Centre for Social Innovation Board Report – A Year in Review 2007-8
April 2008 – adapted for the CSI blog
The following is a report that was provided to the board of directors for CSI.
The Centre for Social Innovation has proven its model in 2007. We have become the vibrant synergistic community of change agents that we have always envisioned and we have taken it to scale. It has been a busy and exciting year and the following will give you a sense of some of the exciting things that have been happening here at the Centre for Social Innovation over the last year.
CSI Expands and adds 80 tenants
We opened our doors to the expanded space on the beautiful 4th floor of 215 Spadina on March 1st, 2007 and we have spent our first year stabilizing, implementing new systems and integrating new tenants in to the space. During this year, we have integrated two new staff (Yvonne and Camila), expanded our billing capacity, introduced a new event management system, implemented more robust financial management systems and have generally worked to make the space functional as well as a healthy and happy place to work.
Our expansion was made possible by the support of Margie Zeidler with UrbanSpace Property Group, the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the Canadian Alternative Investment Cooperative. We are ecstatic at our beautiful new space and we are proud to have proven that the model can successfully scale for impact. Now we are exploring how we can replicate our model in other communities.
CSI is drawing some attention
During the last year, we have undertaken a number of significant marketing achievements. Some highlights include:
launched our gorgeous new web site
Toronto Community Foundation's Vital Ideas Award
Now Magazine's Pick for Social Enterprise of the Year
Co-hosted the Social Entrepreneurship Summit with over 250 people attending
Partnered and launched the Enterprising Nonprofits Program
Co-host of the Social Venture Institute Toronto
Media coverage in the Star, SPIN and the Globe
In 2008, we will also be hosting:
Open Everything – June 4th
Sharing for Social Change – June 18th
Launching the Ontario Nonprofit Network – June 19th
We are also working on but haven't yet confirmed:
Social Entrepreneurship Summit 2008
The Art of Leadership
Communications Training
Financial Vibrancy
Youth Social Entrepreneurship
Drawing the Politicians into the Centre to launch ENP
On February 29th, 2008, in celebration of our first anniversary on the 4th floor, CSI hosted a party and invited Mayor David Miller, former Prime Minister Paul Martin, as well as Councillor Adam Vaughn, and MP Olivia Chow to speak. In addition we had both Rosario Marchese and Cheri DiNovo. It was great to have the political folks, but we also drew in foundation leaders, social entrepreneurs, thought leaders and other great people involved in our work. It was a great opportunity to celebrate and share what we have achieved and to position ourselves for the future.
In addition to our birthday, we also launched the Enterprising Nonprofits Program and further developed a dialogue about social entrepreneurship in Canada. The post party was also a fabulous success – bringing all our tenants and their friends into a great big birthday party to celebrate how we are all working to make the world a better place.
Enterprising Nonprofits Program
The ENP program is a funders circle that has come together to aggregate the recruitment and selection of nonprofits seeking micro-grants that will seed social enterprise. This is a one-year project has amassed $140,000 to operate the project. Of this $90,000 will be distributed to nonprofits exploring how to create revenue generating income streams that serve their social mission. Funders of this initative include:
Citizens Bank
Social Capital Partners
MaRS
Ministry of Citizenship
Alternat Credit Union
Carrot Cache
Cooperators Insurance
Metcalfe Foundation
Toronto Community Foundation
Toronto Training Board
CSI will be leading 3 Orientation Sessions between now and October and funding applications will be due on November 21st. Decisions about funding will be made before Christmas. The prototype will be complete by May 31st, 2009.
In addition to the funding, CSI is working to create capacity building programs to further support the grantees of these projects. We are in discussion with MaRS, HRSDC and George Brown College.
Incubated Projects: Achieving huge wins on toxics and children's health.
The Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and the Environment (CPCHE) is an incubated project of the Centre and one which I personally have spent the last 8 years working with as the founding Partnership Director. In 2007, CSI worked as the lead facilitator, with CPCHE partners to convenve the National Policy Consultation on Children's Health and the Environment - a national, multi-stakeholder policy consultation on toxics and kids health. The 6 city consultation led to a joint letter between CPCHE partners and the Canadian Chemical Producers Association advocating to Health Canada to integrate a childrens health lens into biomontoring, to stengethen the Chemicals Management Plan and to allocate resources towards CEH issues in Canada. CPCHE applied pressure in a variety of ways and it has netted huge impact.
On April 20, 2008, Minister of Health, Tony Clement, announced Canada's intention to ban Bisphenol A from baby bottles. This was a huge win for the CPCHE partners, many other groups and for Canada. In this announcement, Minister Clement committed to:
ban a product even where there wasn't a definitive body of evidence
demonstrated the precautionary principle can be put into legislative action
proved that the Chemicals Management Plan (which was directly linked to CPCHE activity) could have the strength to protect children in Canada
After 8 years of work on the project - working for these very changes – the fundamental goals of CPCHE are being implemented. We have a chemicals Management Plan with enough teeth to ban a product and the Minister is using the Precautionary Principle to make decisions to protect children and all people in Canada. These legislative actions have caused a fundamental market transformation and products made with BPA are now being taken off the shelves for all Canadians. The results are definitive and the collaborative model that was employed to get to this point was instrumental.This is what social innovation and systems change looks like.
After 8 years, the role of Partnership Director has moved to the capable hands of Erica Phipps who will be leading the charge to build stronger links between early childhood exposures and chronic illness and a national health promotion campaign. The National Policy Consultation will produce a National Vision and Strategy and CPCHE will continue to advocate for a healthy environment for children in Canada. CSI will continue to provide support to CPCHE as it moves into the next stage of its evolution.
Convening for Social Innovation
Core to the vision of the Centre for Social Innovation is a commitment to explore how collaboration strategies lead to systems change. Evolving the collaboration and open network practice of CSI continues to be central theme. CSI has played an instrumental role convening for social innovation in two strategic areas in 2007-8.
First, CSI has been convening, in partnership with many others, the social entrepreneurship enablers in Toronto, Ontario and has made connections across Canada and international. Central to this work has been the creation of two key documents: Building a Social Entrepreneurship Ecosystem a presentation that was delivered at the Social Entrepreneurship Summit that created a large and inclusive umbrella for social entrepreneurs to be a part of. This presentation has since been delivered to several different audiences including the Ontario Trillium Foundations board of directors and the Queens University Social Entrepreneurship Conference. The second key document is the result of a sector builders mapping exercise. Through a series of strategic meetings, CSI compiled and build a social entrepreneurship ecosytem map that shows clusters of groups work to improve the enabling environment for social enterpise. This map is being shared throughout the sector and will inform a series of upcoming meetings to help to coordinate the work of the sector.
The second project that CSI has been collaboratiing on is the creation of the Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN). This ambitious project grew out of work that Lynn Eakin was doing, funded by Metcalf Foundation, to explore how to organize the sector. After a meeting hosted here at the Centre, Lynn and Tonya began discussing how we might organize the sector. We then talked to two friends and so on. Then the modernization of the nonprofit legal framework consultation was upon us and the next thing you know, we had formed ONN and were building a province-wide network of networks to be able to respond to the government process. CSI is the legal home of ONN, but it is a fantastic example of using an innovative network governmance model to build the connections across the sector. Although it has only just begun, it has already had huge impact – 1. ONN has advocating for a province wide consultation with the sector about the modernization process and got it, 2. it has formed an expert reference constellation, led by Probono Law to support the NPO sector, 3. it is advocating for the our own public benefit act to ensure that the sector has its own legislation, 4. it has hired a staff person – Constance Exley – and it creating its cascading e-mail communications system, and 5. it is in the process of building its own governance model and strategic plan. The ONN will be hosting its first sector-wide meeting on June 19th to move its action plan forward.
CSI is proud of the work that we have been doing convening for social innovation. In both cases, these projects embody our principles of working across sectors, applying collaboration and entrepreneurship and working to find innovative ways to engage a broad umbrella of players.
Incubated Projects
We are now home to the following incubated projects
Ontario Nonprofit Network – www.ontariononprofitnetwork.ca
Green Enterprise Toronto – www.greenenterprise.net
Tech Soup Canada
Transforming Toronto
Social Purpose Enterprise Network
Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and Environment – www.healthyenvironmentforkids.ca
telecentre.org
Real Food for Real Kids Education Programs
Frontline Partners with Youth Network
CREOS – World Artisnal Project
- Media Arts Incubator
The following projects have been incubated with us:
Heliotrope
Isuma
Semesters for Social Innovation
Partnerships
Partnerships have been keen to just about everything that CSI does. And this year, we have been delighted to work with a wide range of partners. These include:
ENP – The Enterprising Nonprofits Program was founded and created in British Columbia. The ENP BC folks – David Le Page and the Van City folks – have been tremendous partners. They have given of their model freeling and have supported us in building ENP TO. Ultimately, the two projects are separate, but the spirit is a true collaboration. We are leveraging all of their investments and hope to be able to contribute to our collective work shortly. www.enterprisingnonprofits.org
Sage Centre – it has been a delight to work with Doug Kerr from the Sage Centre on the development of the Sharing for Social Change event that is planned for June 18th. This conference has been a great way to cement the great relationship that we share.
SIX – Social Innovation Exchange is a global initative of which the Centre for Socia Innovation was a founding partner. This project, based primarily out of the Young Foundation, is focused on building knowledge sharing around the world about social innovation. Our CSI blog postings can now be selectively found on the SIX site. www.socialinnovationexchange.org
SIG – Social Innovation Generation (SIG) is a national collaborative of institutions that are exploring how social innovation happens. The partnership incluldes the McConnell Foundation, MaRS, University of Waterloo, PLAN Canada and most recently Tides Canada. Tonya has been asked to be a Social Innovation Generation Fellow.
Youth Leadership with United Way of Toronto – CSI has partners with UWT to be a part of CITY Leaders. This is an exciting project that is focusing its energy on supporting young leaders from the priority neighbourhoods in Toronto.
Online Community Engagement
Finally, after much pain and suffering, we finally launched our web site. Check out www.socialinnovation.ca and you will find a fabulous new look and feel, tons of information and all the makings of a dynamic web 2.0 site, including a flickr feed of our community, a social innovation blog and a comprehensive listing of our fabulous tenants.
We still have plans for the web site... online booking system, social networking capabiities and a new way of organizing our content, but mostly we are just happy to have a web site.
Tied into our web site is our renowned e-bulletin. With over 4000 subscribers, there isn't an issue that doesn't get at least one person sending us a note saying how grateful they are for our information feed. We have great ambitions to grow this substantially in the coming year.
Things that have died at CSI in 2007
Social Innovation Canada – the partnership between Ashoka Canada and CSI never quite got off the ground. Ahead of its time, the effort to build an award program to recognize social innovators in Cananda has been eclipsed by several other initiatives that are similar or linked. Although tremendous effort was put into the project by the many partners and volunteers, SIC was unable to secure the funding to bring this project to life. That said, several other groups have moved into position to ultimately build out a similar vision for Canada.
All in all, it was a great year.... but just wait for my posting on the year ahead!!!
Tonya
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