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?”

On March 25th at 3:30pm - 7:00pm, join us at the Hotel Arts in Calgary for the first ever Canadian edition of the Global Challenge competition, where teams from Canadian post-secondary institutions will compete for two spots at the Global Challenge final in Oxford, England and other prizes.

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.

Drawing on years of working with social entrepreneurs, conversations from across the globe, and lessons from case studies of its Social EnterPrize recipients, a new report from the Trico Foundation, "Building on Getting Beyond Better" (BonGBB) , calls for a rethinking of how we see the intricate yet inescapable interaction between the social and the entrepreneurial that is “social entrepreneurship”.

Held at the MaRs Centre for Impact Investing Incubator, the 9th annual Social Finance Forum (SFF) event in November 2016 brought together Canadian social entrepreneurs, social finance professionals, and impact investors to discuss best practices of business and community building. Through discussions around key insights and highlights with several individuals who attended the event, it is clear the SFF stimulated two crucial themes: networking and unifying social enterprise knowledge across Canada.

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