This is a blog series dedicated to the frequently asked questions we get during the Ask Me Anything About Social Enterprise (AMAASE) sessions. One frequently asked question is “what legal structure should my social enterprise be?”
Dan Overall of the Trico Charitable Foundation finds important messages for the impact community in Charles Dickens’ famous seasonal ghost story.
This is a blog series dedicated to the frequently asked questions we get during the Ask Me Anything About Social Enterprise (AMAASE) sessions.
One frequently asked question we get asked is “what is the definition of social enterprise?”
In November 2013 Trico Charitable Foundation was honoured to host the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF), bringing it to Canada for the 1st time ever.
As fate would have it, one session was titled “Three Things Public Policy Needs to do for Social Enterprise to Thrive in 2023.” The session was an all-star affair, moderated by Peter Holbrook, CEO of Social Enterprise UK, and featuring eight social enterprise policy leaders from Canada and across the world. We thought the ten year anniversary of the panel would be an interesting time to revisit it.
Two common refrains – hoping for the day when every business is a social enterprise, and claiming that social entrepreneurship “is a verb, not a noun” – sound positive. In fact, they’re holding us back from performing among the virtuosos of the world.
Funded by the Government of Canada, the Investment Readiness Program (IRP) supports social purpose organizations as they contribute to solving pressing social, cultural and environmental challenges across Canada.
Its goal is to help social purpose organizations prepare them to be ready for investments and participate in Canada’s growing social finance market.
The latest IRP round was overseen in Alberta by the Banff Canmore Community Foundation (BCCF) in partnership with Red Deer Community Foundation (RDCF). BCCF and RDCF utilized a jury of 14 community members to deliberate on the applications and Dan Overall, Executive Director of the Trico Foundation, was honoured to be part of that jury.
Recently, BCCF sent Dan five questions about IRP. Some of his answers formed the basis of a BCCF blog that is available here. You can see the entirety of the questions and answers below.
“This program represents a ‘summer of opportunity and social impact’, for the student and the Trico Foundation”, said Overall. “The student will be able to move their venture forward while generating additional income and plugging into our support services, network activities and events; and we get another bird’s eye view on what is needed to take promising social enterprises to the next level. It’s a real win-win.”
Will this bring about the transformation of capitalism the world needs? It’s a fortuitous moment that could well be a watershed, the potential dawn of a fundamentally new era of social impact.
Effective learning is shrinking your feedback loops as much as possible: Everything you do that really matters should either confirm your thinking or teach you something new, and it should do so as cheaply, efficiently and quickly as possible. Effective learning is knowing what to test, how to test, and how to learn from the results of that test in a way that you use to improve your efforts and impact.
The social entrepreneur/changemaker sums up his journey as “fumbling towards ecstasy”. He thinks collectively we could be on the cusp of a renaissance in social problem solving, but the 1st step is how we each work on ourselves. With the benefit of his inspiration & insights, we should see less fumbling & more ecstasy.