What does it mean to go bottom-up, and why, is it important?

It is a way to create social change on the ground, for real people and families. I went bottom-up in Africa by establishing the first ever micro lending program for a village in Ghana.

Every emerging industry develops its own language and colloquial ways of communicating. It’s a kind of shorthand, with terms adopted from other fields to make sense of the new evolving world. This is my working lexicon for bottom-up social change.

My goal is to highlight the subtleties of our new lingo so we can have a shared language as bottom-up social-change artists. We are a scrappy group, fueled by passion, and we certainly are in for a riotous discovery of the language we find useful as a community.

In language lies the magic of marketing and going bottom-up.

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Control the language to define the playing field.

The world of going bottom-up is highly entrepreneurial which means it will evolve quickly, with new models and ideas emerging to measure success. We need to open up for an inflow of new words, often adopted from other fields, to maximize the resilience and impact of working on the ground for social change.

New language leads to new rules of thumb, more creativity and greater market transparency. With new language we can move forward to build the case for going bottom-up.