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?”

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.

Created by the Trico Charitable Foundation in 2011, the biennial Social EnterPrize celebrate and advance leadership and excellence in social entrepreneurship in Canada. Social enterprises are organizations, for-profit or not-for-profit, that blend the social and the entrepreneurial by using business models/markets to solve social problems.

This 2013 Social EnterPrize recipient is a brilliant example of how perseverance, planning, and maintaining quality can turn a grant based charity into a self-sustaining social enterprise. We had a chance to catch up with Founder and CEO, Marcia Nozick on the most recent updates on ESS.

“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.”

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