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Happy New Year!

Our photo of the week:
Our photo from the field this week is an update from 2010 Echoing Green Fellow A. Latham Staples, Founder of the Empowering Spirits Foundation (ESF). ESF focuses on fostering non-confrontational dialogue with individuals and institutions about LGBT to help change hearts and minds and ultimately promote equal rights. Have a look at the full gallery on Facebook.

Topics and trends:
The superguide of conferences and events in the social change space for 2011 kicked off the week—definitely a resource to keep handy and look back on to help plan your year.

10 TED Talks for Entrepreneurs is another resource to tuck away, when you’re looking for a little inspiration, or when your team needs a little boost. You can also find a great sortable spreadsheet of all TED Talks (ok, maybe not all, but at least 600!), here.

Learning from the mistakes of others is always valuable, but the “7 Common Mistakes to Avoid” definitely made its mark. @SocialEdge also shared the “100 things young entrepreneurs should know.” Remember, though, that there are always mistakes to be had and things you always wish you would have known—don’t worry, keep driving forward, and maybe you’ll find yourself writing your own list one day.

Matthew Bishop, New York Bureau Chief for The Economist, shared his keen predictions for social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and nonprofits. We all agree that the field of social entrepreneurship requires some much needed infrastructure and we predict that the building blocks will start falling into place this year. We’re intrigued to see where and how these predictions will play out, but no doubt, it will be an exciting year for all of these fields.

As you’re heading to the end of your day, Harvard Business Review shares the best way to spend the last five minutes of it. So take a moment and reflect on how your day went, what you learned, and who you interacted with to help you start your tomorrow and next week with purpose.

Inside Echoing Green:
The big news this week was most certainly our announcement of the Semifinalists for the 2011 Echoing Green Fellowship! While the Semifinalists are furiously working on their second round applications, take a few moments to congratulate them on Twitter or Facebook—they will appreciate your encouragement!

We also launched the Echoing Green Book Club. With the end of the first week of 2011 and a hopeful year ahead of possibilities, we’re exploring stories of people and places that will inspire and light a fire for our own journeys. We’ll be reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer and discussing on Twitter on Tuesday, February 8th – so grab the book and start reading!

We started this New Year with a quote from St. Ignatius of Loyola, and it still seems quite appropriate for the end of the first week of 2011: “Go forth, and set the world on fire.” Until next week!

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