Why Community?
As we launch a newly refreshed Community Partnership program, complete with new benefits and programming for our partners, it’s a great time to take a step back and answer a question that has been at the core of 18 Coffees since we founded the company: Why community?
Community has been at the core of how we’ve structured 18 Coffees from the beginning, for a few key reasons:
Digital broke the talent acquisition pipeline. Coming from a varied background in professional services (big agencies and consulting firms), my partners and I recognized that the war for talent had gotten insane. Every year, our firms were trying to figure out what new org chart the company needed to meet some demand in the marketplace for a new skill set. Because digital changes that demand—constantly. What if there was a way, we thought, to build relationships with the talent of the future now, before that demand caught us off guard?
Our own expertise, while valuable, has a shelf life. At 18 Coffees, we’ve always valued our practitioner heritage, because we feel it brings a perspective to our clients that most consulting firms don’t have: we’ve been there. But in a fast-moving digital environment, what works one year may be obsolete the next. Building a community of people in the work, who can push us on our assumptions, and bring their perspectives to the table for the kinds of mission-driven companies we work with, makes our work sharper and our thinking bigger.
Community sharpens the mission. The mission-oriented nature of our work attracts mission-oriented people—and community programming is what keeps them organized and engaged, in a way that they wouldn’t be if they were simply names on a list we called every so often for an engagement. But community is a two-way street: our people focus our thinking about the nature of mission-oriented work itself, creating a balance we have to maintain between business goals and community action—a tension that I think keeps us scrappy and makes us constantly question our own assumptions.
I’m incredibly proud of our community—and I’m very excited about the new benefits we’re able to offer our partners for being at the table with us. Our partners inspire me and give me life every day.
If you’re also a mission-oriented talent looking for a community of like-minded professionals, maybe 18 Coffees Community Partnership is for you. Check it out and apply.
