We CAN Scale

The last few months have flown by on the Cans for Kili team and, my goodness, what an affirming ride it has been. We’ve gone from hustling to find people, business, events, and organizations willing to let us collect cans to hustling to find enough space to store all the cans we’re collecting, cars to transport said cans, and time in our schedules to pick up and drop them off at our local recycling center. The dream is taking form before our very eyes and I no longer feel like I’m chasing a dream that’s out of my reach, but one that is growing and hurtling forward at a pace I’m just trying to keep up with.

At this point in our journey, the name of the game is scale. We are asking ourselves: how can we build into our schedules the infrastructure to take on meetings with potential partners, to continue working with our current partners, to disperse duties and demands on our time, to collect, transport, and recycle an ever-increasing number of cans, and, let’s not forget, to train to climb a mountain? One single bite at a time, that’s how.

In a typical Cans for Kili week, we are each responsible for managing our respective partner relationships as well as the duties of our own roles, which can include website content management, blog posts, social media engagement, resource solicitation, and event planning. For our team, scaling and managing growth has meant setting aside more time on regular basis to communicate with each other, both in-person and online, early and often. With limited time and resources, we need more than ever to be efficient during meetings, in the planning of pickup routes, and when making asks of each other. Scaling has also meant spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of information to keep each other informed on progress toward goal as well as folders within folders to store our administrative documents, collateral, and notes.

This week, we’re working with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to coordinate can collection in their administrative building. Yes, that IMS, though I don’t suppose there’s another one. To date, this partnership will be our largest continuous collection effort from one single organization, and to say that we are elated would be a great understatement. While we’re still working out the details of pick-ups and drop-offs, can collection receptacles, cadence of meetings, and a number of details, we are also celebrating the fact that this is another significant benchmark toward meeting our goal. These kinds of opportunities to create long-term, large scale, sustainable change in our local community are exactly what we sought when starting out.

And so while I can sometimes get so caught up in the logistics of scaling that I forget to rest in the joy of getting to face these challenges and feel these growing pains, I just want to take a moment here to pause, to break from measuring our efforts on how far there is to go, and to recognize how far we’ve come, because there’s a heck of a lot more work to be done tomorrow.

Thanks for reading and thanks for being part of the journey,

The Advocate