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Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (SEE) seeks to address Northern Ontario’s social and economic challenges through the development of a social enterprise ecosystem. As an emergent initiative, it has engaged multi-sector partnerships and diverse stakeholders in strengthening the region’s resilience by leveraging local assets to diversify economies. NORDIK Institute serves as a backbone organization to the collective.
SEE aims to strengthen, support, grow and scale Social Enterprises (SEs) across northern Ontario through:
NORDIK is currently collaborating with organizations to co-create and deliver tailored social enterprise development workshops and programming to meet their specific needs. Please contact us to find out more about fostering and growing businesses that have a social purpose, putting people and planet first.
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The 2019-2023 phase of SEE concentrated on women-led social enterprises. The Women of Ontario Social Enterprise Network (WOSEN) was a province-wide collaborative composed of five social innovation and system change organizations aiming to redesign the entrepreneurial ecosystem to meet the needs of women and non-binary founders from diverse, equity-seeking groups. WOSEN’s focus was women who have business solutions that put people and the planet first (i.e., social enterprises). Its approach intentionally moved away from current services and financing structures that are readily available and easy to deliver largely due to their limited relevance and accessibility for those that fall outside of the dominant culture, choosing instead to develop a model that holistically supports diverse entrepreneurs’ learning journeys and aspirations. This approach helped hundreds of entrepreneurs across Ontario to start and grow their businesses and unlocked more than 8.8 millions of dollars in capital for these initiatives.
Three reports document the project. Part One, Outstanding By Standing Together, Interim Report and Summary Interim Report (March 2021) indicate the partners’ foundation of trust and dedication to collaboration and co-creation in meeting the project’s objectives, processes, programming and evaluation framework is seen as an innovative, effective and an impactful approach to addressing systems change.
Part Two, Centring Equity: Catalyzing system change through a collaborative, cogenerating knowledge network (Oct. 2022), deepens the Interim report’s key learnings. It contextualizes the initiative within current social change practices and community development principles aiming to advance equity, providing a critical reflection on WOSEN’s approach to, and resulting impact on, the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It contributes to: i) understanding how community-based research methodology can contribute to building, enhancing, and expanding equity; and, ii) how to develop an equity-centric social entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Part Three, Investing in Women Entrepreneurs: A Case Study for co-creating effective supports, (this report), provides an overview of the key elements of each of the three catalyzing strategies for co-creating effective supports for diverse women entrepreneurs. It is followed by ten recommendations for increasing investments in women founders through equity-centred collaboratives, partnerships and advocacy, and program diversity, flexibility and duration, to name a few.
WOSEN was funded in part by the Government of Canada through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev) and the Northern Ontario Heritage Foundation Corporation (NOHFC).
For more information: Visit the website (the link is fine) Send us an email (the link attempts to goes to my name and address- please change it to info@seethechange.ca
Originating from SEE in 2015, the Urban Indigenous Youth for Change (UIYFC) project works with youth to create community and capacity in the social economy through social enterprise development.
UIYFC views youth as changemakers, those who are capable of making change in their communities based on their passions, which is the piece that is emphasized and explored through culturally relevant programming.
UIYFC provides an in-depth opportunity to teach and learn from urban Indigenous youth how to incorporate cultural and land based learning that may lead to increased and diverse participation in the social economy. Youth are provided the opportunity to co-design curriculum, co-deliver, lead or facilitate workshops to other Indigenous youth in the Sault Ste. Marie area.
UIYFC poises youth to develop their leadership, business and self-expression skills through their active participation in various community activities and events.
Urban Indigenous youth are able to leave a mark of their own creative expression on the urban landscape through arts-based workshops such as the creation of art murals, digital story-telling and other related cultural programming. Youth have the opportunity to participate in the design and creation process while developing skills that can be applied to careers in the arts and/or social entrepreneurship.
