MIX began as a talent retention project and has evolved to be a community development effort. We connect community members through crowd-sourced, data-driven engagement activities at ten monthly networking events each year, plus an annual startup competition. MIX helps individuals find jobs, friends, camaraderie and more and helps businesses find talent for hire, customers, information and more. It’s an authentic, collaborative forum that facilitates real connection and changes the networking game from the awkward, speech making of other events. We set the stage for real people to find the right connections in order to make magic happen. We make the atmosphere, bring the best people, frame community conversation and then let the connections begin. Engaged professionals in the MIX community include entrepreneurs, artists, civil servants and anyone who wants to collaborate, celebrate and pursue a passion. MIX has between 200 and 400+ attendees at each monthly, third-Thursday networking event from 6:00-8:00pm. Every event happens in a different location around Santa Fe and seeks to spotlight underutilized or underexposed places, organizations, and/or issues. Each event showcases local talent, specifically, photographers, DJs, graphic designers, volunteers, local chefs, bar-experts, artists and interesting people, businesses, products and projects. MIX believes Santa Fe can be an exceptional city by seeking to nurture itself through crowd-sourced data gathering, empowerment and collaborative ideas, design and advocacy. Many constituents have seen the benefits of working through ideas to make change happen. A key tenet of MIX is to support its local entrepreneurs based on the understanding that our city is undeniably DIY (do-it-yourself), meaning that we encourage all of that come to MIX to workshop solutions and fill in gaps with a new service, product, project, program or activity to respond to the city’s categorical needs. Through our data, MIX has found its constituents to be incredibly entrepreneurial. When asked, ‘Have you ever started a business?’, 58% of MIX constituents responded they had. We put our money and capacity where our data reflects where an investment is needed: in pre-revenue startups! In short, MIX is a community driven project building a collaborative future. Our founders had a vision to reconnect Santa Fe to itself, and strengthen the ties that bind us together. Come to MIX, take a survey, grab a drink or snack, get comfortable, and get to know the community and find the opportunity that you may have never known was waiting for you to seize it.