If someone has ever tried to explain the concept of social enterprise to you, there’s a good chance they’ve used TOMS Shoes as an example.

TOMS was founded in 2006 by Blake Mycoskie. The Californian was inspired by a trip to Argentina where he witnessed children walking around without shoes. Mycoskie returned to the U.S. and started a shoe company with a pledge to donate one pair of new shoes to a child in need for every pair of shoes TOMS sold. After the first year, the One for One project resulted in Mycoskie returning to Argentina with 10,000 pairs of shoes. By September 2010, TOMS Shoes had given more than 1,000,000 pairs of new shoes to children around the world.

But social enterprise isn’t just about shoes. In the simplest terms, social enterprise is a business with two goals: to earn revenue through the sale of goods or service and to achieve social, cultural or environmental outcomes.

While TOMS is one of the prominent examples today, social enterprise has existed for centuries. According to the Centre for Community Enterprise, social enterprise was born during the mass displacement and impoverishment of the Industrial Revolution in 19^th century England. Similar movements took root in Canada early in 20^th century. Both farmers in the prairies and fishermen in the Maritimes created a range of social enterprises for the betterment of the community, with co-operatives and credit unions being two notable examples – Girl Guide cookies and Scouts Canada popcorn are two others.

While social enterprises have a lengthy history, their impact on contemporary society is just starting to be uncovered. A recent report from Enterprising Non Profits says social enterprises in B.C. and Alberta are significant contributors to both employment creation and economic generators.

The report, titled Strength, Size, Scope: A Survey of Social Enterprises in Alberta and British Columbia, estimates that the 140 social enterprises surveyed for the report have a total of 4,500 employees and 2,700 of those employees were members of a designated target group such as persons with a mental or physical handicap or a member of a marginalized population.

In addition, the social enterprises that responded to the survey engaged 6,780 full- and part-time volunteers, had 27,870 people as members, provided training for 11,670 people and provided services to 678,000 people.

The sale of goods and services from social enterprise in the two provinces generated $78 million in revenue and an aggregate net profit of $7.9 million in the 2009 financial year.

Huayna Picchu / Peru / August 06 2008

It might seem like a giant thigh-burning lunge from teaching classes in the comfort of a slick modern Edmonton yoga studio to leading clients up to Machu Picchu, the famed “Lost City of the Incas,” for a few early morning sun salutations. But Cole Williston was ready to feel the burn of starting his own adventure travel company. Through Plan It Adventure, Williston guides adventure-seeking yoga enthusiasts on 12- and 22-day trips through Peru. Daily activities can involve trekking through the Amazon rainforest, cavorting with primates in the nature reserve of Monkey Island, mountain biking in the Andean highlands, hiking through the dry-stone walls of Machu Picchu or building a playground for a remote rainforest community. Williston took a break between downward dogs and business plans to talk about giving eco-awareness a hit of adrenalin, helping out the communities he travels to and leaving the planet “more loved than when he found it.”

Making Something Bigger Than Yoga
It was the breathing with movement that made a lot of sense to me. And I was hungry for spirituality. Having been to only a few yoga classes, I knew I needed to learn more. In 2001, I took a three-month training and certification course at the Chakra Yoga Center in Koh Phangan on a beach island in southeast Thailand.

After I got back to Edmonton I taught for a year at Lion’s Breath yoga studio, which a friend Breanna Johnson helped open. Later, Breanna opened her own studio, Shanti Yoga Studio. So I began teaching there, among other places. It took some time to build up my confidence before I was able to move forward on any big ideas but there were elements that started to come together for me: a passion for travel, yoga and community service. I wanted something that I could make bigger than just myself.

Letting the Good Times Roll
Having taught yoga for five years, I convinced myself that I should go to school, so I took out a loan for a massage therapy program. Four months into it, I realized that I wasn’t excited. Plan It Adventure was the next step. I dropped out of the massage program, planned an itinerary and took the rest of the money to travel to Peru. I financed a second trip by teaching 25 classes a week for a couple of months. Frankly, I didn’t have a lot of money left over for advertising, but I knew that I could use my yoga contacts to spread the word.

There have already been so many highlights. For instance, while we were acclimatizing in Cusco – which is 3,300 metres above sea level – we went hiking, mountain biking and whitewater rafting, which also gave us some cardio training. We hiked up Machu Picchu at 3:30 a.m. to beat the lineups and then continued up the nose of the mountain to watch the sunrise. We were the first of maybe 200 other hikers, and we got an amazing view of the Inca ruins and the valley. Near the Peruvian border with Ecuador, we went dune buggying, surfing and to the mud flats. Then we stayed at a really cool yoga bungalow.

Welcome to Project Start-Up, a six-part series on how a team of entrepreneurs take their bright idea from the pilot stage to production – from building a winning business plan and securing financing to hiring senior execs and developing a marketing plan. Along the way, our experts will weigh in on what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong and what they should do next.

BROADCASTING SCHEDULE

Sustainability is a word that has been rendered meaningless. When every new coroporate initiative is “sustainable”, nothing is. However, if businesses aim to prosper over the next 30 years it’s clear they’re going to have to operate within the Brundtlandian idea of sustainability;

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

It’s not the best definition of sustainability out there but it’s not the worst either. It’s a clean, understandable sentence and at only 23 words it’s got brevity working for it as well. By this definition there are precious few companies operating in a sustainable fashion.

Investor, venture capitalist and author Andrew Heintzman has written a solid book about Canadian companies and entrepreneurs that are nibbling at the edges of creating a sustainable economy.

For the people out there who believe that it’s either the economy or the environment, this book is a necessity. For readers who are familiar with the environmental and economic challenges facing Canada and the world and the potential solutions this book may be old hat. The book covers everything from electricity generation to forestry to the food system. It picks out entrepreneurs and innovators in each space and briefly profiles what they do. People Glenn Johnson of Glace who is developing innovative new small wind turbines or the people behind Saltworks, a Vancouver company with some very promising solar-powered desalination technology.

I’m not going to detail the profiled companies as Heintzman cuts quite a path across the landscape. Skipping across the country and across industries to show the breadth of the possibilities.

This wide-angle portrait both hurts and helps the book. By skipping from industry to industry and subject to subject the coverage of each individual story is fairly thin. Maybe I’m being greedy but I’d love a more in-depth look at some of these stories.

There are also mini-profiles of companies that really don’t fit the idea of sustainability outlined above. Carbon capture and storage is a universally terrible idea that will hopefully be obviated by companies like Day4 Energy or concepts like low-head hydro.

Regardless of those minor quibbles the people I applaud Andrew Heintzman for writing it. However, being the greedy person that I am, I just wish there was more here. Still, you should read this book and learn more about the Canadians risking their financial livelihoods in order to build a better economy for Canada.

If you want a light, inspiring read this summer you should read The New Entrepreneurs.

You’ve written about some alternatives to the traditional small animal veterinary practice. What ways have you found to become involved in animal advocacy?
I took a course at the University of Alberta called the “Philosophy of Humans and Animals.” It was fascinating and it made a big impact on me. We watched videos of military experiments using g-forces on chimps, saw gorillas signing (doing sign language) to teachers that they hadn’t seen in decades. I cried in class every day. Eight years ago I protested circuses that use exotic animals by standing outside Rexall Place, in Edmonton, in a tiger costume that was supplied by PETA. I also went to Guatemala as a volunteer vet.

Are there career changes that might be a solution to the internal conflicts you’ve faced?
Maybe to specialize, though that does nothing to help animals that don’t get proper care. Or work with a non-profit group like Rural Area Veterinary Services. Basically, I hope someday to have a bigger voice than I do now.

This article was originally published in June of 2008

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
_Dr. Seuss

As far as I know, Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) never visited Alberta. Yet one of his most popular books has proven to be an astoundingly prophetic parable about the nature of 21st century Alberta: the tremendous wealth we have created, the grave environmental problems that have accompanied it, and the seed of a possibility for another kind of future, one in which economic health does not come at the expense of a healthy natural environment.

First published in 1971, the year Peter Lougheed led the Alberta Tories into power for the first time, The Lorax illustrates the unintended consequences of unfettered (if well-intentioned) capitalism. Lougheed may seem, from the vantage point of 2008, a thoughtful and compassionate Conservative with a strong environmental ethic. But the party he brought to power has embraced a Milton Friedmanesque philosophy that, despite all the government’s crooning to the contrary, has promoted economic, largely industrial development at the expense of Alberta’s environment. Only a Thank You For Smoking-calibre PR genius could argue otherwise.

As in Geisel’s Lorax, as insightful a social commentary as any episode of South Park or The Simpsons, the direct and indirect impacts of industrial activity aimed at providing “things that everybody needs” are devastating our forests, poisoning and depleting our water resources, transforming our climate, and hastening the disappearance of numerous species from our mountains, forests and prairie. To be sure, these activities provide jobs and generate wealth, but the environmental and social costs associated with what we have come to know as the Alberta Advantage are enormous. Continue along the path followed by the greedy Once-ler character, Geisel warns, and the future we leave for our children will be fundamentally different in ways I can’t imagine we would have wished on them.

Thankfully, a new generation of Albertans are coming to this realization much faster than the Once-ler did in the land of the Lorax. No need to wait until the rivers are fouled (or empty), the air besmirched, the climate inextricably warmed, the Swommee-swans and Humming-fish and brown bar-ba-loots gone, our cities depopulated and ruined. Time, instead, to rise to the greatest challenge of the 21st century: reducing our unsustainable impacts on the environment without compromising, perhaps even enhancing, our quality of life.

The antithesis of the Once-ler, the environmental stars profiled here represent the best and brightest of a growing constituency of Albertans choosing to pursue careers and business opportunities and (it’s impossible to put it any other way) lives that reflect their commitment to improving the state of the environment. Armed with the entrepreneurial, can-do spirit that has defined the province for more than a century, and bolstered by unparalleled wealth and triple-bottom-line thinking, these green hotshots are helping to develop and implement solutions that could turn Alberta into a true hub of sustainability. Into a global leader.

The variety and creativity of the work these people do represents the breadth and range of technological and policy solutions that will be required to make the jump from our currently unsustainable society to one that balances the needs and limits of the natural world with our increasing desire for luxury and comfort. There are no shortcuts; there will be no easy answers. The path to sustainability will take hard work and commitment, of which these entrepreneurs and environmentalists are in no short supply.

But there is more to the answer than simply discovering and applying technological solutions to environmental problems, or popularizing ideas that, if actualized, will help to transform society. The real transformation will be neither technological nor economic – it will be cultural. What makes many of the people profiled here exceptional is less the substance of what they do – cutting-edge solar engineering, say, or writing inspiring and well-researched books – than the courage and creativity and sense of responsibility (all hallmarks, by the way, of successful entrepreneurs) to choose careers and lives that veer from the conventional. Instead, they embody a new path to a more sustainable New World, the very beginnings of which we can only glimpse today.

“We need to be careful about heroes,” Marlo Raynolds, executive director of the Pembina Institute, told me as I prepared these profiles. “In a lot of ways we’re a hero-driven society – that someone else out there will save the day for us – and that gives us an excuse not to get off the couch. We’re not going to win this game with heroes. We’re not going to tackle global warming with a few heroes. Ultimately, we have to look at ourselves for our own inspiration and take our own action.”

A sustainable Alberta, then, will be a place where our environmental stars are no longer exceptional, a place where all Albertans factor in the environmental implications not only of how they spend their money, but how they earn it. Had the Once-ler incorporated this kind of triple-bottom-line thinking into his business plan when he first arrived on the scene in The Lorax, of course, there would still be Truffula trees and brown bar-ba-loots aplenty (not to mention clean air and water), and the story would have a very different ending.

Although none of them characterized it that way, perhaps that’s exactly what these Albertans are doing today. Regular people trying to rewrite the province’s story, so that it always contains so many of the things we are precipitously close to losing. U

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Danielle Droitsch
lawyer, executive director
watermatters + bow riverkeeper

I was a reporter for a newspaper in North Carolina. My editor asked me to cover a story about a pulp and paper mill that was polluting a nearby river. There had been fish kills and the community downstream had disproportionately high levels of cancer. These people needed help – not another newspaper article. I asked to be pulled from the story. It changed my life. I went on to become an environmental lawyer.

The intensity of our land use has grown to a point that’s unsustainable. Our water supply is decreasing and water quality is degrading. We seem to be operating on an assumption that we can build, drill, mine and pave anything and everything in Alberta. Every boom has its bust, and our water can’t be sacrificed as part of the deal. Our “business as usual” approach no longer works. We need new legislation that sets targets for managed growth for water, wildlife, air and landscapes. These targets would be established by considering the cumulative impacts of multiple activities on the landscape (water usage, oil and gas activity, recreation, urban and rural development) and then establishing thresholds based on a community vision and environmental protection. The only way to make this happen is by changing legislation, which would hold individual government ministries accountable to these targets.

Watermatters isn’t a big national environmental group, but I’ve seen our small efforts have a big effect. I know we’ve changed people’s opinions. I know we’ve influenced government decision-making. It’s true that a few people can make a difference. If only everyone thought that way.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Danielle

Matt Beck + Mark Blackwell
university of calgary students + co-chairs
alberta solar decathlon project

Beck (above right): I consider myself a systems entrepreneur. As Adam Werbach (U.S. Sierra Club president turned Wal-Mart consultant) announced a few years ago, “environmentalism is dead.” It is an outdated worldview that focuses on individual issues at the expense of complex systems relationships, when an understanding of both are needed to create a positive future. Through building an energy-producing home – rather than a home that consumes energy – we are showing Albertans that through efficiency and innovation, we can both reduce our impact on the environment and continue to develop our energy sector.

Blackwell: With a project like this we have a real opportunity to really change how people perceive sustainable housing design. Consumers need to be aware of how their actions – like switching to a more efficient insulation system – will decrease the demand for fossil fuels. There is so much criticism on the producers, but the place people need to be looking at for fault is in the mirror. Until people are able to manage how they live their lives and rely less heavily on fossil fuels, no real change will take place.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Matt & Mark

Claire Ellick
engineer, sustainable transportation
city of edmonton

I’m a bike ninja. OK, I also do strategic planning and design for bike facilities in the city, as well as operational reviews and improvements, and generally anything else related to on-road cycling. After I finished my engineering degree, I wanted to do something that benefited people and that I really believed in. That’s this job. Cycling has always been one of my biggest passions, and it’s great to have input on city policy with respect to how bicycles are integrated into our transportation system.

If you can avoid driving a car to work and get there by biking or walking, or by taking transit or carpooling, these are all cost-effective alternatives to driving a single-occupant vehicle. With increasing gas prices, I think people will start to realize how little sense it makes to drive alone everywhere. Cycling makes sense on so many levels – but the most obvious are the environmental and health benefits. Look at the rising obesity rates in North America. Cycling saves you time and dollars: there’s no need to drive to the gym and pay for a gym membership to sit on a stationary bike for an hour. Cycling can add so much richness to the quality of anyone’s life.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Claire

Jon Mitchell
group lead, environmental strategies
encana corporation

EnCana is the biggest natural gas producer in North America and one of the biggest companies in Canada. I work with the leadership of the company and our operating divisions to identify areas where we need to develop a corporate approach to sustainability issues, coordinate our activities to address these issues, and work with external agencies on developing solutions. While the work involves issues related to air, water and land, the majority of my work at the moment is leading EnCana’s climate change strategy.

There is no longer a choice about whether to think about the environment or not. This is business. Environmental issues must be managed as they can represent a significant risk to the bottom line, now and in the future. Those that identify the opportunities to excel will be better positioned than their competitors in the long run. You can debate how effective certain initiatives are, but there is no debate about the need for them.

Environmental issues are front of mind for boards and executives – it’s our job as professionals to provide advice and input to help them make informed decisions. The discussions are no longer focused on “if” but have shifted to “how.” That is why it is not enough to just understand the environment; you must also understand business and politics. How could you not be motivated when you work in this field? There has been no time when environment has captured the attention of the public, business and politics like it has right now. If I wasn’t motivated by that, I’d be overwhelmed.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Jon

Stephani Carter + Brandy Burdeniuk
interior designer, sustainable building material specialist + industrial designer
ecoammo, green alberta

Carter (sitting): Our companies are designed to make the transition to a more sustainable building industry fun and easy. We educate people about building green and choosing healthy building products and materials. There is no “organic door” to a world where everything is perfect. We are living in a time of transformation. Each of us has to pick what is most important to us and act on it. We should no longer point fingers at one another. Instead, we must encourage everyone’s green actions. If all the energy spent pointing fingers was used to take action, we would certainly speed up this peaceful revolution.

Burdeniuk: As an industrial designer, I am a trained problem solver. We help facilitate the LEED certification process and ensure that the vision of a green building is maintained all the way through the design and construction process. We try to simplify the process so that it isn’t overwhelming. I’m not going to lie: we’ve had our financial ups and downs, but now we are really busy and the money is steadily coming in. I think today it is possible to be both environmentally and financially sustainable. It is essential to have this balance, as it allows for long-term planning and realistic solutions.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Stephani and Brandy

Justin Thompson
energy-efficient homebuilder + rancher + wind power consultant

Spending a lot of time in the foothills of southern Alberta as a child I gained a love for wildlife and wide open spaces. I also spent a lot of time in the wind near Pincher Creek, so when it came time to look for work, wind energy was a natural fit. As for the green building effort, this was a very conscious decision to try and influence an industry that to me has no excuse not to improve its practices, because so many of the improvements are so simple to make.

Most struggles in our history have involved an external enemy. This time, we are the enemy: it’s a struggle within ourselves to change our consumption patterns. That’s hard to reconcile for most of us, especially amid such wealth in Alberta. I struggle with it all the time because I know my personal footprint could be smaller and my quality of life would not be threatened.

The myth of the incompatibility between profitability and sustainability has been perpetuated for too long. Time and time again, companies who do the right thing benefit from increased efficiencies, which lead to reduced costs or create new markets or demand. What is required are companies that are willing to take risks and step out of the status quo. I’m not saying being green is a business slam dunk, but there are so many examples of success that it’s time we put this question to bed for good.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Justin

Leanne Allison + Karsten Heuer
filmmaker + author

We undertake grand-scale expeditions into critical landscapes and tell stories about our experiences through films, lectures and books. The first project was the Yellowstone to Yukon hike (1998/99), which highlighted the need for wildlife corridors. In 2003 we followed an Arctic caribou herd for five months to their endangered calving grounds and back again (Being Caribou). Last summer, we canoed and sailed across Canada with our two-year-old son to meet author and environmental crusader Farley Mowat, winding through the settings of his stories along the way (Finding Farley).

Somewhere in our early 20s, we began to realize the places where we canoed, skied, mountain biked and climbed had value beyond outdoor gymnasiums. A series of wildlife encounters, some university courses in biology, and a couple of summer jobs with wildlife ecologists deepened our appreciation for our surroundings and shifted the emphasis from the activity to the place. For lack of a better term, we are in the business of environmental education. Our impact is pretty hard to measure. We could talk about book sales (tens of thousands), viewers of our films (in the millions), and lecture attendees (tens of thousands). But it’s all meaningless unless it translates into action. On that front, it’s the notes we get from individuals that make our work rewarding – notes that describe real changes people have made in their lives and what they devote themselves to because of our projects.

The next big breakthrough? Wow, we wish we knew. We’ve stopped trying to predict how change will happen. We only believe it will.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Leanne & Karsten

Marlo Raynolds
executive director
pembina institute

Global warming, hands down, is is the biggest environmental challenge facing the planet. Never before have we had so much scientific brain power conclude that we need to make very significant changes in our energy system and our levels of pollution. If we don’t get on a track of deep reductions by 2020, we’re going to see significant changes that are not favourable.

The most important solution is having a very clear and adequate price signal on carbon dioxide pollution. Coupled with that, we need very strong regulations in the areas of energy efficiency, industrial emissions of CO2 and vehicles. Those two market-based mechanisms of price and regulation will drive a lot of change in behaviour. Boardrooms need to be given and shown incentives and reasons to build things differently.

There is no silver bullet for this one. Unlike the ozone challenge we had, with CO2 it is a much more distributed problem; it really requires a portfolio approach. We have to get a lot more out of our current consumption of energy: we need to be able to drive further on a litre of gasoline and we need to be able to heat our homes with less energy. We need to be more accessible to our workplaces, to our friends and relationships, and to the services we need. We also need different ways of producing electricity. Renewable energy is a huge opportunity, from wind power to solar energy and deep geothermal.

Ultimately, these changes have to be possible. The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. Environmental protection needs to be a design criteria in our economy, and in how we conduct business. And I think we’re starting to see certain companies really taking this seriously. U

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Marlo

This article was originally published in February 2009.

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.

Quinn was emotionally invested in the project. But, after a year abroad, he was critical of aid programs and the pitfalls of designing interventions for Third World communities in faraway donor countries. When we crossed paths again a few years later, I was struck by how much his experience in the development field, and the evolution of his thinking on it, encapsulated the major trends and debates happening in the aid sector, including the emergence of social entrepreneurship.

Left: Bolgatanga’s market. Middle: After school, girls sow groundnuts and sing worksongs. Many songs, the writer was told, boast a similar message – men are lazy, drink too much and are not good for much at all. Right: Fertilizer spray packs for distribution at an “input fair” in the town of Sandema. Villagers from the surrounding area arrive on tractors or on foot to get free agricultural tools, often donated by CARE International.

While his tenure in Ghana was part of a more traditional development model, it introduced him to the man he considers his mentor, Abeeku Brew-Hammond, a Ghanaian energy expert charged with rolling out the MFP program. “You meet a lot of cynical people in the aid sector, but Abeeku was unique,” Quinn said. “He taught me about the perils of dependency and how strongly the market could motivate people. He taught me to think like an entrepreneur.”

What Quinn learned from Brew-Hammond pushed him closer to the burgeoning notion of social enterprise: market-oriented businesses intended to meet broader social and environmental needs. These were businesses concerned as much with social and environmental as with fiscal dividends, but run as prudently as any profit-making enterprise.

It didn’t take long for Quinn to head back into the field after his Ghana placement. An internship at an engineering firm in Vancouver was fruitless (he developed a habit of not showing up at a work), and so, again under the auspices of Engineers Without Borders, he lighted out for Africa, this time to Zambia. There he would lead a sorghum commercialization project for small-scale farmers.

Sorghum, a drought-tolerant cereal grain, wasn’t grown much in Zambia, but it was perfect for the country’s arid environment. Crucially, SABMiller, one of the world’s largest brewers, had signed an agreement with the federal government to garner tax benefits if it bought sorghum locally. With a major buyer guaranteed, Quinn spent 10 months riding around Zambia on a motorbike, working with farmers to produce more sorghum and organizing the two co-ops that consolidated the crop and trucked it to the SAB plant in Lusaka.

“I had seen the traditional NGO model, which was to work with farmers directly, get them to grow stuff, then figure out how to market it afterward,” Quinn said. A big company like SABMiller, though, could make an enormous impact. “They weren’t even directly involved; they were just a purchaser. But they created a stable market opportunity and earning incentive that the aid agencies weren’t able to.”

Still, he witnessed how conventional aid models operating in the same environment could undermine long-term viability. “Distributing food aid created a perverse incentive that discouraged farmers from changing their behaviour to adopt more sustainable livelihoods,” Quinn recalled. “My project was market-led and aimed at getting farmers to diversify away from maize – the dominant crop that is becoming much less viable in southern Africa because of climate change. But, at the same time, one organization was distributing food aid, including maize, to these same farmers. It discouraged many farmers from doing anything different. They would continue to plant their maize in the same way and, if it failed, they would sign up for food aid.”

Despite the challenges, the sorghum project brought in a small profit.

“It was suddenly a pretty exciting time in what could be destitute places. The price was good and the farmers were convinced that this was a real market opportunity,” says Quinn.

Then a common problem afflicting NGOs started to happen to the sorghum project. “As soon as something does appear to go well, NGOs want to replicate it somewhere else. Resources end up getting shifted away from the original success,” Quinn said. “But you forget it’s only been one year. When I went back later to my project area, they were still planting sorghum and selling it, but all the excitement was gone. The project had topped off. I wonder how different it could’ve been if there was a social entrepreneur still there, someone with a vested interest that could’ve built on the business.”

While social entrepreneurship isn’t new – the term has been around since the 1960s – the popularity it now enjoys is recent. Leaders hold up Florence Nightingale, Margaret Sanger, Mahatma Gandhi and Helen Keller as icons. Today’s movement is very much a product of globalization and the whirligig of money that made so many millionaires and billionaires in the 1990s and early 2000s – especially the ones who made their hay in the bubbling financial, real estate development, high-tech and media sectors.

With unprecedented wealth, newly minted “philanthro-capitalists” are seeking to use their social and financial capital to leverage change in the developing world. (Given their business backgrounds, leverage has become a buzzword in the movement.) Moguls like CNN founder Ted Turner, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Jeffrey Skoll (who established the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University) ushered in a new era in fundraising and social action, raising an estimated $30 billion.

Gary McPherson at the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship points to the professions that should lead the way in social entrepreneurship.
01. Accounting
02. Business (especially the oil and gas sector)
03. Engineering
04. Law
05. Politics

By professing to be market-oriented, and therefore demand-driven, people like Skoll argue that social entrepreneurship sidesteps the chronic problem of donor accountability, in which aid recipients are given too little say in the projects designed for their benefit. As entrepreneurs, the philanthro-capitalists insist that their projects are more immediately responsive and less burdened by government or organizational bureaucracies. Constantly measuring their impact, they strive to be as results-oriented as any business. If something doesn’t work, they can adapt quickly to local realities and changing times. They are also, they say, more willing to experiment with untried approaches and new technologies – from mobile phones to vaccines to biotech crops.

Former management consultant Bill Drayton is one of the field’s intellectual progenitors. Drayton, who founded the Ashoka Foundation, funnels money into a diverse array of projects and, until the recent stock market meltdown, was managing a social investment portfolio o f$40 million. Frequently summoned to explain the movement, he talks as though it is largely an effort by social activists to speak the language of Wall Street. “[The word] entrepreneur has nothing to do with government bureaucracies, or any bureaucracies,” Drayton said in an interview on CBC Radio One. “The [traditional] business entrepreneur and the social entrepreneur have so much more in common with one another than they do within the routine structures of their own industry or sector.”

Drayton would maintain, of course, that it’s about far more than nomenclature, that social entrepreneurs are able to achieve more than government, and that government and transnational institutions like the United Nations should limit themselves to supporting roles.

This is already happening. Money pouring into the aid sector from private groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is redrawing the power dynamic among the leading players. With yearly disbursements of more than $2 billion, the Gates Foundation’s resources alone outstrip those of the World Health Organization, whose total annual operating budget (including admin costs) tops out at just less than $1 billion. When the Gates Foundation commits to a project, it tends to draw public money in its wake. Is accountability resolved though, especially when a few moneyed individuals garner more power to make policy decisions with global impact?

Quinn returned from Zambia a full convert to social entrepreneurship; he just hadn’t heard the term yet. Only when a friend mentioned a new MBA program in social entrepreneurship at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School did Quinn realize he was part of something larger. He applied for a Skoll Scholarship and soon found himself at Oxford.

One of the thinkers who featured most prominently in Quinn’s studies was the controversial American economist William Easterly, best known for his criticism of Jeffrey Sachs and celebrity-fronted campaigns such as Make Poverty History. Easterly says too much of what passes for development, like the Lake Turkana fish plant, are futile top-down exercises driven not by local demand but by donors; they come with political strings attached, require too much capital and rely too heavily on foreign expertise, inputs and technology.

Most importantly, the model fails to recognize how economic growth and poverty reduction are best enabled. Easterly pointed to Asian countries that have benefitted from tremendous growth in the past 50 years, mainly as a result of homegrown economic policies and innovations. He’s not the first economist to contrast the trajectories of Ghana and South Korea: in 1957, when Ghana was on the verge of becoming the first independent sub-Saharan African country, they had almost equal per-capita incomes; 50 years later, South Koreans had 10 times the purchasing power of Ghanaians, despite being significantly less endowed with natural resources.

In The White Man’s Burden, an ironic nod to Rudyard Kipling’s Eurocentric poem of the same name, Easterly differentiates between Planners and Searchers. The Planners conceive and implement expensive, largely technocratic solutions from abroad. Such solutions typically have inadequate local consultation, and little accountability. Easterly doesn’t disguise whom he’s talking about – by Planners he means the policy wonks that populate the major international aid agencies and NGOs.

Then there are the Searchers: flexible, innovative, market-friendly folks, free from the inertia of bureaucracies, who are intent on piecemeal solutions that breed noticeable results and not grand, utopian designs.

Social entrepreneurs surely like to think of themselves as Searchers. But from his office at New York University, the genial and soft-spoken Easterly warned against taking their claims at face value, saying, “Just because someone uses a fashionable new label doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing anything useful, constructive or even novel.”

“The question with social entrepreneurship is whether there is a bottom line. Is someone applying a market test or voter test to what social enterprises are doing? Some clearly pass the test, like Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank’s micro-credit financing. He invented something poor people seem to find very useful because we can see there’s a demand for it,” Easterly said.

Left: After a raga of singing and dancing, a Konkwa elder gives the writer a what for. Middle: Left-over food aid in a Bolgatanga storeroom. Right: Kids lugging water back from the communal well through a tall thicket of early millet.

“Development can’t be about whether a project or aid agency attains its objective, but whether we assist the poor in meeting theirs.”

Now that Quinn is at the hub of the social entrepreneurship scene, he is beginning to question these same things. How different is it really from traditional aid agencies, which have long tried to quantify their effectiveness? True development, he has learned, eludes easy measurement.

The distinctions between one brand of development or another are often lost on the people that aid is directed toward. During my travels in the developing world, I’ve often felt like a one-man complaints department, recording the frustration of communities that, while grateful for assistance, still speak of many of the same shortcomings in aid delivery they always have.

In Ghana, I looked up Quinn’s mentor, Abeeku Brew-Hammond, now dean of mechanical and agricultural engineering at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi. The pragmatic, 52-year-old Brew-Hammond didn’t conceal his conflicted attitude toward the developing sector’s changing regime.

He welcomed more engagement with the private sector, the kind that social entrepreneurship embodies, especially when it came to priorities like the provision of accessible electricity – the lack of which has long-hindered Africa’s development.

Yet he’s seen this push for private involvement taken to ideological extremes. Before joining KNUST, Brew-Hammond was a director at the NGO-backed Global Village Energy Partnerships (GVEP), where he worked with governments in Africa and the Americas to develop national energy access plans. After only a year on the job, some countries had submitted their strategies while others were in the pipeline. Then one day a new chairman arrived, a chairman who, according to Brew-Hammond, “believed everything public was a waste of time.” The work was scrapped. “I hate it whenever we just start to get our act together, the donor’s ideas change and we’re forced to move on to something else,” he told me.

Attention Deficit Disorder seems to particularly afflict the newer models of entrepreneur-led development. Social enterprises tend to fetishize technological innovation and novelty. “Donor ideas now have a short lifespan,” Brew-Hammond said. “But a lot of societies and institutions in the developing world take time to soak in new ideas, build capacity and operate effectively.”

There can also be bizarre, wholesale changes that spread resources too thin and cut short promising work. I have seen groups in Guyana and Guatemala pulled away from their main expertise or mandate to work in another area simply because that’s where the money is at the moment. Maybe five years ago the money was there for AIDS/HIV prevention, last year it was poverty reduction and this year it’s for climate change.

Not only that, but supposedly cutting-edge projects often distort local priorities. Some agronomists in Ghana put it to me this way: They have a list of 10 key projects, all designed to improve agricultural output and food security, but ranked in order of importance and potential impact. Their thinking is backed by experience on the ground. Potential donors, however, might request proposals to finance what are only the Ghanaians’ fifth or sixth priorities. The agronomists go after that money anyway because they’re already underfunded; they’ll take what they can get.

Brew-Hammond believes local grassroots organizations in developing countries could best generate the kind of anarchic, piecemeal bottom-up economic activity that produces sustained results. “You know, some old ideas aren’t bad ideas, they just need time to work,” Brew-Hammond said. “You’ll go to a conference, make a suggestion and someone will say back at you, ‘Oh, that’s nothing new.’ So what? I didn’t come here to say something new; I came here to say what I think will work in my country.”

The last time Quinn and I spoke, we discussed how the current economic crisis was affecting social entrepreneurship, especially considering how much of the money at its disposal was made in a financial system that is now imploding. A director at one prominent foundation estimates that U.S. foundations have slashed their budgets by an average of 30 to 40 per cent; Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, has cut its annual disbursements by almost 50 per cent.

For better or worse, Quinn has committed himself to social enterprise. While finishing his studies at Oxford, he hatched a small business incubator called African Enterprise Partners. A U.K.-based fund has already hired him to find and manage investment opportunities in Zambia (for which he will retain an equity share).

What’s most encouraging about the emergence of social entrepreneurship is the debate it has fostered on development strategies and how we allocate our resources for aid. Expertise garnered in the private sector or at business school can bring fresh thinking to an old topic. Quinn doubts, however, that social entrepreneurship will usher in the kind of transformative change it promises. “It is in danger of passing itself off as the whole solution,” he says. Technologic and programmatic schemes, from micro-loans to hybrid seeds, will not alone end unfair land distribution policies, income disparity, social conflict and ethnic discrimination that are often the source of poverty.

Social entrepreneurship is a surprisingly apolitical animal at times, and its lack of regard for the role civil society organizations have historically played in fomenting social change is an odd blind spot for a movement that lionizes icons like Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

The phenomenon may be more a symptom of economic inequalities than a cure. It exists because of the vast fortunes made in an era of high CEO remittances, the widening income disparity between employees and executives and the inflated value of big corporations. “People on the social entrepreneurship side are often guilty of thinking they have the answer,” Quinn said, “as opposed to improving on a defunct system. They’re sometimes guilty of not partnering with civil society or trying to improve on what’s been done before.” U

Christopher Frey wrote this article with the support of the Government of Canada through the Canadian International Development Agency.

This month we have two book reviews for you. The management tome Good to Great and the short, snappy and inspiring REWORK.

Good to Great is written by Jim Collins, co-author of another oft-cited business book Built to Last. To give you an idea of what Good to Great is about, let’s examine its ISBN categories:

1. Leadership

2. Strategic planning

3. Organizational change

4. Technological innovations – Management

On the surface these topics seem dry, but Collins has done some darn fine research and has constructed some blazingly obvious conclusions and some very cool counterintuitive conclusions as well. When you consider the massive data sets used for this book, you really feel for the researchers. This book stands tall on the shoulders of grad students. Just wading through the thank-you section at the front of this book takes a good while.

Using some pretty tough benchmarks, Collins and his team identified 14 companies that made the transition from good to great. These were middling companies, getting returns at or below the general market, when, seemingly out of nowhere these companies sustained at least 15 years of success, beating the general market many times over. With their prey identified, Collins and his team wanted to know the process that turned these companies around.

So how did they do it? Funny sounding management jargon, of course! Hedgehog concepts, level 5 leaders and the flywheel of success. Now, if you’re not familiar with these terms, don’t worry. Collins explains them well. In order to make their concepts stickier, they use pretty awful management jargon to identify the underlying trends they uncovered in their research. For instance, the Hedgehog Concept, that is when you  concentrate only on what you can be the best in the world at. If you stick with your company’s Hedgehog Concept you’ll do better than other companies that flail around from one trendy business idea to the next. Shocker!

This is not to say there is no value in the book or its findings. It’s just that I find concepts like this to be a writing crutch. Make it obvious and you shouldn’t have to give your concept a silly name.

The final chapter relates the concepts in Good to Great to the concepts in Jim Collin’s first book, Built to Last. As I have not read Built to Last, this chapter was darn well unreadable. The jargon you read in Good to Great makes sense as it’s built up throughout the book but to be dropped into a whole new genre of business management jargon was tough on the brain, especially as I read this part of the book in the back of a rented Grand Cherokee on the way to Vancouver from Calgary.

The book skews towards older organizations because companies had to have a minimum of 30 years of existence as a public company in order to qualify. This means that the companies that are analyzed tend towards the stodgy end of things; Phillip Morris, Walgreens, Fannie Mae, Kimberly Clark. This was an unfortunate byproduct of the rigorous standards they set in order to find companies that made the transition from good to great.

One of the biggest takeaways from this book was the idea of “stop doing” lists. I love this idea. I typically make a to-do list every day, piling task upon task. A stop doing list encourages you to simplify and take away from your daily load.

His thoughts and research on getting the right people on the bus was very well done. Again, this is an obvious concept, but in this case he attacks the obvious in a novel way.

So who’s going to get the most out of this book? Managers, executives, directors, entrepreneurs and anyone who wants to make an organization they belong to really sing. There are some worthwhile lessons in here and they don’t all have to be applied to a publicly traded company. Collins only used publicly traded companies for the book because it was easy to gather the data and analyze it.

By Craille Maguire Gillies | Photography by Pete Aspros, Grip Limited

There is nothing like a big orange slide plonked right in the middle of an office to obliterate hierarchy between upper management and everyone else. But then Toronto creative agency Grip Limited, home to that big orange slide, has never been a place for hierarchy. Grip, whose clients include Acura, Lululemon Athletica and Labatt, has an unusually linear team, with an astounding 11 partners. David Crichton, one of eight founding partners calls it a “flat structure” in which partners work directly with clients, and therefore with their own designers, writers, interactive and technical staff who put together campaigns. “There’s no corner office mentality. There isn’t actually a corner office,” Crichton says, adding that newly hired president Harvey Carroll has the worst digs in the space – a small, drafty office that no one else wants.

Grip’s office – designed by the folks at Johnson Chou and featuring the agency’s signature orange logo – is  spread over two and a half floors, and reflects the open attitude of the agency. (And the fireman’s pole in the atrium is great when you’re running late for meetings.) Crichton spoke with Unlimited about breaking down barriers – and walls.

+ Every Thursday, many of the company’s 100-plus staff gather in the atrium for a 4:30 beer-fuelled news briefing. (It counts Labatt as one of its longtime clients.) “On Thursdays we open up the draft taps and play foosball,” says Crichton. “The atrium is basically stadium seating for announcements.”

+ The company has events called “What’s your story?” when anybody in the company – from someone in the production studio to a creative director –  can present new ideas.

+ They notice the little things. White Astroturf lines one of the boardrooms. “It deadens sound,” Crichton says, “but it’s also not expensive. We like to do things creatively that don’t involve spending a lot of money. It sends a message to clients that you can be creative without being excessive.”

+ That working-class ethos turns up in Grip’s logo, a bright 1960s-style orange circle meant to show the company’s working-class roots. “I would say the culture here is pretty peer-oriented. Our partners work on a client’s file directly, so that means we worked directly with everyone here,” Crichton says. (Click to see a TV reel of some of Grip’s work.)

+ The non-linear structure of the company lets employees move between departments for rare wholesale career changes within the same company. For instance, a longtime studio manager became a designer and later an art director. One former IT staffer went on to become a multimedia editor/producer at Grip’s in-house production facility. The strategy is to “let people make a career change and then keep them in the company. At the end of the day, [the happiness of] a bigger paycheque only lasts two pay periods. If you provide a place where people like to work and are respected, they’ll be happier and more enthusiastic.” U

Last December I found myself trapped in financial darkness with no escape route. A few years earlier I’d set financial goals such as “grow my net worth” and “pay off my mortgage,” but I hadn’t devised a clear action plan. Frustrated and feeling like I wasn’t achieving anything, I decided to carve out a specific 10-year financial plan. To jazz up the process, I rolled out a six-foot-long sheet of wrapping paper and taped it onto my bedroom wall (the blank side facing me – I didn’t want to get that jazzy).

For a week I populated the paper with Post-it notes that outlined my goals and dreams. I jotted down things like “purchase an investment property,” “buy a new car with cash,” “travel to a new part of the world each year” and “grow my investment portfolio by 10 per cent annually.” We’re talking dreams, remember. But after I summarized each of my goals, I was able to come up with a clear, defined route towards making them happen. I escaped from financial darkness.

Heading toward a new year means tens of thousands of Canadians are making resolutions to improve their lives. If you’re financially lost, it’s time to gear up and plan. The first rule is both to dream, and to get specific about what you’d like to accomplish. Clearly defined financial goals have a timeframe (usually five to 10 years), they can be measured (to see if you’ve accomplished them), and they’re realistic. An example of this might be to become mortgage free within 10 years by making two extra payments each year. Write down your goals and, as you move forward, be willing to allow
for some flexibility.

The second principle is to ensure that each financial goal increases your net worth. (Net worth is what you have left after subtracting your liabilities from your assets.) Building your personal bottom line means reducing debt and building assets. Let the measure of net worth drive the actions you take to achieve your goals. So, in year one of your plan, you might increase your net worth from $10 to $5,000. In year two, from $5,000 to $15,000.

The third rule is to increase your assets. Break down your asset goals by year; that’ll make it much easier to see what actions you need to take to make them happen. In year one set a goal of contributing five per cent of your total income into an investment program. Increase those contributions to 10 per cent in year two and 15 per cent in year three. These types of contribution goals are easily executed through automatic bank and payroll deductions.

Sign up for your company RRSP and pension plans. Most employers will allow you to select the investments within the plan and some will even contribute a matching portion. If you’re self-employed or your company doesn’t provide a plan, an RRSP can be set up at any financial institution. Increase your contributions each year until you’ve maximized the predetermined limits. Starting in January, a new savings account called the Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) will be available to Canadians. Individuals can contribute up to $5,000 annually with after-tax dollars and can select the types of investments within the plan. The money then grows tax free. Both the RRSP and TFSA are valuable investment tools everyone should have. And within your plans, if you’ve invested in mutual funds, contribute regularly to capture an average price on the units. If buying stocks, re-invest your dividends through a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP).

The fourth principle is to get rid of bad debt. There’s only one kind of good debt and it’s the kind that helps you grow your assets – like a mortgage or RRSP loan. The rest is bad: credit cards, store cards, vehicle loans and so on. Each year, set specific debt reduction targets. If you owe $20,000 you could set a goal to decrease the balance to $14,000 in year one and $8,000 in year two. Review and negotiate interest rates annually and use helpful accelerated payment plans to reduce debt faster.

Don’t forget to evaluate your plans to see if they’ve worked. Check in and update your goals every few months or at least every year. Record your progress, celebrate your bottom-line success and make adjustments. As you flush out a financial plan based on realistically increasing net worth, your financial goals will guide and define a lifestyle that fits with your aspirations. Though temptation to live beyond your means will always exist, focus on achieving your financial dreams. If you want your dreams to become reality, plan to make it happen. U