Njambre, a New Social Enterprise Accelerator in Argentina Looks to ‘Swarm’ Impact

Jenny Melo : How did this initiative to collectively build Njambre arise?
Paula, Emiliano, and Federico – Njambre: Each one of us has a lot of work and life experience devoted to supporting transformation processes towards a more inclusive system. Ranging from having undertaken our own businesses like Openware, to working together with social entrepreneurs at Ashoka, or collective constructed spaces like VALOS, MoveRSE, RARSE (Argentina CSR Network), or co-working spaces, to name a few.
In recent years, parallel to the activities that each one of us was doing, we started to be involved with some social enterprises—in management, as investors, and enabling access to new networks—and that made us realize the tremendous added value that this strategic alliance has for social enterprises that are taking their first steps. These two dimensions were combined with our desire to join forces and work together and with the competitive advantage of being located in three different cities in Argentina: Rosario, Mendoza, and Buenos Aires.
Jenny Melo: What is the relationship between Njambre Accelerator and Njambre CoWorking?
Paula, Emiliano, and Federico – Njambre: They are essentially linked from their origin, and share an agenda of values such as building community, innovating, and creating a new context. They are mutually reinforcing. In Mendoza and Rosario, the social enterprises participating in the accelerator have access to the physical space and services of Njambre CoWorking (in Buenos Aires we are partnered with a similar space). Njambre CoWorking is also a hotbed of entrepreneurs where it is very probable for some social enterprises to go on to participate in Njambre.
In any case, we insist that the most important thing is that they share the value of creating community. Why do we emphasize this? Because, like many others, we are convinced that system or paradigm change cannot come from isolated organizations or people. That way of thinking is obsolete. Today, the value of networks and interconnections for achieving genuine change is increasingly evident. Because of this, when we designed the Accelerator (truthfully, the term “to accelerate” troubles us; what we propose is much more linked to help give birth, accompany, nurture, mother), our priority was to become a community of resources at the service of social enterprises, a space where everyone—social enterprises, the Njambre team, mentors, investors—works collectively to advance each one of the social enterprises. For this reason we have instances in which the entrepreneurs mentor each other, or spaces for collective knowledge generation, for example. We are all to some extent co-responsible for their success or failure. That is the logic that has “swarm,” which accompanies new life.

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