In December a range of partners—including MaRS, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the Centre for Social Innovation, and the Toronto City Summit Alliance, with the support of the Ontario government—held the first Social Entrepreneurship Summit in Toronto. While this event, or anything quite like it, had never been held before in Canada, the venue at MaRS was at capacity with over 250 people in attendance leaving another 100 people on the waiting list hoping to find a way through the doors.

The idea behind social entrepreneurship is to create ventures that combine both making profits and achieving social ends, such as poverty reduction, or environmental improvement, as fundamental elements. In the past, these goals were seen as isolated and were rarely combined; either you were making money or you were practicing some form of philanthropy in an attempt to improve the state of the world. We are now seeing that this separation of goals based on principle is not to be simply taken as a given and we are learning how we can, at times, make our profit-seeking and socially driven goals mutually supportive.

“The Summit represents a defining moment for the social entrepreneurship sector and its coming of age in Canada,” says David Pecaut, Chair of the Summit and senior partner with The Boston Consulting Group. “This new model of social change is distinctively appropriate for mobilizing talent, markets, and capital to bring innovation to some of our most challenging and intractable social issues. Government leaders, corporate leaders, and funders are realizing the breadth and importance of this movement.”

The social entrepreneurship community in the UK has been particularly successful featuring a range of successful ventures and even garnering special attention from the government. As such, the organizers of the Toronto Summit were sure to bring in speakers (Rod Schwartz, Catalyst Fund Management & Research Ltd. and Michele Giddens, Bridges Community Ventures) from the UK to help shine some light on what can be done to push the sector forward.

A New Approach

During one of the day’s many presentations, one panelist challenged the audience to think about how social entrepreneurs approach their surrounding environments. It is not uncommon to find non-profits and social entrepreneurs who will invest a great deal of their resources in pushing government to change policy that will help them achieve their goals. The panelist said that organizations can easily spend five years of their time and a large proportion of their often meager resources in this process, with no guarantee of success. Instead the panelist suggested that social entrepreneurs put more effort into finding creative solutions that help them get around these barriers, more time than they would otherwise spend trying to elicit change through public policy reform.

In the same panel, Tom Heintzman, President of Bullfrog Power, was discussing the challenges he faces in growing his renewable energy company. He noted four significant public policy related challenges that frustrate his sector:

• Ontario energy prices are capped.
  
• Ontario energy prices are subsidized.
  
• Nuclear power is granted limited liability in regards to its insurance that ultimately leads to yet another major subsidy.
  
• Most traditional forms of power generation in the province are allowed to externalize the financial costs of problems they cause—such as air pollution.

While the Bullfrog President was not specifically addressing the other panelist’s earlier statements regarding the opportunity in creatively getting around barriers, Heintzman’s statements were nevertheless relevant. Social entrepreneurs should be creative and should wisely use their limited resources. That said, creativity can only go so far. If you want to get into the renewable energy sector in Ontario, for example, it is not long until you run headlong into the factors that Heintzman listed. As a society, if we want to see the social entrepreneurship sector flourish, we will, at times, need to find ways to make changes which improve the conditions both for these ventures, and for the society in which we live.

A Canadian Champion
A major focus throughout the day included features on the six finalists for the Schwab Foundation Canadian ‘Social Entrepreneur of the Year.’ This year, Canada joined 26 other countries in selecting a national winner for this award leading to over 80 Canadian individuals/ventures being nominated. The Summit produced short videos on each of the finalists. Once these videos are posted online we will be certain to include the links below. The six finalists, all of whom are impressive in their own right, included:

The Summit produced short videos (linked to their names, below) on each of the finalists. Each of the six are impressive in their own right. The links to those videos are coupled with the Summit's own descriptions of each finalist.

Tzeporah Berman, Forest Ethics (Vancouver):
Tzeporah Berman is co-founder of Forest Ethics, a BC-based organization that runs programs in Canada, the US, and Chile to protect endangered forests and wildlife. They have used innovative programs to create consumer demand for wood and paper products that are produced according to ecologically responsible principles. Using the power of the market to drive behavior, they have encouraged forest companies to change their methods to meet that demand.

Geoffrey Cape, Evergreen (Toronto):
Geoff Cape, founding Executive Director of Evergreen, has grown the organization to a national level with over 70 staff and offices in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Evergreen is an innovative charity that explores the relationship between nature, culture and community in urban spaces. With offices across Canada, the environmental organization brings nature to our country’s cities through naturalization projects and motivates people to create and sustain healthy, natural outdoor spaces—all the while giving them the practical tools to it.

Ian Gill, Ecotrust Canada (Vancouver):
Ian Gill is President and founder of Ecotrust Canada and a director of Ecotrust (Portland, Ore.) Ecotrust builds the capacity of communities, institutions and businesses to participate in the conservation economy. The organization raises and brokers capital to accelerate the transition to a conservation economy and connects conservation entrepreneurs to each other and to the marketplace. The ultimate focus of Ecotrust is to champion the conservation economy.

Tim Jones, Artscape (Toronto):
Tim Jones is President and Chief Executive Officer of Artscape, a non-profit enterprise that builds creative communities and expands knowledge about the dynamics of creative places. Artscape works with developers to create affordable living and working spaces for artists that enable cultural districts to grow and thrive. Artscape engages in property development and management, master planning, creation and maintenance of arts districts, and supporting activities like research and consulting.

Dr. Gilles Julien, Social pediatrics (Montréal):
Dr. Gilles Julien is a pediatrician and champion of children's rights. Devoted to helping children from disadvantaged families grow up in a loving atmosphere, Dr. Julien is considered the father of social pediatrics, offering innovative solutions in the care of neglected and abused children. Dr. Julien believes that by looking at family ties, at interactions between parents, children and their community, one can better interpret a child's experience and understand why that child has developed a mental or physical illness.

Michel Labbé, Options for Homes (Toronto):
Michel Labbe is president of Options for Homes Non-Profit Corporation dedicated to providing quality homes in great communities at the best possible price. Through a range of services, the organization strives to bring home ownership within the reach of families with gross annual incomes as low as $40,000. Options has assembled teams of professionals and builders willing to work for the purchasers themselves, to produce quality homes they can enjoy. Options acts as a consultant to homeowners, working on their behalf to create their community.

In the end, Geoff Cape of Evergreen was selected as the winner, with a great deal of emphasis placed upon Evergreen's Brickworks project, which reclaims an old industrial space, and will create “a thriving environmentally-based community centre that engages visitors in diverse experiences connected to nature.” As part of his award Cape represented Canada along with past and present winners from the other 26 countries at the Annual Summit for Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs of the Schwab Foundation this January in Switzerland. It is at this event that the participants share their successes in dealing with many of the world’s greatest challenges.

The Summit was a tremendous success and all in attendance are excited to see what comes next.