In the span of four months, Cherry Rose Tan was involved in a major car accident, lost her brother unexpectedly on Christmas Day, and found out her mother had stage three cancer. Her grief was unlike anything she had ever felt before, so she decided to turn to her colleagues in the tech industry for support. But she didn’t know where to go or who to talk to. That’s when she realized the sad truth: Nobody in tech talks about this stuff.
So Tan, an executive coach in Toronto who helps entrepreneurs get past their personal and professional roadblocks, started For Founders By Founders in 2018. She defines it as a movement to get tech founders, investors, and executive directors to talk to her about their mental health struggles—and agree to publish their story online.
“There’s some serious mental health breakdowns and emotional suffering that happens in my industry,” says Tan. “People come to a point in their success where they’ve spent so long in a place of drive and doing and achieving more, that they’re really disconnected from their emotions and what it means to be human.”
Tan wanted to end this systemic silence, but prompting entrepreneurs to open up about their struggles wasn’t easy. Says Tan: “One investor said to me, ‘I love what you’re doing, but I need to be real with you. I don’t think you’re going to get a single person to pledge their mental health story.’”
She refused to believe that. “We don’t have to settle for an industry where the best we can do is have founders cope with alcohol and drugs and do their healing in bathrooms.”
Tan knew she was tapping into something huge. Research by psychiatrist Dr. Michael Freeman, who specializes in mental health issues and illnesses among entrepreneurs in the US, found that 72 percent of entrepreneurs struggled with mental health. They were also twice as likely to suffer from depression and experience suicidal thoughts than non-entrepreneurs.
People may go into entrepreneurship for the freedom it can offer, but what’s rarely discussed is how often that journey comes with seemingly insurmountable stress, burnout, and crippling loneliness. Stigma and shame around mental health often keeps people from getting treatment when they need it.
To start her venture, Tan reached out to a few people she knew had gone through something deeply personal and asked them if they were willing to talk about it in a one-on-one interview. It took four months before she secured her first subject (or champion, as she likes to call them); within a year and a half, she had convinced 65 people to share their stories, including CEOs of multi-million-dollar companies. Tech leaders opened up about an array of challenges: abusive families, postpartum depression, eating disorders, painful divorces, losing a parent, the immense pressures of running a company, and being responsible for so many people’s livelihoods.
So far, Tan has published 20 of those stories online at pledgeyourstory.com. She is currently working on a podcast slated for release in November, which will feature one-hour intimate conversations with tech entrepreneurs about their personal mental health experiences.
Says Tan: “One of the most impactful stories was from a founder who I really respect. Super accomplished, serial founder. This person shared with me a story about their breakdown, a time when things were so, so, so bad that they didn’t know if they would survive until the next day. This person told me the reason they’re alive and doing the work they do is because of one person who changed their life and said, ‘I’ll be the person who will hold the space and listen to your story.’ It just reminded me that this work really matters.”
As a for-profit social enterprise, Tan is able to do this work while generating revenue by crafting mental health strategies for founders and investors, speaking at companies and conferences, and providing mental health training at the executive level.
Tan’s forum is particularly useful for female founders who often face even more pressures. They struggle with being taken seriously, securing funding, finding a supportive network, combatting discrimination, coping with imposter syndrome—you name it. For Founders By Founders gives women entrepreneurs an outlet to openly talk about their struggles without shame, judgment, or guilt. Says Tan: “There’s a lot of masculine energy in this industry, and I feel like that’s why so many people are suffering is because they don’t have a connection to this softer side of themselves.”
Throughout her interviews, Tan noticed other patterns emerging. For instance, she discovered that anxiety and imposter syndrome tend to creep up when founders raise their first round of funding. And when founders exit their company, they often feel like they’ve lost their sense of identity and fall into depression and grief.
So now Tan is creating a playbook for tech founders that will lay out a roadmap of what to expect with their emotional and mental health journey from startup to acquisition.
“I’m really excited about this playbook,” says Tan. “I want to show people the way out of emotional suffering.”
If you are in an emergency, in crisis or need someone to talk to, please use these hotlines or call 911 immediately.
“Life-changing book. It talks about a nine-figure tech founder who decided to let go of control (as a paradigm for success), and how his life transformed on every level because of it. What happens if we start trusting ourselves and life, instead of fighting it? I found it powerful for shifting my perspective with adversity.”
“One of my favourite mindset books of all time. Written by the founder of the world’s largest real-estate firm, it explores the question: What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? It has been important for my mental health and in keeping me focused on what is most important.”
This article was generously sponsored by Startup Here Toronto
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Sarah Kaplan, Author, The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation
Sarah Kaplan, Author, The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation
Businesses operating within the framework of 21st century capitalism can and must be a force for good, says Sarah Kaplan, director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) and professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
“Big companies are the ones who have either created or perpetuated many of the pressing social and environmental issues we face today,” she says. “If we are to see significant change, we need them on board.”
Yet, despite more than a decade of amped up efforts on corporate social responsibility (CSR), the impact has been negligible. And evidence shows Canadian public and large corporations, in particular, are lagging behind those in other countries in the CSR area.
In her new book,The 360° Corporation, Kaplan says it’s because they have been going about it the wrong way. We spoke to Kaplan, to find out what they missed.
LiisBeth: You’re best known for your work on innovation and how gender impacts the economy. Why a book on corporate social responsibility?
Sarah Kaplan: This is a project I’ve been working on since before I founded the Institute for Gender and the Economy. The timing happens to be pretty good. A few weeks ago, the Business Roundtable (an association of CEOs from leading US companies) announced that they were going to prioritize creating value for all stakeholders versus just focusing on shareholder returns. Women, gender minorities, LGBTQ+ are increasingly viewed as important stakeholder categories that many corporations are paying attention to.
What is the book about?
(Getting) business leaders to think about social and environmental challenges as central to their business as opposed to it being seen as an add on, something they do off to one side of their desk. It’s time to get past the “CSR candy sprinkled on top.”
And how do we do that?
Think differently about what to do when investor and stakeholder interests don’t easily align. Often when faced with this situation, decision makers default to constructing a business case to figure out a win-win solution to break trade-offs. You get this. I get that. We all get something. Not what we wanted. But it’s as good as it gets.
This can work, but what happens when investors and stakeholders find themselves not just miles, but worlds apart?
In those cases, win-win just isn’t possible. At least not right away. Even attempts to innovate with known variables may not lead to the breakthrough required.
In this case, I encourage companies to hold and value this seemingly intractable tension as a one-of-a-kind transformation opportunity. The idea is to get decision makers to start thinking about the challenge as they would a research and development opportunity. They need to ask what kind of productive experiments could be designed, in concert with stakeholders, over time, to develop something that could not have even been previously imagined. I am asking companies to think of social responsibility and social innovation like any other disruptive R&D project—one that requires long-term uncertain investments with unsure but potentially magnificent payoffs.
That sounds great for companies with deep pockets. What about startups? Smaller enterprises?
A great example of a small company that has successfully integrated social change is McCarthy Uniforms. They figured out how to leverage a social issue—gender equality—as a business transformation opportunity, in fact, as their turnaround strategy.
McCarthy sells uniforms and, like other companies in that space, only sold uniforms that fit a man’s body. By paying attention to a growing conversation around gender equity, they noticed that lots of women wear uniforms. Due to lack of options, women were being forced to wear men’s uniforms that did not fit well. Not only was it uncomfortable, this also often created safety issues. So, they added “female fit” lines of products. And they started creating a social responsibility report, which included gender equity information. They applied this knowledge when they were bidding with school districts and other people needing uniforms. They’re winning their bids because they are including that kind of information.
Embracing stakeholders and seeing them as essential to your day-to-day business and engaging with stakeholders can actually help you find sources of differentiation and benefits that you hadn’t even anticipated.
What role do activists play in motivating companies to take social and environmental issues seriously?
Well, there’s a couple of ways that activists are really, really important to this equation. The first is they can increase the pain for corporations. When Greenpeace started blocking the ships that were carrying drilling equipment up to the Arctic, the visibility really increased public relations and logistics costs. When Shell abandoned their Arctic drilling activities, they said, “Well, it didn’t have anything to do with the activism. It had to do with the cost benefit. But, of course the activism was shaping the cost benefit.
I have talked to sustainability people in various companies who say, “Don’t tell my boss this, but I actually appreciate the activists because they help me make my case inside the company.” Activism can play that role.
The second role that activists can play is to work to get on the inside, and take a seat at the table in those decision-making meetings. Take ACT UP, which I talk about in my book. Their protests got them a seat at the table where researchers were deciding on drug testing protocols for AIDS drug testing. The activists come with a different point of view, different experience, different knowledge. In this case, activists were able to help the researchers understand the most effective ways to do the trials and get the trials to be fair, more just, more accessible.
That said, there is a big tension between being in the conversation and being seen as selling out. It’s a very difficult tension to manage. I think it mirrors the same tension that the corporates have when they’re actually paying attention to the stakeholders (“But you’re hurting the bottom line.”) I think the activists should more often see themselves as potential players at the table in this conversation. And in turn, corporations need to be open to, and invite in challenging, uncomfortable and diverse points of view.
What was your biggest “aha”?
I came across some really interesting research that suggests that people who rely on the business case are precisely the people least likely to act when a business case is made to them, because in order to act on these things, there has to be a certain level of moral outrage.
The business case actually mitigates against moral outrage.
What the business case does is justify the existing status quo. It leads to complacency as opposed to outrage. We need business leaders to think about how we can change the status quo versus perpetuate it. The point is not to make the business case. The point is to find new ways to do this work. If you start with the business case, you’re only going to get incremental solutions. That was the biggest aha for me. The business case is getting in the way of action—not to mention innovation and transformation.
What’s happening with the Institute for Gender and the Economy this year?
When it comes to working to achieve positive social change for gender equality, the biggest barrier is that people don’t know what to do and how to do it. So, to help people figure out the “how,” we are launching a series of case studies that are specific examples of what companies have done, which offer new models and templates. The second thing we’re doing is developing a Gender Analytics training program. We will be running prototypes early in the new year and hope to have the program available in the fall of 2020.
Sarah, thank you for all your amazing work to advance gender equity not only in Canada but globally.
We are familiar with term green washing but how about gender washing? What does it look like? And what can we learn from the environmental movement about the pace and nature of change?
While we can likely agree that slavery is wrong, women around the world are still arguing their case for gender equality. Valerie Hussey asks: What gives?
“I have seen feminism become much deeper, much more intersectional, much more enmeshed in people’s everyday lives and that’s the kind of feminism we need going forward.”
Our foray into Oregon’s newly legalized recreational cannabis industry earned us a spot on the cover of the local newspaper for two weeks running – though not in a good way. The headlines described us as facing “complications,” but the content quoted angry locals as saying we were bent on manufacturing and selling drugs across the street from a family-friendly park filled with kids.
This publicity followed on the heels of a town hall meeting to obtain a state-mandated Conditional Use Permit from the local municipality. The permit was the State’s way of ensuring that local governments were informed of any cannabis businesses opening in their jurisdiction and also enabled those municipalities to take a cut of the development money. Our town, like most in Oregon, took a big cut.
Several new facilities had already petitioned for permits, but ours threatened to be the “one too many.” Like many small towns, the public felt overwhelmed by the influx of new people and distrustful of the new recreational cannabis industry as a whole. The meeting drew a packed house with an organized group of protestors testifying against us, shaking their fists and yelling that we would ‘have dope fiends hanging off the fences’ of our property.
My husband and I, the cofounders of Full Circle CO2, kept our cool, agreed to all the City’s stipulations, and left with our approval.
But our buildout also became something of a circus. There were, at times, up to six people parked on lawn chairs across the street watching – and often hurling ugly comments — as we pulled out 400 feet of old, crumbling sidewalk; poured new, handicapped accessible curbs; and installed an eight-foot landscaped greenway on all public-facing sides of the property as well as cedar fencing (mandated by the city to replace the old chain link). There were several incidents of angry locals not just yelling at us but throwing rocks. The worst of the vitriol was directed at me – the female cofounder in our start-up cannabis enterprise. Since I was the one who spoke at the meeting in this conservative logging town, I got nailed. Trolls in online forums, coffeeshop gossip mongers, and people on local radio call in shows dismissed my cofounder and husband, Paul, as “a pretty boy” and went after me as a “domineering b*tch” that didn’t know my place. That a cannabis company had moved into their town was tough enough to swallow; the front person being a woman just ratcheted up the hysteria.
We kept our heads down and focused on putting the fence up.
It was an episode that was emblematic of my experience as a woman in the cannabis industry. Sometimes you have to keep your head down and focus on the task at hand, and sometimes you have to step into the center ring and advocate for yourself. The trick for me has been to remain true to the vision and mission of our business and not allow anyone else to define who I am or what role I should be allowed to play in this male-dominated business.
This is the story of that journey, but, first a bit of background.
CANNABIS GOES CANNABIZ
In 2014, Oregon became the third state in the U.S. to legalize cannabis for recreational use by adults. It would take three years for the industry to transition from the past two decades of loose oversight under the medical program to a functioning recreational market. In that time, thousands of businesses would start and fail, many even before receiving their licenses. Today, only a small percentage of the hundreds of initial applicants are still in business, even fewer with their original owners. Those that did survive have largely done so because of huge amounts of investment money that allowed them to ride out those turbulent early days of legislation, rulemaking, black market leaks, and oversupply. Today, only a handful of the small-scale, Oregonian-owned, self-funded operations that dominated the medical market remain.
My husband and I own one of those companies, Full Circle CO2. We are a two-person, self-made cannabis processing facility that stands out as much for our 50 percent female ownership and unique business model as we do for our hand-crafted products. This year, for the first time, we will see steady revenue, enough to cover both our business and home expenses, though I still supplement our income with writing. It’s been a long road filled with construction, research, networking, policy advocacy, and out-of-the-box business development. But we’re still here, and we’ve learned a lot that can help other small businesses thrive, especially those in highly regulated markets such as cannabis and alcohol, even in the midst of big-money competition.
Our journey — and that of any early-to-the-game cannabis company — can be divided into three phases: pre-legalization/medical, licensing, and early market. I call our current phase “early market” because like most new industries, regulations and consumer preferences change quickly in the early years, preventing the stabilization of industry practices and norms. How long that kind of volatility will take to even out is anyone’s guess; in the cannabis space, we expect the unexpected as long as national and international laws continue to evolve.
FIND THE MARKET NICHE
My husband, a construction contractor and long-time believer in the healing effects of cannabis, entered the industry in the waning years of medical, before we married. He was in his early thirties and started with a small-scale grow operation in an outbuilding on his residential property, with just enough space to provide flower (the bud) to a few patients.
Pretty immediately two things became clear: He wasn’t very good at growing cannabis, but he saw high demand in value-added products such as vape pens, tinctures, topicals, and edibles. As well, nicotine-based vaping products were growing in popularity. That drove him to research the manufacturing of cannabis-based vape oils, a difficult project after nearly a hundred years of research suppression. He persisted though, and, in 2015, he settled on using CO2 for extraction, which is a non-toxic, non-explosive method of extracting the essential oil (which includes the THC, cannabinoids, and terpenes) from the cannabis plant. It’s a method widely used in the production of essential oils from plants such as lavender and roses.
But entry into the cannabis industry via processing appeared cost-prohibitive, especially for lower-middle class Americans, which we were. At that time, a mid-sized, no-frills extractor ran to $250,000 or more and the ancillary equipment commonly used for post-processing and refinement could cost another $100,000 to $300,000 (all figures in US dollars). We scraped together financing for the extractor and bare necessities with small personal loans, savings, and credit cards. And then Paul started down the long road of learning how to make cannabis extract while I learned everything I could about operating a small business.
The first thing that hit me was pretty obvious: Nearly everyone in cannabis was male, and it had been that way as long as anyone could remember. In pre-medical, black-market days, women were customers (often in need of a male escort who could vouch for them) and arm candy relegated to wait on a couch while stoner dudes talked breeds, trichomes, and pricing. Under medical, it wasn’t much better. Since mostly men had been growing, mostly men continued to run cultivation, distribution and management. If women gained entry to the sector at all, it was usually filling roles as low-paid trimmers or clerks in the newly-allowed dispensaries.
REGULATION TAMES THE WILD WEST
Our marriage in 2016 coincided with the dawn of the recreational market and a promise of change. The State of Oregon began issuing administrative rules, making it clear that the recreational market, in stark contrast to the medical days, was going to be highly regimented. The old way of doing things would not cut it. Opportunities opened for people with skills in mainstream agriculture, manufacturing, retail, and distribution. Like myself, a lot of women made the transition, applying their diverse life and work experiences to the cannabis industry.
I brought an advanced degree in geology, five years of experience in environmental consulting and community college instruction, as well as hefty student loans to the sector. Remarkably, that set me up well to sift through the weeds, as it were. While Paul focused on the extraction side, my role touched every aspect of the start-up — reading up on the administrative rules and keeping us in compliance, overseeing the application process, setting the timeline for construction, and managing the budget. Most in the industry paid thousands to attorneys to read and interpret the hundreds of pages of guidance documents and legislation the state was pumping out, while I read and reread every page. When I had any questions, I never hesitated to pick up the phone and call a regulatory agency or policy maker directly. Apparently, this is infrequent in an industry still wary of government officials. For us, this initiative was essential. And it’s something I recommend any business owner make a habit of doing, whether for occupational health and safety, weights and measures, or simple building code compliance. The best information always comes directly from the source, and I found regulators are often are surprisingly eager to help.
One of the state’s first regulations was a restriction on operations in residentially zoned properties. That left most of the industry, including us, without a place to operate, even for research and development. The scramble for agricultural, commercial or industrial space created a land race. Within months, the inventory of cannabis-appropriate properties (the guidelines stipulated distance from schools and lot size) dwindled to almost nothing. Pricing — for purchase or lease — responded to the demand, increasing to twice or three times the asking price of just a year earlier. Worse, even those companies lucky enough to secure a property before prices soared often found themselves back in the search after counties and cities held special elections to opt out of cannabis.
We were lucky. Just eight months into our search, we found a lot to lease in a small town 30 minutes from our house. It had a roof and reasonable rent and that was about it. Then we had to endure the hell fire of obtaining our permit to build. And then there was the tall task of fulfilling the requirements of the permit, which dictated everything from storage (we would need a secure vault) to surveillance (our 25 by 30-foot structure has seven cameras that record 24/7), to the prep counter material (food grade). It was like building a mini casino.
DIY ON THE FLY
Most of the industry solved this particular logistical nightmare by throwing money at it. The average processing facility build-out at that time cost between $500,000 and $2 million. For us, frugality became the mother of invention — and one of the reasons that we survived this roller coaster industry. From the beginning, we drew on our own skill sets and invested our own sweat in the build out. My husband’s contractor license enabled us to handle most of the construction. As a registered geologist and with my experience as a researcher, I was able to write our complex Standard Operating Procedures, safety plans, and training manual myself. When we required outside expertise for landscaping and irrigation, plumbing or website design, we reached out to people in our network, finding friends and contacts willing to work for labor in kind or low fees.
McConnell’s processing equipment
We also hunted out bargains. From my time in research, I knew labs paid a premium for equipment so I sourced kitchen, farm and alternative industry suppliers for devices that could collect, contain, measure, and disperse liquids — and we bought everything we could secondhand. We found office furniture at salvage stores, and we pulled heavy steel storage cages and security gates out of autobody shops to make our vault. One day, we emptied out most of a recently closed restaurant, scoring stainless-steel tables, cleaning products, mop buckets and even a picnic table to give us a place to eat lunch — all for less than $500. After being quoted upwards of $13,000 for a security system for our tiny space, we took the regulations into a big box store and made friends with a clerk willing to read them. We left with $250 of equipment that kept us in compliance until we could upgrade to something more robust. We still use vintage sterilized mason jars we pulled out of a farmhouse canning room to store and transport our bulk product.
Finally, in January 2017, we became one of the first of 40 licensed processors in Oregon. After we paid $5,000 for the license fee, we had maxed out every credit card we had and were left with just $7 to our names. But we had done it! We had built a processing facility, and we were shipping stock.
WOMEN: MIND THE WELCOME MAT PULL BACK
By then, the media had picked up on the uptick of women in the industry, a welcome shift from the b*tches and buds’ mentality that had dominated the cannabis market for so long. While our numbers still lagged far behind men, there were more women in the industry, and those women were holding greater positions of authority. Women-owned dispensaries and wholesale facilities were becoming common, as were woman-dominated farming collectives. There were even Facebook groups for women in the industry, and woman-only cannabis business groups.
But that pink-in-the-green uptick didn’t last long.
In the fall of 2017, Oregon cannabis farmers harvested more than a million pounds of cannabis, far more than enough to supply the state. As regulations still don’t allow for export, the bottom dropped out of the local market. Prices plunged, farms failed and guess what? The good old boy network kicked back in. Competition became cutthroat with men infiltrating women-only spaces — online and in meetings — drowning out our voices and preventing us from networking. Next, they shut women and their products and services out of the game by excluding them from consideration and shelf space. Finally, they targeted our less established and therefore more vulnerable businesses for takeover in an ongoing consolidation process. Now, some dispensary owners estimate that nearly 80 percent of the value-added products on the shelves are held by just three parent companies.
STAY SMALL TO SURVIVE
We survived that first market collapse mostly because we were so small that no one saw us as competition. And our frugal build-out and lack of employees meant we had comparatively little overhead. We only needed a sliver of the pie to stay alive. Competitors tried to undercut our prices, and I faced several instances of blatant condescension and inappropriate sexualized comments, to the point that I started bowing out of “first-contact” business meetings. Instead, Paul began handling initial contacts to vet the value system of potential clients and partners — and shield me from potential negative behaviors and attitudes. It’s a policy we still follow today.
As with the build-out, we took a contrarian approach to other businesses fighting to establish their brands in a crowded market. Instead of promoting our own brand, we built a business model based on servicing the industry. So instead of investing money to launch a Full Circle line of products, we offer business-to-business services, providing custom processing and value-added products for a toll fee. We turned potential competitors into clients, and that helped us maintain a degree of independence and ride out market fluctuations. The strategy also insulated us from high-cost regulatory changes in labeling and testing, shifts that shuttered many start-ups.
But we don’t shy away from taking an active role in advocacy and policy making, both in the state and nationally, partly out of necessity. In the summer of 2018, with no notice or explanation, the state issued a verbal “cease and desist” order for our business. After all our effort to start up, we faced being shut down – and there appeared no means for appeal or reinstatement. I took to the phones, calling everyone from the small-business ombudsman at the Secretary of State’s office to the governor’s cannabis liaison to our federal senator. I often got through as we had taken the time to build relationships with all these people during the previous three years. We showed up for town halls, provided public comments on proposed rules, and lobbied directly. That all helped. As did going out of our way to become a part of the community that initially slammed us, by participating in arts events, spending money at locally owned businesses and being good neighbors.
TURN YOUR ENEMIES INTO FRIENDS
Ironically, it ended up being our good standing in our small town that made the difference. After a two-week shutdown, the local fire marshal went to bat for us. We knew him by first name, and he was already familiar with us, our business and how we operate. He wrote a strongly worded letter, which was backed up by the ombudsman, and we got our permission to operate. The Secretary of State’s office even informed us that we could lodge a formal grievance over the shutdown, but I declined; instead, I requested to be placed on the rules-making committee so I could prevent this from happening to others. They did. I was the only female processor in the room.
Running our business has gotten a little easier since those hurly burly start-up days. We have regular clients and our products, under their brand names, are sold in nearly every dispensary in the state. We still process, pack, and label everything ourselves, but we like the freedom that comes with that. There are still challenges, not the least of which is navigating the gray area that still exists between state legalization and federal prohibition. Because banks are federally insured and our business is not legally recognized federally, we can’t get business loans or a line of credit, which limits our ability to obtain credit and puts our current banking accounts at risk of closure.
And yet, we abide. This summer, we will launch a line of Chong’s Choice. The contract to process products for Tommy Chong (a cannabis activist who made his name in Cheech and Chong comedies) came to us via word of mouth, great references from our clients, and my husband’s determination to stick with his unique brand of craft CO2 oil. It will provide, we hope, the first stable source of income we’ve had in years.
But there is still a long road ahead of us to reach financial stability, and an uphill battle for women in the industry. I’m still almost always the only woman in the room. Most of the women in this industry still seem to work on the retail side, though there are some family and women-led farms that are surviving. And even though women control two-thirds of the purchasing power in the U.S. and so should be a primary target demographic, cannabis marketing still focuses on young men.
I remain hopeful. I look forward to the day that, for a change, women farmers and business owners dominate policy discussions and our products dominate the shelves. My current goal is to build a business that is sustainable over time and generates revenue and creates jobs in the same community that was so against us at the outset. For myself personally, I’d like to see Full Circle provide Paul and I a stable income and a means of taking care of my parents as they age and ourselves into retirement.
And I’d like to pay off my student loans, a goal I almost gave up on but now seems within reach.
When we talk about how to advance inclusivity and diversity, we often default to identifying new ways of including those typically excluded to enter the dominant group’s tent. As colleague Dr. Barb Orser would say, this is known as the “Add X (insert your word here____________ i.e., women, LGBTQIA2S, people of colour, newcomers, etc.) and stir approach to diversity and inclusion.“
Given mounting evidence that decades-plus worth of “Add X and Stir” efforts are yielding disappointing results and, in some spaces, even creating rifts, we need to start thinking differently.
If we really want to see a world that has successfully addressed all 17 of the the United Nation’s 2030 sustainable development goals we are going to have to do a lot more than advance a Nike-esque “Just Do It” empowerment mindsets for women. We have to re-imagine fundamental, meta-level social operating systems–like neoliberal capitalism itself.
This is where the feminist economy and its protagonist–the feminist entrepreneur, or NEW breed of womxn entrepreneur–the #feministboss-comes in. What is the Feminist Economy?
The feminist economy is a kaleidoscope of startup and established organizations and enterprises that live and innovate at the intersection between feminism, social justice, and business.
It’s not all about bookstores or zine publishers anymore, either.
It cuts across sectors and is comprised of fearless startup founders, enterprise owners, non-profit leaders, plus collective, association, activist and cooperative directors of all genders who collaborate and expressly launch gendered products and/or services that challenge norms and advance both gender and social justice. But much more importantly, this community of relatable radicals think about business as a canvas for finding ways to challenge and reshape norms, indicate resistance, and create alternative interpretations of what is possible in our world. Introducing the #Feministboss
For feminist entrepreneurs and innovators, #movethedial style reform efforts and #girlboss empowerment narratives, while helpful in building personal confidence and advancing gender equity to a point, simply don’t go far enough. Nope. This community gets what humanism actually means, and leverage their individual privilege (if they have it), passions and business acumen to fight for deep systems change that brings an end to gender-based oppression.
This #feministboss pluralistic, global community doesn’t just tinker or wear cool feminist t-shirts.
These mavericks show up and take risks politically, mine 200 years of feminist scholarship, conscientiously tackle emerging theories, and study social movements and activist organizations (In addition to feminism, think Idle No More, Slow Food and the Arab Spring) for insights they can leverage in the context of building a model, social justice values-led enterprise.
Because feminist enterprises exist on the fringe, often without venture funding, corporate or establishment ties, they have the latitude to push the boundaries—with both hands.
Sure. They might have also read Lean Startup by Eric Ries. But they are more likely to have found a more values-aligned path by reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategyor Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the Worldwhen thinking about startup design, finance, and strategy.
They also routinely draw on feminist community of practice to learn what’s working–and not working when it comes to next gen inclusive operational practice and governance ideas. They engage with feminist media to share insights and findings—because there is no feminist executive program (yet!). Their companies create economic value—but also serve as social justice labs. They work hard and take on additional risk in order to put into practice feminist values, futures, scholarship, and best practices in an economy that continues to reward in outsized ways kyriarchal compliance (patriarchy + intersectionality = kyriarchy).
According to our most recent LiisBeth survey, the majority of feminist founders and business owners connect with the visionary definition of feminism articulated by feminist writer, bell hooks. It’s based on love for all humanity and the planet.
So where am I going with all this? As argued so well by Dr. Dori Tunstall, OCAD University’s Dean of the Faculty of Design (the first Black dean of a design school in North America), during her keynote at the 2018 Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum,diversity and inclusion practices, as we know them today, are not only not enough—her story shows us how many of these efforts are unnecessarily colonial, primitive and fragile.
On this day, International Women’s Day, I invite you to consider the feminist economy, your own relationship with feminism, and how to liberate and put into practice 200 years of theoretical development in business.
We are not getting to where many people of all genders feel we need to be on this issue.
Part of the answer is in being bolder. We need new stocky, radical ideas. We can find them by engaging the leaders and innovators in the feminist economy.
Perhaps it’s finally time to make feminism a “safe word” in the world of business and innovation. Instead of marginalizing its scholars and its practitioners, it might be finally time to name, fame, and embrace the movement’s wisdom.
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Left to Right: Chanèle McFarlane (Do Well Dress Well) , Karin Percil, (Sisterhood), Rachel Kelly (Make Lemonade) and Amanda Laird (Heavy Flow Podcast)
Left to Right: Chanèle McFarlane (Do Well Dress Well), Karin Percil, (Sisterhood), Rachel Kelly (Make Lemonade) and Amanda Laird (Heavy Flow Podcast)
On December 2 and 3, LiisBeth co-sponsored the second Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum (EFF) in downtown Toronto. The annual entrepreneurship conference brought together the growing community of feminist entrepreneurs to learn and share experiences around feminist business practice.
This year, the message was clear: connect and take action.
Taking action at the EFF
We’ll post a full roundup next year but here is a list of six action items to consider incorporating into your 2019 resolutions.
1. Type “Indigenomics” into a document. When the red squiggly line appears indicating a spell-check error, right-click then press “add word,” because the relatively new term is picking up speed in Canada’s lexicon. “When you talk about water and trees you talk about resources. When we talk about water and trees we talk about relatives.” – Carol Anne Hilton, Indigenomics By Design: The Rise of Indigenous Economic Empowerment.
2. VisitKelly Diels for feminist marketing tools, tips, and resources. If you missed her at the EFF 2018, you missed out, but fear not. Diels offers workshops and coaching sessions where you can develop (among other things) a social media strategy and system based on her Little Birds and Layer Cakes, Social Media Workbook. “If you hate marketing, it means you have a sense of justice.” – Kelly Diels, Feminist Marketing for an Emerging, More Inclusive Economy.
3. Build our communities. CV Harquail reminds us that we can build our collective path to the entrepreneurial feminist future by standing on and grounding ourselves in each other’s work. Every presenter, facilitator, and participant is doing work that we can build on — so let’s follow each other on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn, refer to each other’s work, and celebrate our growing community. View the full list of presenters here.
4, Unplug and Read (okay two actions) Sarah Selecky’s new novel: Radiant Shimmering Light. It’s the holidays so not everything has to be about work. However, you may find your own takeaways in Selecky’s novel about female friendship, business, and online marketing that skillfully balances satire, humour, and truth. Selecky also credits Kelly Diels in her acknowledgments as the person who coined the term Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand and met Diels at the EFF, so maybe it is about networking.
5. Decolonize your mind: Decolonization work begins with taking the time to critically examine how colonization has influenced your personal world view and sense of self. Sit down. Make a list. Check it twice. Then consider re-embracing cultural practices, thinking, beliefs, and values that are a part of who you are and where you came from, but were systemically dissed by the dominant culture. “If we want diversity and inclusion, we have to decolonize design so that the practice itself stops traumatizing our diverse students and professors.” – Dr. Dori Tunstall, Whiteness without White Supremacy: Generating New Models of Whiteness
6. Sign up for LiisBeth’s newsletter here and receive rants, downloadables, recommended readings, profiles, feminist freebies! and stay informed about LiFE (LiisBeth’s Incubator for Feminist Entrepreneurship)–a membership only feminist business practice “school” and learning commons.
In addition to the action items above, what else did EFF participants get from the conference? The five most meaningful leaves on the wall of inspiration sum it up best:
We all have something of value to offer
Nothing grows without sharing
Connected
Who knows what will happen!
#rise
Rooted in values that take good care of people and planet, feminist entrepreneurs are building justice into products and services, operating models, and relationships. In the process, we are building collective power to change the economy.
Second day of the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum in Toronto
Day two of the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum 2018 in Toronto
The federal government has awarded Ryerson University $9 million over three years to fund a Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH) to advance research into women’s entrepreneurship with the goal of increasing participation of women in the economy.
Mary Ng, Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion, who worked in the President’s Office at Ryerson University before becoming a Member of Parliament in the Liberal government, made the announcement this morning, saying WEKH will equip governments and the private sector “with the necessary information to better understand and assist women entrepreneurs in their efforts to start up, scale up and access new markets.”
Currently, only 16 percent of Canadian small and medium-sized businesses are women owned. By many estimates, advancing gender equality has the potential to add $150 billion to the Canadian economy by 2026. WEKH is expected to be a one-stop source of knowledge, data and best practices to help governments, organizations and the private sector develop better policies and strategies to grow women’s entrepreneurship.
Vicki Saunders, founder of SheEO and a partner in WEKH, hopes the investment will unleash the potential of women’s entrepreneurship. “We have an excellent business case in the women’s entrepreneurship area to show how investing in women will grow the Canadian economy. It’s very exciting to see that a university will take this information and upload research that will power better government policy.” She adds that “Ryerson has been a leading driver of entrepreneurship, innovation and education across the country.”
The Ryerson-led consortium was chosen over one competing bid led by University of Ottawa, which included some of Canada’s top thought leaders in the area of women’s entrepreneurship, notably Barbara Orser, a professor at University of Ottawa and co-author of Feminine Capital: Unlocking the Power of Women Entrepreneurs; Jennifer Jennings, Associate Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise at University of Alberta’s School of Business; Sarah Kaplan, Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto; Sandra Altner, CEO of the Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada; and the MaRS Institute, an innovation hub that helps entrepreneurs launch and grow ventures.
The Ryerson consortium includes eight regional hubs and universities, ten partners and 37 supporters.
The federal government has not lacked for reports making the case that supporting women’s entrepreneurship will strengthen the Canadian economy – more than 30 in the past 30 years, many industry sponsored. The central question now is will this direct federal government investment in university-led research produce relevant policy action and real results?
Says Barbara Orser, who coined the term Entrepreneurial Feminism, “It’s a unique opportunity to ensure a feminist and women-focussed perspective is shared and that only research of the highest quality is profiled. If not, there’s a risk of replicating the stereotypes and mythology of women’s entrepreneurship. Every incubator and accelerator and academic engaged in entrepreneurship should be speed dialled into this new source of information.”
Ryerson University’s Wendy Cukier, the Founder and Director of the Diversity Institute at the Ted Rogers School of Management, says they were thrilled to win the bid. “We don’t see this as an opportunity to do research. We see this as an opportunity to drive change, and the diversity institute has a strong track record in terms of using evidence and research to make things happen. We have pulled together a good network of partners including universities who will be able to grow and sustain (WEKH) beyond the initial funding.” She says that Ryerson will reach out to work with partners beyond the consortium. “The whole point is to aggregate research and information available. The whole point is to map and grow the entire ecosystem.”
Kelly Diels, a Vancouver-based feminist marketing consultant and writer, hopes there is a channel that loops the research hub back to women entrepreneurs so they can turn it into useful information with tools to use in their businesses. That way, “it’s not a report disappears into the ether or was a big project that didn’t actually move back to the people who need it.”
Jena Cameron, Manager of Women Entrepreneurship Policy at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, says both applications were very strong and equally evaluated against the assessment grid that included things such as partnerships and sustainability. A lot of information on women’s entrepreneurship already exists, says Cameron, so a big part of the plan is to “package information (it) in a way that it becomes accessible to women business support organizations and women entrepreneurs themselves. Go through it and distil nuggets down into practical things that the ecosystem can use.”
Our initial take at LiisBeth? What, another study? This data better lead to change. It will benefit women entrepreneurs if the Ryerson-led consortium reaches out to the other side to tap into Canada’s leading feminist enterprise research and thinkers. Create an open door policy that lets everyone in so everyone can win, including community-based women’s entrepreneurship organizations and feminist entrepreneurs who are often off the mainstream radar.
