Notebooks made from actual Elephant Poo - our swag from re:Vision 2011. Photo Credit: Raneem Meknas

A few weeks ago, Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada held our second annual re:Vision conference on social entrepreneurship. The re:Vision series brings together some of Canada’s brightest young and emerging social entrepreneurs each spring to connect and drive this movement forward in their communities.

This year, we convened around a vital question: where is social entrepreneurship heading in the next five years?

This is a question that has consumed our organizing team in the past few months as we’ve witnessed first-hand the incredible pick up in dialogue, events, and commercial activity reinventing the relationship between business and social change. With 120+ representatives of the next generation of social entrepreneurs present, we posed this question to the room.

Here’s what they predicted:

• Popularity on campus.

The crowd predicted that the majority of universities and colleges across the country would open robust programs or courses on social entrepreneurship, innovation and finance.

• Billion dollar social businesses.

Some foresaw a few social businesses breaking the small business ceiling and becoming large, scaled enterprises.

• Normalizing blended value.

The idea of incorporating a social/environmental lens in corporate decision-making on par with the financial lens will become more mainstream, especially amongst start-ups and small businesses in which founders have tighter control of their venture’s decision-making apparatus.

• Socialwashing.

Part two of the normalization of blended value will be “socialwashing”. Like the greenwashing effect that’s challenged the integrity of the “green” label slapped onto any product, the marketing appeal of “social” designations will result in their attachment to some products and companies more as marketing veneers than as indications of core values.

• Scandals.

Consequently, a few particularly bad socialwashing apples will find themselves unpleasantly exposed in the media. This spotlight will spark a public debate about the merits of social entrepreneurship that will, in the end, force the movement to articulate a more definitive identity, aided by an emerging landscape of certifications, measurement tools and legislation.

• Measuring sticks.

Positive and negative buzz alike will necessitate the wide-scale adoption of standard methods for measuring social impact. These methodologies will be implemented across the landscape of foundations, institutional investors, consulting firms and entrepreneurs themselves, causing the emergence of a ‘language’ of social impact.

This list represents only a select number of predictions, but it is useful as a gauge of the future envisioned by a large sample of the emerging generation of social entrepreneurs. Over the next few weeks we’ll take a closer look at these predictions.

You may agree or disagree with the predictions, but whatever the case, we invite you to speak up.

What’s your take on where Canadian social entrepreneurship is headed in the next five years?

Here are some photos from re:Vision 2011. More to come!

The aim of re:Vision 2011 was to bring together a cross-section of people interested in social innovation to explore where it’s heading in Canada, emerging trends and challenges, and how we can shape its future.

Yesterday’s conference brought together over 100 people including: new and established social entrepreneurs, directors and staff of small and large non-profits, serial entrepreneurs, MBA students, high school students, business school professors, consultants, representatives from municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government, investors, social finance experts, lawyers in social enterprise, and a whole lot more. The diversity of people in the room was incredible leading to very compelling conversations!

We will be providing a more detailed write-up of what came out of the conference. In the meantime, here is a Liveblog from re:Vision 2011.

We’re getting excited for our re:Vision 2011 Earth Hour After Party!

It’s going to be an awesome networking event following the re:Vision 2011 conference. There are also a limited number of tickets available to the public here.

Drinks and refreshments are included with entry. Party tickets are included in the re:Vision 2011 conference fee.

We only have a few tickets left for re:Vision 2011, so if you want to join the day-long event, book your ticket now!

The party starts at 7:30 pm @ the Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Ave. Toronto, Ontario, M5T 2C7

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Group shot from re:Vision 2010

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re:Vision 2011 brings together all the key players: entrepreneurs, innovators, policy leaders, investors, students, educators, and government to discuss emerging issues and trends in social enterprise.

Discover opportunities and tangible actions you can take to advance social entrepreneurship in Canada.

Learn more…

Once a month, we profile a young social entrepreneur in our community who answers 5 questions. If you know of someone who should be profiled, let us know!

YSEC Pitch Competition Winner: Neighborhood Basketball Association

Nkem Anizor of Neighbourhood Basketball Association’s B.R.O.S. (Brothers Reaching Our Sons) Mentoring Recreation Program. The B.R.O.S program addresses the lack of positive adult male role models for young, Black males in the Kingston-Galloway community of east Scarborough by connecting young males with role models.

The $1,000 loan from YSEC will be used to teach economically challenged participants entrepreneurial skills by providing an opportunity to earn their registration fee by selling t-shirts. The loan will be repaid within 4 months through t-shirt sale profits.

Read more about Nkem Anizor below.

1. What are you working on and why does it matter?

We are currently working on securing core operating funding to pay at least 2 full time staff and to operate our current programs.

Like many grassroots, charitable organizations, a lack of staff has proven to be a hindrance to our productivity and the growth of our organizational capacity.

Because we cater to a community with a particularly large high-risk youth population, the needs are great, and making sure that we have dedicated staff is essential.

2. What motivates you?

We are motivated by our desire to see an end to the senseless Black youth on youth violence that plague Black communities not only across the GTA, but across North America, and truthfully, the world.  We believe that all youth deserve the opportunity to reach their full potential and that being poor and Black should not be a death sentence.

3. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned recently?

The biggest lesson we’ve learned recently is that despite the rise of emails, texts and social networking, nothing beats face-to-face interaction with people of like mind.

Looking into someone’s eyes and watching their physical reaction to your words helps you to detect their sincerity and prevents wasting time on connections that will ultimately prove to be frustrating if not fruitless.

4. If you could invite 5 people dead or alive to dinner, who would they be?

1. God, 2. Jesus Christ, 3. Nat Turner, 4. Harriet Tubman, 5. Marcus Garvey

5. Best resource people don’t know about?

Our youth are the best resource that people don’t know about.  If you get past token ‘youth input’ and stereotypes and really pick their brains, you’ll realize very quickly how much they know and how much they can offer.

Once a month, we profile a young social entrepreneur in our community who answers 5 questions. If you know of someone who should be profiled, let us know!

YSEC Pitch Competition Winner: Young Urban Farmers Community Shared Agriculture

Christopher Wong and Ronald Ha are on the Executive Team of Young Urban Farmers Community Shared Agriculture (YUF CSA), an organization that turns Toronto’s backyards into a sustainable source of fresh, organic food for community shareholders.

The $1,000 loan from YSEC will be used to purchase a greenhouse to extend their growing season and be repaid within 4 months through community shareholder fees.

Read Christopher Wong’s profile below.

1. What are you working on and why does it matter?

Young Urban Farmers CSA’s mission is to reconnect people with fresh, locally grown food. We do that by converting backyards in productive vegetable gardens and sharing the produce with community members through a CSA (community shared agriculture) program.

As the general manager of YUF CSA, we’re currently planning our operations for our upcoming season, choosing the crops, recruiting volunteers, increasing our land base, and creating the plans for our new urban greenhouse.

Food unites us all and is the basis for our health and well-being. By engaging, educating, and reconnecting people with how and where food is grown, we hope to share with them the joy that comes with eating well and living a more sustainable lifestyle.

2. What motivates you?

As an entrepreneur, I understand that what you put into your business is what you get out of it.

To that end, striving to do my best, working hard to make a difference in people’s lives, and not settling for second best are a few of the things that really motivate me and get me up and out of bed in the mornings. Working with great people and working towards a shared cause never hurts as well.

3. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned recently?

Everyone has a beautiful and amazing story to tell. You just need to take the time to listen, understand, and connect with them before you can uncover it.

4. If you could invite 5 people dead or alive to dinner, who would they be?

A tough choice, but if I had to choose 5, they would be: Warren Buffet, Mozart, Mohandas Gandhi, Will Allen, Bono.

5. Best resource people don’t know about?

Coming from a business background and being an avid reader, many people ask me for business book recommendations.

My favourite resource is  the Personal MBA, whose manifesto is simple: MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work.

They’ve put together a list of the 99 best business books for you to give yourself a personal MBA. Check out their list here: http://personalmba.com/business-book-recommender/

Today marks the launch of the Social Finance Task Force Report. The task force is meant to identify opportunities to mobilize capital and catalyze the Canadian market for social finance.

The Task Force’s first report, aptly named Mobilizing Private Capital for the Public Good, was also launched today. The report outlines the massive opportunity that exists in social finance, while also highlighting areas that need further development.

There are a few key take-aways:

1. There is momentum in the right places to create robust financial instruments to address social issues. The Task Force has a powerful line-up of contributors, (i.e., Ilse Treurnicht, Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, and advisors like Jed Emerson)  pointing to growing consensus among key decision makers within commercial and government sectors.




2. The recommendations identify specific actions that can catalyze a Canadian marketplace. Hopefully, this bias towards action will continue in future reports because we need a clear, concrete voice that can argue for real policy change amongst financial intermediaries.




3. There is a need for more market data: the size of the investment opportunity is pegged to the growth of the American market, which is a starting point but would benefit from Canada-specific data.

Young social entrepreneurs will surely welcome the call for financial capital. As these recommendations are implemented, it will be necessary to create funds specific to the needs of young social entrepreneurs, who represent a sizeable portion of the social entrepreneur demographic in Canada, including the over 3,000 in YSEC’s current network.

As future task forces and reports are commissioned, it will be necessary to include the perspectives of young social entrepreneurs.

On the whole, the report shows an increase of momentum in the Canadian social enterprise landscape amongst important stakeholders. The recommendations are a welcome step in the right direction to accelerating the sector’s growth.

Analysis provided by Anshula Chowdhury, President of Social Asset Measurements (SAM).

Photography by Kat Rizza (http://katrizza.com)

“Here’s to setting our ambitions high, to those who are making it happen, and to investing in young social entrepreneurs.”

This was the conclusion of Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada’s executive team this past Thursday where to mark the end of Global Entrepreneurship month, and in celebration of our first successful year as an organization, we hosted “A Toast to Social Entrepreneurship” at MaRs Discovery District.

Canada’s first for-youth, by-youth fund for social entrepreneurs

The focus of the evening was a competition that saw six start-ups pitch their social enterprises to a panel of judges and a crowd of 80 of Toronto’s leading social innovators.

The pitch competition prize (two $1000 microloans) came from the Social Finance Chain, a fund that YSEC and Social Asset Measurements started as an experiment to prove that young, Canadian social entrepreneurs are worth investing in. The purpose of the fund is to bridge the gap between the aspirations of young social entrepreneurs and the funding they need to get their initiatives off the ground.

These microloans must be paid back within 4 months and have a 9% interest rate, which is significant because this is higher than the Canadian market rate. Our aim with this is to prove that young social entrepreneurs can be profitable, and are worth more to this economy than other kinds of businesses.

Once loans are repaid, they are recycled and given to the next batch of young social entrepreneurs via a pitch competition. The vision is to contribute to the legacy of youth-driven social enterprises in Canada as being innovative, profitable, and socially impactful. We believe that this movement will have impact on a scale this nation has never seen before.

Photography by Kat Rizza

The Pitch Competition

It was in this energized setting where we heard from six pairs and individuals of young social entrepreneurs on Thursday evening. They were:

• Christopher Wong and Ronald Ha of Young Urban Farmers Community Shared Agriculture (YUF CSA), an initiative which converts people’s backyards into vegetable gardens that provide fresh produce to community shareholders for a set fee. The loan would be used to purchase a greenhouse to extend the growing season and be repaid through shareholder fees.

• Laur Fisher of The Civic Series, which aims to be the public’s go-to resource for a clear, non-partisan understanding of world issues and events.  The loan would be used to help cover costs of launching the public sessions and be repaid through event admissions.

• Munira Ravji of 26parknews, an initiative to create a hyper-local news blog to promote cultural awareness, appreciation and civic engagement among residents of Toronto’s Ward 26. The loan would be used to launch the blog and be repaid through advertising fees.

• Romesh Hettiarachchi and Dylan Fernando of Sri Lankans Without Borders, who seek to unite multiple Sri Lankan diasporas in the GTA through an arts exhibition featuring the work of Sri Lankan-Canadian artists. The loan would be used to produce calendars of Sri Lankan Canadian art pieces and be repaid with profits from calendar sales.

• Selena Flood and Jeremy Fischer of Collective Footprints, an initiative to create community partnerships and enhance relationships between conscious businesses and citizens within the Riverdale neighbourhood. The loan would be used to help put on events and be repaid through various revenue sources including consulting fees, event admissions, membership fees, and commissions.

• Jam Johnson and Nkem Anizor of Neighbourhood Basketball Association’s B.R.O.S. (Brothers Reaching Our Sons) Mentoring Recreation Program. The B.R.O.S program addresses the lack of positive adult male role models for young, Black males in the Kingston-Galloway community of east Scarborough by connecting young males with role models. The loan would be used to teach economically challenged participants entrepreneurial skills by providing an opportunity to earn their registration fee by selling t-shirts promoting the program. The loan would be repaid through t-shirt sale profits.

The candidates received tough questions from the judges:

• Tonya Surman, (Founder, Executive Director, Centre for Social Innovation)
• Peter Deitz, (Managing Editor, Social Finance.ca)
• Mike Edwards, (last year’s loan recipient, Executive Director, Preparing the Trail)
• Nogah Kornberg, (Executive Director, Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada)

After much deliberation, the loans were awarded to the Neighbourhood Basketball Association and Young Urban Farmers Community Shared Agriculture.

We can’t stay as a community of theory, we must be a community of practice

Following the pitch competition was a networking reception where we heard from three inspiring speakers: Paul Estey (Co-Founder, Public Inc.), Drew Dudley (Founder, Nuance Leadership) and Theresa Laurico (Executive Director, Love in Action).  All three speakers highlighted the role of young people in the Canadian social economy and shared their own experiences of connecting, inspiring and investing in youth.

Looking around the room at “A Toast to Social Entrepreneurship” it was clear to all that attended that youth-driven social enterprises are key drivers of this paradigm shift in the global economy.

But this isn’t an easy road. To bring credibility and sustainability to youth social entrepreneurship we need more than talk. We can’t stay a community of theory; we must be a community of practice.  And this requires more examples of successful young social entrepreneurs running financially and socially profitable ventures.  This will clearly take time, but we believe that investing in young social entrepreneurs is a pretty good place to start.

For more on the event:

BlogTO’s “The Future of Social Enterprise in Toronto”

Jan Keck’s blog post, “A Toast to Social Entrepreneurship”

Recap of tweets from event

The Social Finance Chain is supported by a steering committee of: Anshula Chowdhury, (President,  Social Asset Measurements); Magnus Sandberg, (Vice President and General Manager, Social Capital Partners); Adam Spence, (Executive Director, Social Venture Exchange); and Tim Draimin, (Executive Director, Social Innovation Generation @ MaRS and Director, Causeway Social Finance).