Sick of buying magazines full of nothing but ads? Fed up with lining the pockets of the Oprah Winfreys and Martha Stewarts of the world? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you should check out Vancouver’s Megaphone Magazine the next time you’re in the market for a magazine.
Published on a bi-weekly basis by the Street Corner Media Foundation, Megaphone is sold on the streets of Vancouver. Low-income and homeless vendors purchase each magazine for 75¢ and keep all the profits they make from reselling to customers. Not only does this provide job opportunities and a sense of accomplishment for the vendors, but the magazine itself helps spread the word about poverty-related issues through the articles published within it.
Megaphone’s mission is to provide economic opportunities to homeless and low-income people while building grassroots support to end poverty. If you look deeper, though, you’ll see that Megaphone is also a social enterprise that creates entrepreneurs out of the population it provides employment opportunities for.
To subscribe to Megaphone Magazine, check out their website at http://megaphonemagazine.com/ and follow them on Twitter at @MegaphoneMag
Ps. If you have a favourite Canadian social enterprise that you want to share with us, we would love to hear from you in the comments section!