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?”
Where to Begin offers a deep dive into models of post-secondary social innovation and/or social entrepreneurship hubs across North America. Commissioned by the Mount Royal University (MRU), Scaled Purpose conducted a wide scan of programs and their offerings across campuses in Canada and the United States, and then dove deeper into interviews with eight campuses to get at the heart of why certain programs have worked, and what we can learn from failures.
“It (the Social Finance Forum) was a wonderful opportunity to access information with various people that can help provide more energy and ideas on how we can grow the business” - Shaugn Schwartz With over 500 attendees at the 8th annual Social Finance Forum (SFF), hosted by the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing this past November, many different insights and themes were inevitably going to emerge
This article was originally published on February 5th, 2016 on the SiG website. It has been cross-posted with permission from the author Kelsey Spitz, Senior Associate at SiG National. “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are…” ― Thomas King, The Truth About Stories (2003)
This article was originally published on November 24th, 2015 on the ENP Canada website. It has been cross-posted with permission from the author Michelle Strutzenberger, Newsroom Chair, Axiom News. As The Cleaning Solution adds yet another significant achievement to its name - winning the national Social EnterPrize - the Enterprising Non-profits Canada newsroom caught up with Executive Director Shaugn Schwartz to reflect on key learnings of the social enterprise to date.