applied her expertise in business development, sales and marketing to projects with community economic development organizations like the Small Business Solutions Center in NYC and the Queens Public Library.
Erica is an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College in Business Management and Community Economic Development, a Slow Money NY board member, and is on the entrepreneur selection committee for the farm incubator at Glynwood. She is a Coro alumni for the Leadership NY Program in 2013. Erica is fluent in Spanish and has lived and worked in Latin America and Asia.
By supporting and working alongside local businesses, Erica believes we can all contribute in building strong local living economies that improve our collective future.
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all.” (Jane Addams)
This show originally aired live on December 15th at 4pm EST on WPRK 91.5 FM in Winter Park, FL.