Transforming the Community Impact of Campus Space: Bow Valley College and WINS Open a Social Enterprise Thrift Store

Bow Valley College and Women In Need Society (WINS) have partnered to launch a new on-campus thrift store that combines affordability, sustainability, and hands-on learning. The initiative gives students access to low-cost essentials while creating real-world learning opportunities in social enterprise and community impact.

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What is social entrepreneurship?

We define social entrepreneurship as using business models (selling a good or service) to enhance social impact. This reflects most Canadian definitions.

Beyond balance

Many see the social and the entrepreneurial as being in opposition, like two sides of a scale that needs to be balanced. Instead, we see the social and the entrepreneurial as partners in progress.  

Aspirational

We support a social entrepreneurship movement that dares to ask, “How far could we go in solving the world’s problems, and even fulfilling our potential as human beings, if we fully harnessed the power of business models to enhance social impact?”

The IRP funds Leftovers received are being used to start a cafe featuring redirected rescued food, upcycled food products, and sustainably sourced coffee. The café will also use a pay-what-you-want pricing model to increase dignified access to nutritional food.

The IRP funds Medalta received are being used to increase production volume, product selection, and capacity of their Working Pottery to enter into larger wholesale contracts, through upgrades of production and safety equipment.

The Premier’s Council on Charities and Civil Society (the Council) launched a targeted engagement process in July 2020 to determine what lessons could be learned from the COVID-19 experience to date, and to provide advice on the sector’s future recovery and capacity building opportunities. Key opportunities for civil society recovery include enhancing collaboration, coordination and integration of services, improving research and data, capitalizing on new and existing technology, strengthening civil society’s financial foundations and strengthening social finance and social enterprise.

Over the month of September, thirteen ambitious Mount Royal University students created individual lists and presented their picks of Canada’s Top Social Entrepreneurs for 2020.

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