Tonya Surman's blog

Article reposted from Dowser via Tim Draimin...

Eight trends in social entrepreneurship to watch for in 2011

January 27th, 2011 2:37 PM By Tamara Schweitzer

Perhaps an old concept for many of us, this article in the Harvard Business Review, "Shared Values" by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer may be a defining moment in the transformation of thinking about capitalism.

It was a delight to see mention of Community Bonds in the Globe and Mail this week in their article about social finance. It is pretty darned exciting to see people talking about the different ways that we might use social finance to change the world.Very exciting indeed.... hey Ontario! Are you listening? Just think of what we could do together?

$1000 cash to do something AWESOME! That is the idea behind the Awesome Foundation TO.  This week #awesometo launched and is already the talk of the town.

What is the Awesome Foundation? Here is how Wired Mag describes it...

NOW Magazine's editor (and one of our amazing Board Members) Alice Klein writes about the growth of social impact investing in her article Many Happy Returns. In it, she profiles CSI's Community Bond offering.

And today, we discoverd that we have met our $2million investment target and are now selling Community Bonds to buy out the bank... yupp... you heard. We are seriously keen on having the community buy out the bank so that we are writing cheques to all of you. Pretty cool huh?

I must say that this is a great, quick article by Nathaniel Cahners Hindman in the Huffington Post confirming that experience matters to entrepreneurship too.  Great way to bust up some stereotypes.

Check out what tenant - the Pembina Institute - is doing on city transit issues in partnership with the Toronto Environmental Alliance and others. And in the Toronto Sun no less.... read full article here.

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Mayor Rob Ford's subway plan will leave more losers than winners when it comes to access to public transit, two environmental groups warned Wednesday.

Instead of writing a holiday message this year, we thought that it would be more useful to actually update some of our web site over the holidays... and that is exactly what we did.... So, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and here is the best of the Constellation Model - all in one place, for your reading pleasure.

Great video from Steven Johnson about where good ideas come from... puts forward a solid explanation for why shared spaces like the Centre for Social Innovation are so important for fostering innovation... also begs us to be patient in the evolution of our ideas, explaining that some of the best ideas took years to evolve and benefit fundamentally to the collision of ideas - the ultimate mash-up.