Hello Social Entrepreneurs,
We apologize for our brief blog absence. In the past few weeks we have been busy with a number of events and are gearing up for the ENP-AB grant applications to come in at the end of May. We also have a few fresh faces around here: I am Brittni Kerluke and I am excited to be joining the Trico Charitable Foundation as Foundation Coordinator. I have to admit that I am new to Social Enterprise, as I come from a Sociology background, and I am attempting to wrap my head around the literature and language in this area. Thankfully, I had the opportunity to attend the Building Your Social Enterprise workshop in April and I am learning tremendous amounts every day. On April 31st, we successfully ran our first ENP-AB workshop in Edmonton with Jill Andres, our Acting General Manager, at the helm. Jill is a Calgary consultant who specializes in helping individuals and organizations create social value (www.creatingvalue.ca) and has been delivering the Building Your Social Enterprise workshops with the Trico Charitable Foundation since the New Year. Our Edmonton workshop was attended by a variety of organizations interested in Social Enterprise and we are looking forward to returning in the fall.
We have also been busy with our “After Hours” sessions. On May 8th, we hosted the session “Really Big Value Idea Generation for Social Innovation workshop” with Alex Bruton, President of The Innographer (theinnographer.com) and Professor of Innovation at Mount Royal University. This session filled up quickly and packed our office to capacity. At this event, attendees were introduced to a number of tools meant to assist in their Social Enterprise development and were given the opportunity to pitch their ideas to an audience of like-minded individuals. Overall, it was a successful and fun evening. We are currently preparing a number of “After Hours” sessions for the fall and we will share these with you when the details are finalized. Once they are announced be quick to register as these sessions tend to fill-up fast.
Finally, we are gearing-up for the next round of ENP-AB grants to arrive on May 24, 2012. We are looking forward to seeing what Alberta’s non-profit organizations are up to!