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.
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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We define social entrepreneurship as using business models (selling a good or service) to enhance social impact. This reflects most Canadian definitions.
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.
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?”
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.
To zero in on the testing you need, you have to balance two perspectives. On the one hand, you want to be aware of and prepare for all key risks/thresholds as you move from where you are now to what you want your social venture to be when it is in its ‘steady state’ (i.e. your model has proven to be a success and growth is predictable and steady. A typical barometer in this regard is what your venture will look like five years after it starts). This will also help make sure you are building towards your goals rather than building a bridge to nowhere (this is a significant risk for start-ups, as discussed below). On the other hand, a lot of your current assumptions will be wrong, so you don’t want to go into too much detail too far down the road.
Richard’s journey with TAC and Opportunity For All Youth is another example of how social entrepreneurship can stem from pivoting in a new direction and thinking about succession planning of your social enterprise. This is a pattern Trico Foundation and others are seeing in terms of scale: it isn’t necessarily a bigger social enterprise, it is about using the knowledge you gained from the social enterprise in a different way on a whole new level.
This past summer working at the Trico Foundation’s Summer Student Internship, I was able to take my company from an ideation stage that had undergone 2 years of evolution, to its first pilot, to an official launch of operations, to a now rapid scale of production on its way to reaching a steady state within the next 18 months. Trico Foundation’s one-on-one coaching and group sharing through the A.S.E.S.S. program were pivotal to my progress.