Lauren Sears On The Rise Of Social Entrepreneurship In Canada & Creating Positive Impact

“A new millionaire’s goal is not to have a million dollars but to impact a million lives through their work.” Lauren Sears lives by this statement, not only professionally but personally.

Lauren is recognised as a leader in developing social purpose organisations and has coached, mentored and supported numerous businesses and individuals to achieve their maximum social impact.

Hailing from Truro, Nova Scotia, Lauren got ‘itchy feet’ at an early age and travelled to Winnipeg to get not one, but two degrees, in both Biopsychology and Business Administration. Having conquered Winnipeg, and the drastically cold winters, Lauren realised she missed the ocean and decided to venture home where she became the CEO of a crowdfunding platform called Pursu.it. Her entrepreneurial spirit started there, and after meeting David Upton of Common Good Solutions (CGS), Lauren decided to jump ship from Pursu.it and work for the greater good.

Over the last 3 years, Lauren has led a team that has supported the launch of 45 social enterprises in Nova Scotia, supported multiple government initiatives and helped to grow the CGS team from a start-up to that of a full-blown organisation. Presenting and speaking at over 54 conferences internationally, Lauren headlined FRANK 2019 and the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) in Ethiopia. It is through Lauren’s unwavering ambition, drive and support, that CGS were able to secure bringing SEWF to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in September 2020.

When Lauren isn’t changing the world one community at a time, Lauren is keenly interested in developing and supporting young people through entrepreneurship and sport. Lauren is a Director at 100 Seed$ Atlantic, sits on the Board from Habitat for Humanity Nova Scotia and is a Director at Volleyball Nova Scotia, as well as the assistant coach of Saint Mary's University women's volleyball team.

Lauren shares her experience working to grow and develop the Canadian social enterprise movement, providing insights and key learnings from a part of the world which is gaining strong momentum.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in the social enterprise sector?

[Lauren Sears] - I get asked this question a lot and I guess I'll have to rewind because it doesn't really start in a great place in terms of the story, but it's true. Back in 2013 I was finishing my second Bachelor's degree in business. I went to the University of Winnipeg, mostly playing volleyball and classes there but you know that at times they were not necessarily the priority. And I found out in April of 2013 that my dad was terminally ill with a super rare kind of cancer that started in his gallbladder. I flew home, I was able to finish my degree. I had planned on doing an honours but cut that short. And my sister left her co-op job and we came home to take care of my dad for the summer. My mum was still taking care of their businesses. It was a really amazing summer, I was so happy to have spent the time.

In December of 2013 my dad passed away and I think up until that point I was a much more financially motivated person. My parents had both grown up in poverty and their parents were all entrepreneurs. I think maybe it's not such a stretch that I am now myself pursuing entrepreneurship. When you're a kid and your parents are telling you to do something, you just don't. I thought I was going to be a doctor there for a minute. What a joke. At that point I really started reevaluating what my priorities were. I always thought, ‘okay, I am a former jock. I could probably climb a corporate ladder, that would be really easy to do just with the kind of personality I have, in the way those things work.’

If you keep winning, you keep climbing, that's the athletic mentality I guess.

I just started to question what the hell money was for and why it mattered.

It didn't matter that my parents had built this little empire of two car dealerships for themselves and built this nice little life and they were comfortable. It just didn't interest me. To be honest, I floated around for quite a bit, about eight months. My now husband was finishing his Masters and my sister was finishing her engineering degree. I pretended to be Martha Stewart for a bit and I made a lot of lunches and a lot of dinners and I baked a lot of cakes. In 2014, I figured I better do something with myself. I started looking for jobs and everything I found and came across happened to be in the startup world, which was interesting. I ended up taking a position around the retail logistics.

I hated retail logistics, I thought I had attention to detail, but with the number of spreadsheets I had to deal with, I was like ‘this is not for me.’ It did move me into sales, which is more my interest and specifically around business development, which I think is a bit different than straight sales because it's more relationship based than just product based. That organisation was interesting, it was all women. We were creating this really interesting blend between beauty, healthcare and natural efficacy to skincare. For eczema sufferers like myself, it was really cool. But the culture wasn't so great.

I ended up leaving, dove headfirst between nonprofit, which had a 10 month grant runway, which needed to be overhauled. It was a crowdfunding platform for athletes and it was actually the first one.

That's where I learned titles were free. I was hired by two women that were running two other tech firms, and this was their third little nonprofit baby because one of them was an Olympian and the other was a high level athlete. They said, ‘we want to see this keep going’. I said, ‘great’. I became CEO of me, myself and I.

I spent about 10 months there and through that experience is actually how I met Dave Upton, one of the co founders of Common Good Solutions. My two bosses at the time, as wonderful as they were and continue to be, there's just not a lot of time to be spent when you're trying to raise two other tech firms. I ended up randomly meeting Dave at an evening about social entrepreneurship and I was asked to come present on the nonprofit I was running. Dave was there, talking about Common Good Solutions and I still didn't know what social entrepreneurship was, I was like, ‘I don't even know what this term means. I don't know what social enterprise is, but whatever this Dave guy's talking about, sounds really cool.’ So as Dave does, he said, ‘why don't you pop by the shop for a coffee at some point?’

In March 2016 I finally took him up on the coffee and he started mentoring me on this crowdfunding platform. I started understanding what Common Good Solutions was doing. More so around what social entrepreneurship was. Dave is telling me about this brilliant hybrid model that's about to exist in Nova Scotia called a Community Interest Company. And me having this ‘what?’ sort of reaction of, ‘there's somewhere between these two things?’ And that's really how I ended up in social enterprise. I ran that nonprofit platform for 10 months, totally burnt out. And along the way had been planting seeds. Dave saw me do a couple of presentations or pitches, which is some of the stuff that I really like to do. And in the back of my mind I consider myself to be a bit of an eternal opportunist where I'm always open to hearing it.

If there's a new opportunity, I want to hear it, I want to know what's going on because you never know what's going to come of it. In October of 2016 Dave was the only one I knew of doing business development at Common Good. At the time there was only five staff. The CGS now has 20 staff so it's been quite a quick growth and I was sort of one of the ones in that initial growth that took us to about 10 or 11 folks. Dave needed help with business development, that's how I fell into Common Good, as a business development officer. And now I'm obsessed. Obsessed!

You now are Managing Director of Common Good Solutions. I'm really keen to hear more about what sort of projects you are involved with in this team of 20 people?

It's evolved over the last number of years. I've been at CGS for three years now. When I first came in, what had allowed for some of our kick-start growth was a partnership with the Social Enterprise Network of Nova Scotia. They are a member driven nonprofit that represent the social enterprise sector in Nova Scotia. At that time there's a lot of sector building going on, a lot of liaising with government. One of the projects that SENS secured was for an impact incubator to help start and grow more social enterprises in Nova Scotia.

Common Good Solutions became the secretariat. Acting on behalf of the board of SENS, we were actually delivering the work. Over the last three years we've supported the launch of 45 social enterprises across the province and that was up and down, lots of learning, reiterating the program.

You make assumptions about where you think entrepreneurs will be and how they'll respond to the content or a light hand approach. What we learned was that we really needed to have a much more step-by-step guided approach for some of the folks that were coming to the table.

There was just not much understanding of business in general.

Most of these folks were coming from a place of doing work directly with the beneficiary and just seeing another opportunity to be able to support. That was really interesting as a kickstarter for the growth of CGS and really the work that we've always done has been through consulting but not necessarily in the the normal colonial sense.

Someone mentioned to me at one point that consulting is sort of colonial in the way it works because you generally hire old white dudes as experts and you pay them lots of money for their expertise, and then the next time you have a problem you have to call them all over again.

So we're sort of in the business of you can call us once and we're hoping that whatever we do as an intervention, whether it be a new business plan, you want to run a new social enterprise perhaps or a non-profit that would like to generate your own revenue in some way, shape or form. You want to do some market research, you want to do a feasibility study, you'd like to understand how to measure impact in a greater sense. Those are all pieces of our consulting work. And in the last year and a half we've been able to use those same skills in just a different way around social innovation labs. The Department of Community Service with the province of Nova Scotia as part of their poverty reduction strategy have wanted to try out labs and labs are not necessarily a new thing. I think they've been used for the last 10, 15 years in lots of different industries to sort of create multi-stakeholder problem solving. And now the government wanted a shot, which at some times in my mind when I'm sceptical, I'm like, ‘does that mean they're not cool anymore? If the government thinks it's cool. Does that mean it's not cool anymore?’

We've been running phases of these labs in different communities around Nova Scotia, which has been interesting. In the Cape Breton regional municipality, there are pockets of communities where there's incredibly high under or just complete unemployment. And then you've got employers that have, six to 800 jobs that they're flying in foreign temporary workers for. One of the biggest issues there is transportation. How do we get those people half an hour down the road to work? That was one of the projects. The second one was down in the Tri-County area around childcare alternatives. They started a pre-primary program a couple of years ago where kids that are four that would normally still be in daycare, could go to school with their older siblings and get used to that school system.

But lots of things have unintended consequences.

And one of those unintended consequences when they launched the pre-primary program was that you essentially decimated the employees of the daycare systems and all the daycares in the Tri-County area because come on, who doesn't want summers off?

So, now there's a shortage of daycare workers. So what could be done in terms of community problem solving to think about alternatives to childcare? And the third one we've been running that's been incredibly successful so far and I think a really good example of a symbiotic relationship, which is something that interests me a lot in this work. And I hope to see more of the lab that we ran here in HRM Halifax region municipality around African Nova Scotia and youth unemployment. In Nova Scotia there's a long, long history of generations and generations of African Nova Scotians. The black community here are the Indigenous black population, we're talking 500 years of history and generally an underserved population, lot of different systemic issues. And so chronically over the last number of years, decades really since before I've been born and I just turned 30 in June.

The unemployment rate for African Nova Scotian youth has been double that of the regular youth population. So something like 20 to 32% unemployment versus 14 -16% unemployment. And they've even broken it down to number of jobs. 561 jobs. That's it.

You now are Managing Director of Common Good Solutions. I'm really keen to hear more about what sort of projects you are involved with in this team of 20 people? [Continued…]

And maybe that seems like a big number, but really I don't think it's that big of a number. And so we really were only able to secure facilitating that lab because it was done in partnership with the O.N.E. North End Community Economic Development Society. We took one of our staff members, Rodney Small and seconded him onto the O.N.E. He had been doing that work as a project over the last number of years and it's now about to become its own fully funded nonprofit.

We supported Rodney and his team to build that out to become independent of CGS, and we do what we do best, which is really provide tools and research. What we're hoping we'll see is more empowerment out of this community to prototype some of the ideas that have spun out of it that were really community-driven. One example being a one stop shop where youth in this community can come to do skills building; like build a resume, how do I interview well, how do I broach these conversations as one part. And then creating employer education. I think there are a lot of employers that would love to hire more African Nova Scotian youth, but perhaps feel really intimidated by the conversation and not wanting to create a fence, maybe feel like they don't know how to best support that population.

People really want to start thinking about inclusion versus just diversity where you start counting boxes.

I think that when we move into phase two, which is testing the prototypes will see even more interesting learning emerge.

You are the hosts of the Social Enterprise World Forum in 2020 which will be held in September in Halifax. What are you most looking forward to about the forum and how have you seen it act as a catalyst for sector development in the work that you've done today?

We're so excited. Honestly, we took the entire team to Edinburgh in 2018 and I do think it was a part of the reason that we were able to secure the forum because of the number of youth that worked for us. 80% of our staff are 30 and under. We just got a lot of energy for it. But I got to tell you, when people know you're going to host a really incredible party, everybody starts calling you. What can I bring to the party? I would love to add to the party. Let me come party too. So I think just from an awareness raising perspective, it's huge. This is a really big opportunity and potentially defining moment for our region in Atlantic Canada, more specifically Nova Scotia and it doesn't always get its due, even in Canada.

I mean, people think the East coast is Quebec and then there's nothing after that. So anybody listening, you've got to look at a map. There are four provinces beyond Quebec that represent not a huge part of the population. I think we're not even quite 2 million people, but we're a hardy people and so I'm just really excited to shine a light on our region, not only for other fellow Canadians, but also for people around the world. There are lots of people that would love, like a bucket list, to visit the Maritimes and then just never other than the dream have a reason to come. I think to tie this into a lot of our peers in their work is just an extra great excuse to show up.

You've worked a lot with these different social enterprises and more broadly across the sector. So what do you believe to be some of the key strengths of the Canadian social enterprise movement? And what do you think that some other countries could potentially learn from those strengths that you have in your approach?

I think one that we're hoping to deepen, particularly across governments, is the fact that there are levels of government that are very interested in what's going on in the social sector. I think for that reason that might be different than a lot of countries. I know there are certain countries that have a lot of government support, but others that could have more because the policy regulations and some of the funding around these things is, until those things move, it’s still very difficult to have awareness in or even set up a social enterprise or find a way to fund a social enterprise or invest in a social enterprise.

I'd say particularly recently where the Canadian federal government has invested in almost a billion dollars into this sector over the next 10 years is a statement.

But there are two streams of funding that are coming down right now. One is around investment readiness. The Federal Government committed $50 million to different priority groups across the nation, all around social innovation and social finance getting ready for the next 10 years of funding that are going to come through the social innovation and social finance fund. The investment readiness fund is more grant-based and could be used for things like getting a business plan for a social enterprise you'd like to start or feasibility around something like that. It could be to invest in a piece of equipment. When I think about some of the social enterprises that produce food or packaged goods or things like that, there might be something that creates more efficiency in their operation.

The next round of funding over 10 years will end up being debt-based financing and so more traditional styles of loans and investments, which will be interesting. That'll be a question that I have around how many nonprofits are going to take the risk on of debt-based financing. Time will tell. It may favour the for-profit sector, which people could quibble about whether or not it's social enterprise or social purpose or what have you.

I guess at the end of the day, for me, I just hope it creates a positive impact.

I'd say another key strength of Canadian social enterprise is that we do have some very large member-driven networks that help connect coast to coast to coast. You could argue some of those coasts are not as connected as others, but groups like the Canadian Community Economic Development Network or CED Net have got offices across the country. There are very member driven folks like Imagine Canada. They represent a lot of the nonprofits and charitable sector. When you have a greater collection of voices to approach policy makers it gives you more credibility, more voice and more collective direction in some parts. Those are my two for sure. I think some areas have more strength than others. I'd say that when I look at places like British Columbia and Ontario, when they have really large foundations or funders like Vancity Bank, like the McConnell Foundation, there's more access to capital there. I’d say those provincial ecosystems are stronger than some of the other ones because of that awareness and interest in and commitment to investment. Where in other areas maybe not so much.

In Atlantic Canada, we certainly lack funders. The Prairies, I haven't heard of too much. I know they have some around there, but not as much. Quebec's another really great example, where they have more committed funding going on. So in those regions, I'd say their ecosystems could potentially be a bit more developed at times because of that cash injection.

Where do you believe that some of these Canadian social entrepreneurs struggle most and and how have you seen them respond to those struggles? How are they addressing them?

I think it's a bit more regional, I think particularly when you think about a raw startup. The awareness around how to even run a business can be really difficult.

If you have access to an incubator or accelerator or those kinds of programs or universities that have those kinds of programs that are more well developed, that is an asset.

But the rural versus urban conversation certainly makes it more difficult for some. If you're in an urban setting where a lot of the expertise lies, then your access seems to be a lot easier because there's going to be multiple places to get it. When I think about Halifax, we have our impact incubator. You have Volta, they do more tech incubation, not necessarily social enterprise, but if that's where you wanted to start a business, you'd probably go there. They have the EAD program, which can put you on employment insurance while you try and start a business and they have their own programming.

St. Mary's University has start up programming. Dalhousie has start up programming, so in an urban setting, there's a lot in the more rural settings I'd argue, the universities are doing great things, but if you're not in a hotbed around Acadia or Cape Breton University or Saint of X, then you're driving somewhere or you're going somewhere. We've tried to create more online content for people to access, and younger folks I think are more keen to use online resources. But older Canadians not necessarily. So to me, that gap is still something that remains. There's outreach, but I think it's still something that is to be solved.

I'm really keen to hear what books or resources or other things you'd recommend to some of our listeners who are passionate about social enterprise?

The number one book, and it's not necessarily social enterprise related, but it's really going to make you question some things about yourself and your business. And the author is Lynne Twist. She wrote a book called the Soul of Money. The Soul of Money will rock you to your core and everybody's underlying unconscious beliefs around money. It shows up everywhere, including in your social enterprise. I'd also really recommend a book called the Power of TED. TED stands for The Empowerment Dynamic. And that is really a very easy to read story about placing yourself in the position of being the victim versus being a creator and the other roles around that and roles that we play for others and roles that we play with ourselves. The third one I'd recommend in my top three is called the Rise of the Meaningful Economy. I recommend that one because it was written by the Barrett's Value Centre in the United States. What they have done over the last number of decades is track the psychological development across time of generations. There is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you extended it past those survival needs and what that means for your psyche. Because everyone's got the sense of millennials and generation Z that are different.

Now, this book doesn't speak about generation Z just because they're getting to that age where they might be documented, but the millennials are in a state of consciousness and a level of consciousness that no generation has hit this young. So we are already believing in collaboration and giving back to community and building that into our lives. It's not something that we want to do when we're ready to retire, which has been the general sense. So I think that’s why we’re seeing a big shift of young entrepreneurs in this sector.