Week 2 – Day 3 – Social Enterprise
This is my first blog post ever so I’ll try to be brief and concise. A few months ago I joined Recrear as one of the three conference organizers for RecrearMagnify. Every single speaker we have had in week two has been phenomenal and expanded our minds in some way. Todays topic was social enterprise and the discourse that resulted from our after noon panel discussion was incredible. Our panel consisted of Keenan Weller from LiveWorkPlay, Vinod Rajasekaran founder of Hub-Ottawa, and Brenda Richardson from the Causeway Work Center. Each of these speakers had incredibly stimulating perspectives on social enterprise. We explored the issues and realities of operating in a social business, non-profit, and charity framework. Each approach presents it own challenges.
I now find myself with many new terms in my vocabulary but a million more questions. Something to consider as a growing organization is our local context and which framework we wish to operate in. I think that it is crucial that we have an ongoing dialogue about measuring impact outside of an RBM model. We learned a great deal about the fallacy of impacting change when many organizations only operate to address symptoms instead of address the cause.
In the last 10 days I’ve learned a great deal about the reality of international development, non-profit functions, the complexities of funding and much more. One phrase that really struck me this week is that “Youth are not the future, they are the present.” This had a huge impact on my perspective and has been fuelling my drive everyday as we dive deeper into the discourse of development.
-Mitch
