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?”
We are trying something a little different this Spring and we can't wait for you to join us! Enp-AB is pleased to partner with enp-Canada and Innoweave to offer three exciting events to assist you on your social enterprise journey. We hope that these three opportunities will offer organizations at different stages in the social enterprise development path an opportunity to learn more and provide them with the resources they need to continue on the social enterprise path.
At its core, social enterprise embodies two elements: the passion for addressing social challenges and the generation of market-based revenues in support of that social purpose. Regardless of whether the social enterprise is an individual or an organization, regardless of their choice of incorporation – non-profit or for-profit, these two elements are the driving force. Those two elements aren’t just identifiers. It is the conjunction of those two elements, bringing together the power markets and social purpose, which is at the heart of the incredible promise of social enterprise. While it has always been assumed that business activity produces an indirect benefit to its community (e.g. through employment and tax revenue), social enterprise brings the power of ‘social’ more deeply into the business world, daring to ask what profits could be made and advances could be achieved if businesses embedded in their value propositions a commitment to directly solve the world’s biggest and most perplexing social challenges. For social organizations, social enterprise brings the power of markets to make them more financially sustainable and take their social impact to the next level.
The Social EnterPrize awards were created to recognize and celebrate leadership and excellence in social entrepreneurship across Canada. This year these awards were presented to four organizations at the 2013 Social Enterprise World Forum.
Calgary Counselling Centre provides compassionate, professional and affordable counselling services for Calgarians. As a leader in research and counsellor training in Canada since 1962, the Centre is committed to supporting a multiplicity of needs by offering a “barrier free” sliding scale pay system for their counselling services to individuals and families in Calgary and nearby communities.