The number of freelancers is growing. But are freelance unions growing? If not, why not? And what would happen if freelance unions worked together?

Freelance writer Toni Main (not their real name) landed a new $6,000 gig. There was no formal contract–just a series of emails and mutual trust about what was expected, what they would deliver and how much they would make. Several months later, Main remained unpaid. As a last resort, they turned to the Canadian Freelance Union for help. 

“And that’s why we’re here, says” Nora Loreto, new President of the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU), a local of Unifor, founded in 2006 by the Communications, Energy, Paperworkers Union (CEP). “It’s also what I like most about what we do. When someone has a grievance, been harassed, or strung along by a contractor, we get involved. We use a variety of tactics to get justice for our members. And we have not failed yet.”

CFU, like other unions in the media and communication space also provide members with health care insurance options, training opportunities, contract negotiation support and press cards.

Yet, despite the benefits of joining a union and increased number of freelancers due to ongoing tsunami waves of layoffs in the media sector, including Postmedia’s recent move to cut 11 per cent of its editorial staff, CFU freelance union membership numbers (200) seem surprisingly low.

Loreto says part of the reason is that there many freelance media/communication professionals unions out there, like the Canadian Writer’s Union (1,600 members), The Canadian Freelance Guild (340 members), the  Communications Workers of Canada (6,000 members due largely to CBC worker memberships)  and CFU’s parent union, Unifor Media Council (8,000) to name a few.

Ultimately, this fragments both membership and power. There is also the out of pocket cost issue ($125-150 per year per union) and member churn; if someone gets a job, they leave.

Other reasons include the fact that the majority of Canada’s 2.8 million (15 per cent of the labour force) contractor workers and self-employed founders, are largely under informed about the existence and benefits of freelance unions and the value of collective bargaining.

However, Loreto is optimistic that will change.

Recently, Loreto co-organized a hybrid freelancer summit in Toronto at Metropolitan University. Approximately 20+ people representing a variety of organizations—or themselves—attended the event, which took place February 3. 

One of them was Chris Katsarov Luna, freelance photojournalist and founding member of the freelance union United Photojournalists of Canada. Luna says many photojournalists have recently found themselves pink-slipped due to tight budgets and then re-hired on contract terms, an arrangement that saves the company up to 25 per cent per person in staff costs. 

“Some (people) think freelancing is great, but most of us are not in the least bit interested in being self-employed and would prefer a regular, waged position with benefits,” says Luna. 

This includes soft benefits too, like corporate discounts for gym memberships, and other “soft” benefits not extended to contractors. 

Luna felt the freelance summit meeting was very productive and believes collaboration can power up and bring more negotiating power to their members.

Freelancers growing in number

Contract workers, solopreneurs and self-employed founders (freelancers) remain the fastest growing segment of the Canadian labour force. Surveys done by Statistics Canada shows the top reason for going freelance was freedom, followed by the inability to find suitable employment.  Women freelancers also cite escaping workplace discrimination, harassment and corporate glass cages as key reasons for exiting traditional employment. Although the number of people employed as freelancers dipped slightly in 2021, Upwork, a U.S. based, global freelance platform with more than 14 million users, anticipates freelancers will represent over 50 per cent of the U.S. workforce in the U.S. by 2027. A 2023 study by MBO Partners, a U.S. based  independent worker management company,  shows the number of American freelancers increased by 26 per cent in 2022. Experts predict similar growth trends in Canada, especially as companies begin to insist on a return to the office, a condition some workers now balk at.

The pay gap

Freelancing is tough for all, but especially women and other marginalized groups.

While income data varies by industry, age and province, the majority of freelancer workers are barely keeping their heads above water. In 2020, Canadian male freelancers earned on average $45,600, while women working in the same field made just  $34, 400–a 24 per cent gender-based wage gap. Thus, average freelancer incomes barely exceed Canada’s current poverty line ( $37, 542). When we further compare the gender pay gap in the freelance space to the waged employment space, recent OECD data shows the pay gap for women freelancers is a  whopping 40 percent higher than that experienced by women in the waged sector. The more intersectionalities you add in, the wider this income gap gets– available studies also show racialized people, single parents, and recent immigrants are over represented in the freelance and self-employment space, and even more likely to struggle financially than their white counterparts, and black freelancers often face discrimination in online hiring platforms.

Being a freelancer is clearly a tough hustle at the best of times, but with rampant inflation, no paid leave or access to subsidized health or dental plans, and chronically late pay cheques– studies show 29 per cent of freelance invoices are paid late– it’s getting harder and harder for freelancers to make ends meet. This is again, especially true if you’re a woman– while male freelancers are paid late 24 per cent of the time, female freelancers are waiting on a payment that’s “in the mail” 31 per cent of the time. 

Are Entrepreneurs Freelancers too?

Anyone who works independently, without a formal salary, according to Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) essentially self-employed aka a freelancer—and this includes consultants, contractors, and includes self-employed entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are commonly viewed as people building the next Facebook. But the fact is, 55 per cent of all incorporated businesses are enterprises with just 1-4 employees. micro enterprises–the vast majority of which solopreneur enterprises. However, a search of start-up and growth programs (such as Startup Canada and Futurpreneur) shows no mention of unions and how solopreneurs founders might benefit by joining. Instead, solopreneurs default lawyers to help with contract disputes or harassment claims.

Given that even a simple “cease and desist letter” or taking legal action to get paid can run into the thousands, many solopreneurs across industries increasingly realize they have a lot in common with freelancers when it comes to living with precarity, vulnerability and accessing basic worker rights. Nancy Wilson, founder and CEO of the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce, says their members, many of whom were hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic, are increasingly looking to the government for answers to systemic self-employment related exploitation issues felt more acutely now than ever before.  

“Anyone fighting to change the system can learn a lot from the labour movement. We deliberately reached out to the Canadian Freelance Union and the Canadian Labour Congress to join our advocacy alliance for self-employed individuals,” Wilson says.

As an entrepreneur, what’s your time worth to you? 

Now, what’s having control of your time worth? 

For most people who own their own business–especially small businesses owned by women–the answer is a lot. Studies show small business owners regularly work more than 50 hours a week, with 68 percent of those hours spent just managing daily tasks, such as emails or phone calls, and only 31 percent of that time spent actively growing their business. Moreover, in a 2021 survey, 41 percent of small business entrepreneurs reported being called away to handle a work-related matter, even when they were actively trying to take a break.

These are the kinds of problems Toronto-based Jennifer Hazel of Curate Concierge has set out to solve. 

Essentially, Curate Concierge helps entrepreneurs design and implement tightly curated, streamlined, technology-enabled work flows so that founders spend more time on their business rather than in their business. 

“My services appeal especially to growing small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to scale their systems operations to fit the budget, the needs, and the projection of their own growth,” Hazel adds. “ Our solutions are also really customized, scalable and agile– ones that can adapt.”

Similar to the way a scientist needs carefully crafted, systematically controlled research practices in order to conduct a successful experiment and gather the most accurate and useful data, small businesses too, need efficient, personally tailored operational and data gathering  systems to be successful.

Everyone knows this. But there is seemingly never enough time. And few founders go into starting a business dreaming about building a starship enterprise style operating system or healthy approach to work. They figure out the importance later on. 

This is a story Hazel knows well.

After returning from a maternity leave, Hazel says she returned to a job in which her duties were so “dramatically altered that I couldn’t really work it anymore.” With her young daughter at home and dependent on her, Hazel, who had initially been studying to be a lawyer, found she had to “make a shift very quickly,” and went into a retraining program to be a paralegal. 

Why Entrepreneurship?

“It wasn’t like I chose to be an entrepreneur at that point,” says Hazel. “Paralegal seemed like a good middle ground and timing wise, it fit. I was relying on a childcare subsidy that I absolutely had to keep – but you absolutely have to be employed or in school or…you have to be working.”

When she finished the program, however, Hazel found herself in an awkward position–she couldn’t work as a paralegal yet, because she was waiting for her licensing to come through, but was severely over qualified to be an administrative assistant. Hazel began thinking about the practice management skills she had learned during her certification as a paralegal, and that’s when the idea of running her own business “started to gel.”

Taking the Busy out of Business

Entrepreneurs–particularly women and especially women with kids– come up against “structural barriers” within contemporary work culture that not only make it harder for them to succeed, but create an emotionally and professionally damaging environment. 

Hazel soon realized she had skills which could help other entrepreneurs not only build less “busy” time sucking businesses, but better lives., Hazel’s business, Curate Concierge started as a business admin company for “twenty bucks an hour, in between (her) daughter’s naps and after she went to bed.”

“I think I posted an ad or responded to an ad (for work) or something in a Facebook group for East End Toronto mom entrepreneurs,” she says. “These were all women with businesses who, a lot of them, were on maybe their second mat leave, or were in between jobs or had recently left their place of work because (the job) didn’t work for them–the hours didn’t work for them, or the work was not aligned (with what they needed). 

Despite the freedom on being an entrepreneur, “They (the women entrepreneurs) were burning the fuck right out because, I mean, insert any one of a million reasons why the traditional job market is hostile to women working parents– and, you know, add in any other intersectionalities on top of that–and you just start to find yourself lower and lower down in the economy.” 

From these experiences, Hazel conceived Curate Concierge–although it certainly wasn’t easy, she says, noting that in the beginning she was under charging for her services and over extending herself personally–things she seeks to help her clients overcome now. 

“It cost me in the beginning way, way more to offer my services than I ever made from it,” she says. “I started learning the lesson (that I) had to value my time–that came very very quickly.”

That lesson became even more important, she says, when she and her partner split, taking her from a dual income parent to a single one–an incident that helped guide her to incorporate feminist ideology into her business, albeit “by accident.”  

“That split came, and suddenly the stakes got so much higher–I had to support myself and two little kids by myself as a solo parent…Toronto is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and I found myself tied here in a co-parenting relationship.”

Although this was difficult, Hazel says the split was ultimately good, because it allowed her to see herself and her work from new, feminist-oriented perspectives. 

“The imbalance (in my work life) started, really, when my children arrived–or, really, if we go back a little bit further than that, the fact that I got knocked up before I could even start my career,” she says. “This was where my life was at the time, and these were things that were not as smack-in-the-face prominent to me at the time, when you start to realize the gender imbalance in the home and in the workplace.” 

“The only reason my new business could take off,” Hazel adds with a laugh, speaking of the unpaid  domestic and emotional labour she juggled prior to her separation,  “is the fact that I wasn’t cleaning up after after a quote unquote  ‘third child’ in addition to my other two actual children.”

Beating Toxic Productivity Culture

The idea that you have to be constantly on and constantly available as a worker–or as a business owner–is a toxic one, says Hazel, and something she works hard to recondition both systems and her clients to fight against. One client, for example–a lawyer who was used to always being “on”–was getting ready to take a vacation for a week, and asked Hazel to watch her inbox for her, even though no one was in litigation and she didn’t really need someone to be paying attention to her emails–she was just so accustomed to being available that she assumed she had to be, even though it wasn’t necessary. 

“I said, ‘Okay, does the auto responder work on your email? Then why don’t you just turn it off, save yourself the money and enjoy your week at the cottage?” she says. “It was honestly so unheard of for her, and she wrote back to me in such shock at such a simple suggestion…those are really common stories that I get with clients.”

Hazel says helping her clients see and beat these toxic patterns is incredibly rewarding for her, especially when it leads to realizations for those clients about creating better and more balanced lives –and businesses for themselves.  

“This is exactly why I went into business for myself,” Hazel says.

Getting to the heart of a story is integral for every production company, but in a world that prioritizes growth and efficiency, what is often lost are the people creating that story. Lucky Ones aims to change all of that by being a media production company focused on prioritizing the wellbeing of their staff while also telling stories with heart and stories that give back. They always try to include an element of community building and aim to highlight women and marginalized people.

I sat with Cass Rudolph (she/her) founder of the company, who shared the ethos and vision behind Lucky Ones.

What’s at the heart of your story?

 Part of building Lucky Ones was to circumvent the traditional career path. It was a conscious decision to grow slow and avoid the politics and dangers of male-dominated spaces. The initial vision was to stay small, maybe grow to a team of five. But after working as a production coordinator for a much bigger show, it’s made me realize that I actually want to grow to scale because there is such a need for people-first productions.

The truth is that I was sexually harassed out of a job. I started in the music industry where I was working in-house creating for a record label. It was an incredibly toxic work environment. I was then given an opportunity to work at an advertising agency with one other person. I was treated even worse than at the record label, and there was no one to talk to about what happened. There was no HR department to report what had happened to me. That was the last straw.

I decided to do it alone and do it better. I carved my own path and now I’m working on bigger projects that are much more rooted in who I am and what I believe in.

It’s the day of the nationwide Rogers outage. There’s a feeling of abject fear and desperation in the air. Most storefronts have these hastily drawn ‘CASH ONLY’ signs. Worse, emergency 911 services are unavailable to many. It’s lights out for the economy –  at least for a while.

Despite the chaos, Nyla Obaid (she/her), founder of Canopy Kids, an online, second-hand clothing shop, warmly greets me on ZOOM from her backyard on the traditional lands of the Mississauga’s of the First Credit, Mississauga, Huron-Wendat and Anishnabeg nations (under Toronto Purchase Treaty 13) and immediately lets me know she’s on her neighbour’s Wi-Fi as she’s without Internet. Nyla is calm, self-assured. She’s got an energy about her that’s instantly resonant. 

We get talking. She tells me more about launching her new second-hand clothing business for kids.

For many reasons, the timing for such a business could not be better.

Consumer inflation rates continue to rise and exceeded 8% year over year as of June. People are paying more for everything -cars, services, gas, and housing – putting financial pressure on everyone.

Embracing secondhand culture is one way to stay ahead of these unprecedented increases in inflation and make those proverbial ends meet in style – especially for parents like myself needing to stretch a dollar during the back-to-school shopping season. It’s also good for the planet.

Furthermore, the second-hand clothing market is booming. According to an extensive 2021 industry report released by ThredUP, a leading US-based online retailer, the North American secondhand apparel market will grow 8x faster than the overall apparel market by 2026. The market is expected to grow 24% in 2022 alone. Projections indicate that 50% of all second-hand sales will be generated online.

Reclaiming Secondhand Culture

For Obaid (she/her), a tight family budget and secondhand culture are core elements of her lived experience. Born to Bangladeshi immigrants, Obaid is a first-generation Canadian who cites this culture as the inspiration behind her startup dream.

 “I grew up in secondhand culture. When I was growing up, my mom would go to some church basement and all the aunties from the area would show up with their kids’ stuff and swap and sell and buy. Everything was already thrifted. So when my kids came around it was very natural to me to dress them in second-hand clothes and [I bought] second-hand toys [for them]”.

While ‘thrifting’ today is increasingly about foraging for stylish bargains, for Obaid’s family, thrifting was done out of sheer necessity. She remembers how her mother would thrift by default and not by choice.

Getting Into Recommerce

In May 2020, Obaid was growing increasingly frustrated with purchasing items for her children on Facebook Marketplace. She then had an idea to recreate the swap, sell and buy experiences from her childhood and add an online element to it with community building being the thread that ties it all together. Obaid called it the Lode Store and much to her surprise – in her words – “It was immediately successful.” This, despite an atypical startup approach. 

Entrepreneurial training rooted in the male-dominated entrepreneurial industrial complex typically focuses on engineering and executing an extensive customer research plan as a path to knowing exactly what the ideal customer wants and how to serve them.

Instead, Obaid’s approach is much more relatable. She is her customer. Her startup actions trusted that insight. 

Store offerings are chosen by Obaid herself for functionality, appeal and use. She tests toys out on her kids – if they like them, it goes in the store for sale. Obaid trusts her choices and her kids’ reactions when it comes to curating content of her store. Her clients save 60-80% off retail. 

Obaid also didn’t have time for a business plan, development of a minimally viable product, pitch decks to potential investors and a go-to-market strategy. Obaid simply collected some items together and started selling them online. She sourced more items and sold those too. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sales grew.

Even though Obaid’s post-secondary education ascended into the upper echelons of business academia, she felt that it wasn’t a path she wanted to pursue. “I do not like theoretical business, marketing and strategy background… I’m very uncomfortable with a lot of that. I’m uncomfortable with capitalism as a concept. So then when I started my business, [I asked myself] how can I still run a shop and not feed into all of that stuff?”

Building what worked and what her community (customers) wants, Lode Store rebranded as Canopy Kids. Today it offers thoughtful curation of clothes and goods for newborns up to age 14, plus an innovative time-saving, cost-saving subscription service and free delivery across Toronto. The company also offers kids’ room organizing, birthday parties and curated capsule shopping. The enterprise also leads mutual aid initiatives plus donates 15% of its proceeds to organizations working to end oppression.

With her partner’s second income as a safety net, Obaid started her business with just $500 of her own money and didn’t draw out any income for six months in order to get the business off the ground. 

Women artists have been denied equal access to opportunities in the art market for too long. But there is a new wave of feminist art-preneurs, who are making sure women are smack dab in the middle of the canvas of possibilities. Here are four examples of women in the art market who are adapting to an ever-evolving business environment. Meet: The Techie, The Curator, The Art-preneur and The Collective.

The Techie
“Nobody does what I do,” says Candice Houtekier, 29, from her home in Toronto. She runs Art Collision, the only marketing agency in Canada focused on the fine art market using emerging technologies. After working at various commercial art galleries in Montreal and Toronto while a graduate student in Art History and Video Games at the University of Montreal, Houtekier quickly realized she didn’t excel at sales but had a gift for improving galleries’ presence in the market place through web design and social media. She remembers thinking: “Whoa, maybe I am more tech savvy than average.”

Imagine this: It’s May 2020. You are in the middle of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders caused by the novel coronavirus. There is no vaccine yet, and much of your life is online — especially on Zoom. 

In one such Zoom meeting, you start seeing what speakers are saying appear at the bottom of the screen. They’re being typed by one of the participants in the call in real-time.

The text you are seeing is called a closed caption. Closed captions aren’t always typed out by volunteers. Sometimes it’s automatically generated and sometimes it’s done by artificial intelligence (AI), but the accuracy of such services vary. For real-time transcription, ideally these captions are created by employees of companies that provide closed captioning — companies like Closed Caption Services (CCS). 

CCS is a Canadian family-owned business whose mission, according to its president Brooke Woboditsch, is “to build better accessibility in media.”  

This mission has gained momentum over the past year and a half as around the world, organizations and communications have moved online during the global pandemic.

Says Woboditsch: “By the time fall 2020 came around, I would say we must’ve had over 30 new clients in those last six months … There was a massive rush for people to put their businesses online — especially a lot of businesses where there’s multimedia content [like] film festivals, educational institutions, artists’ presentations and talks, museum exhibits.”

Strengthening the Family Business

Woboditsch’s father Larry Gavin was a broadcaster, and Woboditsch grew up helping her dad in his work. 

In 1994, Gavin started Closed Caption Services (CCS), providing fast and reliable services in closed captioning, offline captioning, live captioning, web captioning and audio-described video.

CCS started by providing captioning services to the now-defunct Canadian media company CHUM Television’s new CityTv stations and network of ‘A Channels.’ CCS then began working with Rogers, CTV (now Bell), NewCap, S-Vox, Cogeco Television), Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Pattison Group, TVO and more.

Woboditsch, who is Indigenous and was adopted at birth, also dabbled in television production in her late teens and early twenties. Working at the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), she learned more about her Indigenous culture and history. 

She said it was “always the plan” to take over the company from her father one day. 

“We didn’t discuss transition or the future of the company. It was just that I was ‘the future’ and the company would go to me someday.” 

That day came in 2016. With the decline of her father’s health and after 10 years as the general manager, Woboditsch took over as president of CSS. 

Come 2020 Woboditsch would be called on once again to lead a company. Only this time, it would be in the middle of a pandemic while the world — still not accessible — was moving online.

The Business Case for Closed Captioning

Disabilities occur when people who have impairments confront inaccessible environments, prejudiced attitudes, or other situations where their needs for participation are not met. 

According to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), different types of disabilities include but are not limited to mobility, vision, and hearing impairments, visible and invisible disabilities, episodic disabilities, intellectual and learning disabilities, neurodivergence, chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, and limb and facial differences.

According to a 2018 article by the Web Accessibility Initiative, at least one billion people, or 15 per cent of the world’s population, have a recognized disability. 

In Canada, a 2017 estimate by Statistics Canada found that 6.2 million Canadians have one or more disability, with disabilities related to pain, flexibility, mobility, and mental health being the most common disability types.

Captions play an important role in improving digital accessibility for people with disabilities and those who do not speak English as their first language or are not comfortable doing so. 

Captions refer to text on a television, video screen, or other visual display that transcribe oral speech or dialogue as well as capture background audio. Captioning increases the accessibility of media for a variety of people — including people with disabilities and people who speak different first languages — by communicating all audio sounds that may otherwise be missed by some viewers, including sound effects and other non-speech elements.

Along with helping businesses interact with existing customers who may be people with disabilities, Woboditsch says closed captioning in particular also helps businesses expand their audiences by capturing new customers. 

Disabled Canadians are estimated to control $6.9 trillion in annual disposable income and more than seven million Canadians report their mother tongue is neither English nor French. 

CCS believes that high-quality accessibility services help to increase the reach of your content to at least 10 per cent of your audience. 

An article from UK-based Zen Elements from earlier this year says that three in four disabled people and their families have walked away from a UK business citing poor accessibility and/or poor customer service. 

In a similar vein, a 2019 survey by Scope, a UK-based charity trying to improve digital accessibility, found that half of the people surveyed who experienced problems buying goods or services through a website, app, or in-store machine did not purchase the product. Another 48 per cent found a different provider and purchased their products elsewhere.

Captioning also helps businesses meet compliance standards like those put forth by the Canadian Radio‑television and Telecommunications Commission, which require that 100 per cent broadcast content must be captioned and that Primetime shows be audio described, and Bill C-81, which is an act to ensure a barrier-free Canada. 

The bottom line, Woboditsch says, is to normalize accessibility as an essential part of providing high-quality and equitable services to all audiences. 

”We want people to think of accessibility when they’re putting any content out there. If I’m going to have a meeting, if I’m going to sell a product — whatever my business is [doing] online.”

At the outset of the writing process for her first book, feminist entrepreneur Madeleine Shaw created a survey to better understand the motivations of her peers. In the 100+ responses that she received, she discerned a set of recurring patterns that she named ‘soul traits’. 

Liisbeth is pleased to share this exclusive full text chapter from The Greater Good: Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World.  Dig in!

I knew that I wanted this book to be about more than just my experience right from the get-go. I wanted to learn more about the other social entrepreneurs out there, to illustrate the fact that we can look and act in so many different ways, each with our own stories, gifts, and wisdom. My thinking was also that even if my story did not resonate with you, perhaps someone else’s might. Plus, these entrepreneurs and their journeys are just so inspiring. 

So, I wrote a simple survey and sent it out to my colleagues to gather more stories. I received close to one hundred responses and was stunned by the diversity of personal backgrounds, ventures, and depth of passion that they reflected. I was rewarded with some of the most poignant, thought-provoking, and deeply personal stories that I could imagine. There were stories from artists, parents, fitness professionals, sexual health educators, journalists, musicians, scientists, designers, accountants, academics, and more. I should add that they were almost all women, mostly from Canada and the United States, though I did get some wonderful responses from participants in France, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Respondents ranged from college age to retirees. Although I did not ask about gender or sexual orientation (I did ask for pronouns), several mentioned that they were non-binary and/or queer, and I had many responses from people who made it clear that they were Black, Brown, Asian, or Indigenous.

Their ventures and projects ranged from creative fundraising initiatives to innovative lactation support products, from inclusive technology ventures to adaptive vehicles. If anything, it made me think that social entrepreneurship was a natural place for marginalized people. It stood to reason, I thought, that if you were looking to make the world a better place, folks who have been oppressed or excluded by traditional power systems would have fresh ideas for something different, better, and more humane.

One aspect that stood out for me was that the respondents did not start their careers as entrepreneurs. They became entrepreneurs, often reluctantly. This transformation was one of the most exquisite and fascinating parts of writing this book: learning how these everyday people had become motivated, accepted a challenge, acted on it, persevered, asked for help, failed, flourished, despaired, and celebrated. This is why I wanted them to be part of the book; I wanted readers to see that if these people could do what they did, so can any of us.

As someone who was raised on the “bigger is better” notion of scale when it comes to business or project aspirations (Go Big or Go Home! ), where the object is basically to get more of everything, the survey responses made me start to muse on the notion of lateral scale, or what I have come to call “radiance.” This is a multi-dimensional, proliferative concept of growth and impact, which I will share in greater depth later in the book. 

What I mean by this is, instead of looking at an individual business and wondering how to make it as big as possible, what if you looked at a demographic and wondered how to create as many ventures out of their ideas as possible? In other words, creating more enterprises of diverse sizes instead of fewer, bigger ones. How would these two strategies compare in the long run if our metrics of success were not just top-line growth, but also things like reduced greenhouse gas emissions and commuting hours, increased personal happiness, family well-being, job satisfaction and social innovation, among other, more humane metrics? This became my new obsession; what would the result be if these people and their ideas were actualized and supported? What if, alongside all the good things that these ventures would surely create, an entirely new way of thinking about the purpose of commerce and nature of growth also emerged?

In creating the survey, I had hoped to understand not only what had inspired people’s ideas but, vitally, what had motivated them to act on them. In reading people’s answers to the questions and in follow-up interviews, several recurring themes emerged, which I have come to think of as the key “soul traits” of social entrepreneurs and which I’d like to briefly highlight here. Many of these stories will appear at greater length later in the book—this is just a taste.

Perhaps you will recognize aspects of yourself in this list.

COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES

Social entrepreneurs are so creative! Because their premise in starting a project usually comes from a non-traditional place and they themselves often fall outside the traditional profile of a businessperson or entrepreneur, it’s not surprising that they generate such unique, innovative ideas and organizational models. Some respondents with traditional business education and experience said that they had needed to unlearn their previous ways of thinking, while others who did not have this experience said that they felt unencumbered by limiting beliefs and expectations, which allowed them to try new things and be less afraid of failure. 

Social entrepreneurs are by definition “redefiners,” in that they inherently question the accepted purpose of business-as-usual capitalism by putting the “social” part first. These folks go even further, though, coming up with their own definitions of goals, scale, profits, success, and more. What am I talking about? Have you ever heard the expression

“Together Everyone Achieves More” (TEAM)? The Five Ps of Marketing? The VUCA worldview? The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? There are endless examples of these buzzy business acronyms. But are they inherently true, or did someone, once upon a time, effectively make them up?

Let’s take as an example VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), a post-Cold War US Army term that was coined to describe the worldview of the day and has regained popularity in common business vernacular in recent years. My question about VUCA is not whether or not it’s true; it’s about whether or not the concept is helpful, motivating, or inspirational. Personally, it just makes me scared, and scared is not a great place for anyone to create from. Fear is often dismissed (“Choose love over fear!”), but it can, of course, be a sensible and highly valuable reaction in critical situations. Yet fear triggers the fight, flight, or freeze mechanism in the brain, which is not helpful for getting creative or making decisions.

In early 2015, Suzanne and I were asked to give a presentation to an audience of women entrepreneur clients of a major Canadian bank in Calgary, titled “Entrepreneurial Ingenuity in the Age of Constant Disruptive Change.” The Alberta economy was hard-hit at the time and the organizers were looking for practical, yet inspiring content. I had read up on VUCA while attending the THNK School of Creative Leadership, and although I got the concept, something about it left me feeling hopeless, depleted, and frazzled. How were we going to do what was being asked of us while staying true to ourselves? I decided that we needed to reframe VUCA in a more positive and constructive light. Here is what we came up with: CODE.

• C = Colorful
• O = Opportunity-rich
• D = Diverse
• E = Evolving

We often forget, in our never-ending quest to keep up with the latest lingo and concepts, that we have the ability to see what’s true for ourselves and express it in our own ways. Our audience loved CODE. Yes, we were saying, these are scary times. But what actually serves us when we think about that in terms of our personal worlds and businesses? CODE feels exciting while still acknowledging that the world is an unsettled place. 

Similarly, in response to the classic business concept coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras with the acronym BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal), I prefer to use “beautiful, healthy, achievable, generative” as my personal success metric.

I also came up with a cheeky reframing of the classic tech industry imperative “move fast and break things,” to “move purposefully and nurture things.”

True Grit

Social entrepreneurs with true grit have the patience, tenacity, and determination to persist, often in the face of immense challenges. Persistence, though unglamorous and underrated, is a common-sense ally for anyone trying to accomplish something that matters to them. I love the word grit; it has a raw, honest quality that related terms like persistence, commitment, and perseverance lack. Grit implies edge, messiness, and overcoming adversity—being “bloodied but unbowed,” to reference WE Henley’s 1888 poem “Invictus.” 

Much buzz currently surrounds the online The Party at the End of the Patriarchy conference currently underway from Oct 25^th, 27^th and 29^th 2021.

Organized by Mazarine Treyz and sponsored by LiisBeth, this 3-day event invites feminists to move, create and dream about what a world free from the patriarchy would look and feel like.

LiisBeth chatted with Mazarine to find out more about the event that promises to challenge feminists, question current structures and expand our radical imagination.

LiisBeth:  Why did you create this event?

MT: I believe we have an obligation to come together. No matter how bad things get, it always makes it better when we come together and cultivate our radical imaginations towards a better world.

LiisBeth: What can people expect from the event

MT: It’s a time for networking, and the sessions will help cultivate our radical imaginations. Why do we need more imagination? Because the first person who made an airplane had never seen an airplane [before], and the first person who had a car hadn’t seen it [before] either. What we’re trying to do is build our own airplane. We don’t want to be extractive.

LiisBeth: What makes a conference extractive?

MT: It’s treating people like ATMs and robots, jamming in as many sessions as you can. [It’s] when presenters are rushed and people are not getting fairly compensated.

There’s no acknowledgement of the fact that we’re living through multiple extinction events that are extremely stressful and depressing. So we have a grief expert, Kierra Sunae Taplin, for a session on Pandemic Grief. I wanted to create something that’s feminist-focused; more acknowledging of our own humanity, [to] give people time to breathe. Capitalism is built on tamping down on emotions and trying to get pleasure from extracting whatever you can from the environment around you.

Liisbeth: How did you choose your speakers?

MT: I chose them based on the fact that we have to do things differently now and because of the unique perspectives and skills they bring to the conversation. A couple of speakers will talk about online fundraising—how to ask for a major gifts over Zoom for instance.

LiisBeth: What makes this conference feminist?

MT: All speakers are women. It’s also feminist because of [how] we leveraged feminist principles when we designed the event experience, and the kinds of topics we explore. For example, Veronica Garcia will focus on the idea of wealth reclamation. From the Global South to [Global] North there’s been a great transfer of wealth [to the north] over the last 200 years of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. She’s asking us to think about how we can work in ways that help [facilitate the] transfer of wealth towards the Global South. We also talk about [ideas like] the discipline of hope.

LiisBeth: What is the discipline of hope?

MT: Edison failed the first 100 times before he made the light bulb. But he had discipline of hope. It’s about cultivating a radical imagination towards a vision. That’s why it is important to come together as a community.

LiisBeth: What can feminist entrepreneurs expect to take away from this conference?

We will talk about how to run a flourishing, feminist principles-informed enterprise. This includes how to lift other women of color towards their goals; how to expand the opportunities available to them. The conference is a platform for generating new ways of thinking and acting. People will get ideas of how they could do little things every day or every week to help other women and still make money.

LiisBeth: What does a post-capitalist world look like to you?

MT: It would be a world where women could afford to leave abusive home situations. It would be a world where we took care of the most vulnerable elders, disabled people, and children first, and always centered them in every decision we make on a systems level. One policy decision we could make around this is [introducing] universal basic income. This is one idea towards the development of a post-capitalist economy. How would we afford it? TAX THE RICH! Someday, we’re going to move beyond money. I think a lot more of us would be feminist entrepreneurs and post-capitalist entrepreneurs if we didn’t have to worry about this system eating us alive.  

LiisBeth: What is radical imagination and why is it important to cultivate one?

MT: Think about it: we have only had this version of capitalism for the last 100 years. Before that we had feudalism and the divine right of kings in Europe. We thought [those] would last forever too! People saw this system break down because of the Black Plague.

This last year it was easy to sink into despair and grief. We can’t ignore the [ongoing genocide of] Indigenous women disappearing all over Canada, the Black Lives Matter movement, [or the] climate crisis. In our city, Portland, OR, we [saw] open fascism—people getting snatched off the street by police and federal officers. We know these current systems can be torn down and rebuilt.

We can imagine a world where we all get more than enough to live on. Where we have free healthcare, free education and free housing. Where we have systems that have more humane and ecologically-focused metrics that center the earth, women, children, the elderly, and disabled folks. We can move from a profit-based extractive economy to a restorative economy. This is what we want the new world to look like. We have to exist in capitalism until we change the world.

LiisBeth: How do you cultivate your own radical imagination?

MT: You have to surround yourself with proof [of what is] happening. So I have books that I carry with me. Like Kai Cheng Thom’s ‘I Hope We Choose Love’, Nora Samaran’s ‘Turn This World Inside Out,’ ‘Belly of the Beast’ by Da’Shaun Harrison and ‘Capitalist Realism’ by Mark Fisher. I want people to come to this conference and see that this world is coming. [I want them to] be a part of shaping it.”

LiisBeth: What topics do you expect will dominate our collective discourse in the near future?

MT: We’re going to look at the quality of our movements and ask how we can be more supportive and less divisive. We need to work together to make this new world. We must look at what our systems are based on and how we [can] concretely fight white supremacists inside our organizations. Do we tear it all down?  Maybe we have more coalition building, and I hope we do that.

Join the party! Check out the amazing speaker lineup and conference program and then register for the conference today. There is still time!

Note: This interview was edited for clarity and length. 

Like the many enterprises that relied on in-person interaction, Make Lemonade, a Toronto-based, women-centric co-working space for entrepreneurs was suddenly squeezed dry by the pandemic and closed its doors in August 2020. It was the third closure in three years of a well-loved physical co-working space focusing on women — the others were Shecosystem and Women on the Move. LiisBeth talked to Rachel Kelly, the 30-year-old founder and sole owner of Make Lemonade to learn about the journey and where they are now–given the pandemic. 

LiisBeth: Let’s rewind to get the full story. Why did you start Make Lemonade?

RK: It was 2015 and I had been freelancing for a couple years, bouncing from coffee shop to coffee shop and working from home — way before it was cool. One day while travelling on a streetcar to yet another café, I realized I couldn’t keep lying to myself. I was trying to convince myself that this way of working, like a nomad, alone, was great and that the indie freelancing life was sustainable for me. It occurred to me in that moment the key thing lacking in my work life was a day-to-day community of colleagues.

Around this time, I signed a salaried contract with a company I was freelancing for and let go of all my freelance gigs. And even bought a couch! But shortly thereafter, they called to say the contract was cancelled. They never told me why but I suspect it had to do with their budget.

Storytelling transformed Hermine Mbondo’s life and continues to shape her work to this day. 

Born in Cameroon into the Bassa tribe and raised in France, Mbondo now lives in Toronto. She fondly remembers her childhood and all the stories she heard when she visited her grandmother’s village. Back then, every night Mbondo would gather with all of the other kids in the family to listen to stories told by her grandmother and her aunts. 

But these stories were not ordinary fairy tales.

“When you are a child, you don’t realise [right away]. But then slowly, you realise the stories were not just fairy tales,” Mbondo says. “It was really about either warning us about things or teaching us about something.” 

One of the stories Mbondo remembers vividly is a different interpretation of the story of the tortoise and the hare.

In Mbondo’s version, the hare tells the tortoise that both of them should kill their mothers because there was a poor harvest and everyone in the village is going hungry. The hare says they can use their mothers for a feast. The tortoise is tricked by the hare and kills its mother, but the hare does not. 

Mbondo says the moral of this story is to choose your friends wisely and be careful about who you trust. She says the stories she heard as a child, while sometimes scary, were always meaningful and were meant to teach life lessons.

Flash forward many years and Mbondo is now sharing her own meaningful stories through B4brand — a branding and marketing agency she founded in Toronto in 2017. 

An Accidental Marketing Agency 

Like many women entrepreneurs, Mbondo didn’t start out thinking she wanted to be a business owner someday. Within a few months of job hunting after moving to Canada in 2016, she realized that as a newcomer, landing a job and pay cheque that matched her level of experience was going to be impossible. 

“I was still able to do a lot of things but it wasn’t at the level of what I was doing — or earning — in France. I was the head of marketing there,” she says. “[Work I was hired for in Canada] wasn’t challenging enough. There was nothing to justify [staying] — plus I didn’t have the same kind of salary. After a year, I was starting to think, ‘What can I do next?’” 

Around the same time, a company that Mbondo had worked for back in France asked if she would be interested in moving back to lead their marketing department.

But Mbondo didn’t want to move back to France. She knew the job being offered to her would return her to the same position of working for someone else, on their terms, with no room for growth. By this time, she knew she wanted to call the shots and work “with” the company instead of “for” it. Pitching the idea of being an independent contractor led to her landing her first client as a solepreneur. They worked out an arrangement that allowed Mbondo to have more autonomy in her work, and in late 2017, she officially launched B4brand, which now operates as an incorporated marketing agency. 

Marketing with Purpose 

In a competitive industry like brand management, B4brand stands out in three distinct ways: 1) it focuses on people-driven branding, 2) it has the capacity to work seamlessly in both of Canada’s official languages, and 3) it makes innovative use of Bassa storytelling culture. 

Mbondo says that while all three aspects of her enterprise are important, the emphasis on people-driven stories is the foundation that grounds her and her business. Engaging with clients whose values align with her own has led her to work with brands that focus on the needs of people rather than the features or benefits of a given product. 

“I’ve seen different things in marketing — I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Marketing can be used to trick consumers into purchasing products or services. I wanted to do things differently,” she says. 

Mbondo wants consumers to connect with brands that align with their own ethics and principles so that ideally, they make purchasing decisions based on shared values. 

“I talk with the business owners, get to know them, and try to understand not just what they’re doing, but why they are doing it,” she says, “because for me, it’s very important to understand the ‘why.’” The conversations are litmus tests that help her choose brands that, in her words, truly “have a greater purpose.” 

For example, when an opportunity came her way to work with an entrepreneur who was looking to launch a new line of spices from Western Cameroon, Mbondo first researched to find out if they operated in an ethical manner. She sealed the deal after learning the company was paying their employees fair wages and creating a safe working environment for women in western Cameroon.

Through her work, Mbondo wants to challenge the idea that industries like brand marketing can only be made more inclusive by hiring diverse employees. While this is important, she says it limits the possibilities of human resources. What she wants to see instead is an emphasis on the diversity of products and services as well as the diversity of people. The international spices are an example of this because they bring “diversity to the shelves” of mainstream grocery stores. While the spices have not yet been launched officially, another client of Mbondo recently launched. 

“I think for me, the way I see diversity and inclusion is in the everyday things, and food is part of that [when] we go grocery shopping.” 

Passion Projects Helping Build Community

Another passion project of Mbondo’s is the Global Impact Hub — a one-stop learning hub for social entrepreneurs to connect, educate and amplify diverse voices.

Mbondo has partnered with several organizations over the past few years to provide bilingual entrepreneurship training to fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners. During the COVID-19 global pandemic, she found that many such organizations didn’t have the tools, resources, or knowledge to transition online. 

Mbondo explains, “[Entrepreneurs and small business owners] usually wear many hats and they are overwhelmed. Sometimes, all they need is the little push, especially since the road to running a successful business while making a difference can feel difficult and lonely. So, I decided to support them by offering a place to develop supportive relationships with fellow game-changers as well as access marketing tools and resources.”

The Global Impact Hub aims to combat this overwhelm by creating space for entrepreneurs to work it out together. 

“Through this membership-based online platform, social entrepreneurs will be able to sharpen up their marketing skills from anywhere and at any time through valuable content [like] marketing resources, tools, workshops and meaningful ways of connecting.”