It’s a delightfully warm day in late September 2009. My friend and mentor Karen Kun and I are in an airport bar in Toronto, catching up and hashing out ideas before I board my plane and return to Calgary. I had just attended the IMPACT! The Co-operators Youth Conference for Sustainability Leadership, a four-day gathering for 180 students across Canada.

This conversation was the metaphoric equivalent of a cherry on top of the dripping gooey sundae that was my summer, with layer upon layer of inspiring conversations, eye-opening experiences and lofty aspirations melding together in one delicious taste of opportunity for the future. I could hardly contain my excitement.

I’ve grasped at the illusive ideal of meaningful work for years. Since adolescence, I’ve dealt with a chronic illness and chronic pain. Even though my health has improved significantly, I’ve always known the typical nine-to-five office lifestyle wouldn’t work for me.

Back in 2007, I thought I was ready to enter Calgary’s then-booming job market. What I soon found was that, despite my qualifications (a degree in public relations, several internships in environmental communications, and tons of volunteer experience – including co-founding a campus sustainability initiative), the kind of flexible, satisfying, reasonably well-paying – and also world-changing – work, didn’t really exist. It wasn’t just me. The cool jobs I was looking for haven’t been invented yet.

“Canada is lacking in social innovation,” says Kun. She then starts to list off the kind of organizations in Europe that we can look to for inspiration, including KaosPilot, a Danish social change school focused on personal growth and enterprise, and Knowmads, a Dutch school inspired by the same concept.

As the publisher of Corporate Knights magazine, Kun is constantly on the lookout for examples of “clean capitalism,” The magazine she runs aims to humanize the marketplace, showcasing leaders and innovators in the field, and compiling information to compare and contrast who’s who in the CSR zoo (through the annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada and the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World).

Kun also co-founded Waterlution in 2003, a non-profit best known for organizing a national series of dialogue-based weekend workshops for young professionals on water issues, and now gearing up for a Canadian Water Innovation Lab in October 2010.

“I think people need to be challenged more by having the tough conversations,” Kun says. “And we’re just not doing enough of that here in Canada. We haven’t come to terms with the urgency of shifting our economy.”

The Need for Change
Growing up in this increasingly complex world under the shadow of climate change, globalization, and growing awareness that thinking globally and acting locally extends into the world of work, we, the emerging force of generation Y, are looking for more. We want to align our values with the way we make a living. We want to know that the result of our daily toil will leave the Earth a little more just and a little less hot while making ourselves a whole lot happier.

Not only is the quest for meaningful work a tall order in a world where economic growth is often equated with environmental destruction, but the existing political and financial mechanisms in Canada (political, financial) are falling behind other nations.

The report Social Innovation in Canada: An Update, acknowledges the sometimes nebulous, yet powerful potential embodied within social innovation: “At the highest level, the goal of social innovation is to address the social challenges the world faces through innovative means. These challenges can be as large-scale as fighting global climate change and reducing poverty or as small-scale as creating a community garden.”

The report, published by Canadian Policy Research Networks, shows how Canada is falling behind other developed nations such as the United Kingdom, the U.S.A. and Australia in encouraging social innovation. It states: “Canada has missed opportunities to encourage SI [social innovation] by failing to develop adequate models for public support, engagement and funding.”

Cataloguing the Transition

Peter Blanchard founded PlanetFriendly.net in 2000 and GoodWorkCanada.ca in 2001 for that very reason. Frustrated and burnt-out from trying to make it in the “mainstream” economy, he wanted meaningful work that made a difference.

“I came to realize that there’s such an amazing, long list of alternatives that for the most part I wasn’t aware of, and I felt called to use my skills [in computers and communications] to spread the word,” he says. He saw how Canadians were creating change from the ground up, even if government and industry are only now starting to catch on.

Nearly a decade later, the combined sites Blanchard runs are getting upward of half a million hits a day. In addition to the most comprehensive green jobs listings in Canada, they also offer all kinds of detailed information on alternatives within the green economy, such as a guide on creating your own green job, the permaculture gateway, and the guide to ecovillages.

The Meaningful Work Retreat

Returning to Calgary after my richly layered and exciting summer, my head was swimming with conflicting thoughts, ideas for new possibilities, and questions about what to do next.

I am constantly frustrated by Alberta’s lagging desire to promote a clean energy future and avoid the most severe threats of climate change, reboot our economy and move forward. But I am also part of a burgeoning community, young and old, spanning all sectors and professional disciplines – in my own city, and across Canada – tired of waiting for the dinosaur pace of public policy to catch up with reality.

So what can I do for a living that is environmentally sustainable, socially just, spiritually fulfilling – and actually pays?

I have some ideas, but I don’t have the full answer yet. However, I am quite certain that part of my role is to connect the change-makers with those who are craving change and don’t know where to start.

As this magazine goes live, I’ll be at a hostel in Kananaskis Country at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, hosting a two-day retreat called Meaningful Work: Green Jobs + Social Innovation.

The genesis of this workshop was a combination of prior experience and good timing: training by Kun to organize experiential Waterlution workshops, a curriculum design course in my MA program that forced me to get my ideas on paper, and support from my colleagues at Alberta Acts on Climate Change. A lucky break in the form of two grants from the Co-operators’ IMPACT! Alumni fund and the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation was the last push to make it happen.

Two dozen participants will come together to be inspired by success stories from guest ecopreneurs and fellow participants. We will brainstorm action plans for creating our own meaningful work, whether it means starting businesses, non-profit projects or shifting existing organizations from the inside.

There’s no single roadmap for the shift to a cleaner, greener world. We are creating the future as we go along. Aligning what we do to make a living with the urgency of changing the world is the surest way to make tangible, long-lasting change.

Putting on this workshop is part of my own response to the urgency I feel in transitioning our society and economy. By bringing people together to envision a better future, learning from inspiring professionals and each other, and sharing skills and knowledge, we can start moving on creating the kind of meaningful work that will take care of people and the planet.

For more information visit www.albertaacts.ca/MeaningfulWork.

Alla Guelber is a graduate student in the MA – Environmental Education and Communications at Royal Roads University and an outreach co-ordinator at Alberta Acts on Climate Change.

Donald Gutstein is all for capitalism. He just doesn’t like the way it’s been done in the past 30 years and wants the propagandists, policy wonks and media to account for themselves. He is what was called a rabble rouser in the olden days and today is called, well, something else. Now the media critic and author of the new book Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy, talks to UL about abandoning a career in architecture, the problem with think tanks and how capitalism should really work.

+ It was a different universe when I was in school. Education was cheap, jobs were plentiful, nobody had to worry about what they were going to do with their lives. Now you need a career plan. We used to take a course because we were interested in the subject, not because it would help us get a job.

+ I wanted to make a difference for our environment, and I had a dream to design beautiful structures for people. But I found out that architects are just cosmeticians. By the time an architect gets a project, all the major decisions have been made by the planners, by the developers and financiers. Really, there wasn’t room to do much in architecture.

+ As a citizen activist fighting developers in Kitsilano, one of the things I had to do was find out about the developers. I kind of became an expert in research. I happened to know a faculty member in the SFU School of Communication who was teaching a research course, but she wanted to do something else. So I started teaching a documentary research course and worked my way into the field of communications that way. I don’t think you could replicate that [career trajectory] today.

+ Capitalism worked really well in Canada and the U.S. from the 1950s to the 1970s. The economy was growing, there was almost full employment, people had good wages and they could buy houses and cars. That was a great period in capitalist history, so Not a Conspiracy Theory is not an attack – it’s a critique of what’s happened since.

+ Capitalism works best when government is in control, when there’s proper regulation of some of its excesses. I mean, just look at what happened last year in the financial market; that pretty well happened because of deregulation over the past 20 years. So maybe it’s time to reinvent capitalism, but they need to know what to do in order to have capitalism actually solve people’s problems.

+ Repetition is one the key aspects of any successful propaganda campaign; so any kind of an index that [think tanks] can put out every year is excellent. I fault the media most for never laying out the relationship between think tanks and funding sources. Like, for instance, ranking hospitals as good and bad, like they do in British Columbia. It’s expensive to accumulate all of those statistics, and manipulate and analyze them. Who’s paying for those rankings? Who would benefit from those rankings? Nobody asks those questions.

+ The issues that the mainstream media give the most coverage, well, those are the issues that the public think are the most important and then become the issues that the decision makers turn to. It’s calculus. If a newspaper has a story on the front page for a few days, people will tend to think it’s an important issue.

+ The right to know is critical. You just need to know what’s going on, so you can make your own decisions. U

Michele Fugiel Gartner, self-described “philanthropy junkie,” didn’t truly understand that there was a world outside of her hometown until the Russian letters started to arrive. She was in the eighth grade, in Chicago, and had written to a school magazine looking for a pen pal. Her query was translated and published in a similar publication in Russia. The responses filled her mailbox – she received more than 300 letters – and opened her up to hundreds of different lives, most similar to her own. “That was a big marker for me,” Gartner says. The letters showed her that “there is something else out there.” The experience sparked an interest in intercultural dialogue that has led her around the world and, now, to Calgary.

Philanthropy junkie Michele Fugiel Gartner of Social Venture Partners Calgary. Photo by Marc Rimmer

Gartner and I meet over coffee not far from her digs at Social Venture Partners Calgary (SVP), where she is executive director. A private philanthropy firm that matches individual donors with local non-profits, it is a member of the global association SVP International. Beyond telling me the story of her post-Soviet pen pals, it’s difficult to get Gartner to talk about herself. Her impulse is to talk, instead, about the “sector,” about policies, about the “we” of her colleagues at SVP. In anyone else, this tendency to stay on message would suggest stiffness or even evasion. But she laughs so easily and so often, I realize talking policy is what brings Gartner joy. She is not merely promoting the non-profit sector, she is revealing what fills her heart.

Gartner studied communications at Arizona State University and, after graduation, taught English for two years in Japan. She returned to academia with a focus on Asia and made her way to the East-West Center in Hawaii, then to the School of Orient and African Studies at the University of London, where she studied public diplomacy. Eventually, Gartner joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle. This was her first foray into the world of large-scale, multifaceted private philanthropy.

At the Gates Foundation, Gartner quickly learned that philanthropy was about more than just a Robin Hood transfer of dollars from the rich to the poor. She learned the difference between giving and “giving well.” She learned the due diligence of grants and grant writing. The government side of philanthropy. The political side. The grassroots side. She learned about tax and legal implications and the policy intricacies of policy that would bore most people into numbness. Philanthropy is “really layered,” she says. “That’s why I am so captivated.”

After rounding her way from Chicago to Arizona, Japan to Hawaii, and London to Seattle, Gartner arrived in Calgary last year with her husband, Craig, a Canadian-born banker she met in London. While she navigates the world of local philanthropy – SVP has invested more than $1.5 million in local “investees,” as they call the organizations they fund – Craig is educating her in the finer points of Canadian culture. Her father-in-law, meanwhile, gives her books about hockey. (Gartner has already joined the Flames faithful, itself an act of charity.) But it is a northern brand of philanthropy that most intrigues her. In the United States, the struggle is to get government to support non-profits. In Canada, the government is by far the biggest investor in the sector. The challenge for Canadian non-profits, then, is to attract private donors, those people and businesses that can make an impassioned and personal commitment to a cause – not to mention bringing in serious dollars. NEXT PAGE

On the sweltering shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, there is a frozen fish plant that never shipped a single fillet. In the early 1970s, a Norwegian aid agency noticed that the lake was flush with perch and tilapia, and local anglers made brisk trade of the fish they caught. For the area’s Turkana – nomadic cattle herders perpetually beset by drought, loss of grassland and an inattentive government – the aid agency contrived a solution: The Turkana could become fishermen.

Kids in the village of Bongo hanging out at the communal water cooler.

The Norwegians, a fishing culture, were smitten with the idea. Technical advisers were hired, research trips enjoined, studies commissioned, boats donated. The Norwegians enticed some 20,000 Turkana to settle at the lake’s shorelines and trained them to fish. The imported expertise further decided that processing frozen fillets – what today is called value-added – would be the most profitable cornerstone for this new enterprise.

Over the next 10 years, the Norwegians invested more than $20 million in the project, a price that included construction of ice fabrication and cold storage facilities and a highway to Nairobi. But when the plant finally opened in 1981, a sharp truth quickly became apparent: the cost of fuelling the diesel-powered cooling equipment in the scorching Sahelian heat made the frozen fish plant unprofitable.

The plant was only open for a few days, then it closed for good. Drought soon diminished prime fishing spots to dry lakebed, and because such large numbers of Turkana had moved to shoreline, much of the surrounding grassland was ruinously overgrazed by their herds. Many Turkana became dependent on food aid. An elaborate, expensive and well-intentioned scheme had made them poorer and disconnected from their traditional way of life.

I was reminded of the fish plant story while driving around the northern reaches of Ghana with Rex Asanga, a local agriculture adviser and project co-ordinator. This train of thought was momentarily disrupted by the sight of a dead pig strapped to the back of a motorbike that was still evacuating its bladder. But then Asanga lifted his hands from the steering wheel to gesture towards another seemingly deserted dirt road that led to another abandoned development project.

From Tamale to Bolgatanga, Bongo to Bawku, I had seen the signs: placards at roadsides bearing the iconic logos of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and various foreign development agencies. After a while these signs, paint peeling, almost illegible, begin to look like tomb markers in a sprawling graveyard of good intentions.

Since the late 1970s, Asanga had seen all manner of projects arrive ballyhooed then shuffle off with hardly a handshake goodbye. Each had different goals, and boasted a different technological intervention and modus operandi. Some were modest, say, a rainwater retention pool to improve irrigation; others were almost as ambitious as the Lake Turkana fish plant. Some even began to show returns, according to Asanga, but often the donor country or organization’s priorities changed, or it was decided prematurely to pull staff and replicate the initiative’s success elsewhere.

“When I think of how much has been done, how much money spent and how little there is to show for it,” Asanga said. “In the end, food production yields are no higher, and food security is not much better.”

Asanga had learned there was always another bright new idea around the corner. Now a movement of self-described doers in Great Britain and North America had arrived on the Third World development scene. Going by the handle of social entrepreneurs,they claim to have learned from the failures of the past, and profess to be unbound by convention or bureaucracy. As former eBay president-turned-social entrepreneur Jeffrey Skoll put it in 2007 at his annual Skoll World Forum, social entrepreneurs use many of the tools and techniques of business. “Their work,” said the Montreal-born philanthropist, “is characterized by innovation, leverage, empowerment and lasting change.” Social entrepreneurship will, its supporters believe, rewrite the rules of foreign aid, helping to foster economic opportunity and material progress instead of simply providing handouts. Or, at least, this is its promise.

Calgary-native Mike Quinn travelled many of these same Ghanaian roads five years before me. A self-described “disgruntled engineering student,” Quinn had just graduated from the University of British Columbia but felt little enthusiasm for the career that awaited him.

Eager to start fresh but put his degree to some use, he accepted a one-year placement in Ghana financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and signed on to an Engineers Without Borders-supported project that hoped to improve access to electricity in rural communities. The initiative was conceived to promote and implement a simple but dexterous technology – the Multifunctional Platform (MFP), a small diesel engine that can simultaneously power a roster of agricultural processing equipment, including a rice dehusker, a corn mill and an oil press. Around 80 per cent of people in rural Ghana lack a stable energy supply; the machine would hopefully increase incomes by diversifying agricultural production and reducing the time women spend on manual labour.