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?”

There are a growing number of events connected to social entrepreneurship. Many of them happen in our home city, demonstrating what an incredible hub of activity Calgary is. The Trico Foundation team is pleased to attend many of them and wish we could attend more.

The Trico Charitable Foundation (TCF) is excited to announce a new role, and welcome its newest team member. Alexandra Daignault joins TCF as Liaison for Student Social Entrepreneurs. In that capacity she will work with post-secondary students that are developing a social enterprise, by providing coaching, workshops, and other materials developed by TCF. The position was created to support the growing number of student social enterprises in our city, and help Calgary take one more step to realizing its potential as a Canadian social enterprise hub.

Today, the Trico Foundation team is very excited to share that Aishwarya Khanduja will be joining us from May to August as we are truly inspired by her passion and vision for her venture. We look forward to working with Aishwarya as she develops her social enterprise and learning from her as she brings her venture through our A.S.E.S.S. process.

It has been a busy 18 months at the Trico Foundation as we have been working with organizations to test and pilot our A.S.E.S.S. worksheets. While we continue to learn something new every day, our team is at the point that we want to share where we are at with a wider audience, get feedback, and learn with you on your social enterprise journey. Therefore we are pleased to announce the first iteration of our social enterprise capacity building workshop series designed for organizations either developing or scaling their social enterprise *. These workshops have been developed to address a number of key challenges organizations face as they build and scale their social ventures.

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