Balancing Strategy and Operations for Growth and Impact
The 4th annual Social Enterprise Unleashed Conference organized by CSED (Centre for Social Enterprise Development) took place earlier this week in Ottawa. A short conference – just 2/3’s of a day – it packs a good punch and having attended the past 4 years I have always felt it was a good value.
It is an interesting time for social enterprise in Ontario, as many of the key intermediary organizations (including CSED) have seen significant funding cuts in the past year under the current provincial government. While this wasn’t a focus of the day – you certainly felt this reality in the conversations that took place.
Keynote Speaker: Tonya Surman
The day started with a Keynote Presentation from Tonya Surman (CEO of CSI). Tonya spoke of the incredible growth that CSI has experienced over a very short period of time. She spoke of having to deal with the reality of managing that growth – and experiencing that ongoing battle that nonprofit organizations face, where there is often money to build new things, but rarely enough money to keep things going once they are built.
“Funding can push you off mission, can push you into unsustainable growth faster than anything. We need funders who want to see our core work manifested in the world.”
~Tonya Surman, CSED Unleashed 2019 Keynote Presentation
Tonya spoke of how the past few years at CSI had been some of the most challenging in her career. While she spent her days in the community that she had been such a force in creating, surrounded by people who were focused on growth and scale and innovation, she also had to wrap her head around consolidation. Having grown so quickly, CSI found themselves in a situation (not uncommon around organizations that experience significant growth) where there was a disconnect between the staff team and the overall organizational strategy, where growth hadn’t been supported by the proper systems, and where some of their business areas simply weren’t performing. Today CSI is no longer looking at expansion, they are looking at going deeper in the communities where they are already established – growth that is more focused on depth and authenticity and true social change – rather than on being in many different locations or being bigger. CSI has always been a fascinating organization to watch, and I personally look forward to hearing more about this transition in the years to come.
Tonya’s presentation was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Michael Lachapelle, with Ian Bingeman (Youth Ottawa), Katie Miller (Impact Hub Ottawa) and Richard Plummer (Causeway Work Centre). They spoke of the importance of building strategy with staff and stakeholders and of the importance of finding the balance between growth and quality, how as we grow our social enterprises, we need to understand what we might be giving up as an organization. Though they all expressed it differently there was agreement that you had to be careful about not being too big, that growth shouldn’t be an objective, but the result of success. I think it was Richard Plummer (but I may be remembering this wrong), likened the balance to playing an accordion – that in order to play the music you have to both expand and contract, and understand the rhythm of your business.
Tessa Hebb and Marco Pagani
Next up was a conversation between Tessa Hebb (Carleton University) and Marco Pagani (Ottawa Community Foundation). It was mostly Tessa interviewing Marco. Marco spoke of how the nonprofit sector needed to stand up, and “drive the bus”, to encourage cross sectoral social change. He spoke of a need to move the sector away from a current practice of fighting fires to a more collective impact, solutions oriented approach – that aligns stakeholders around (1) what is the problem we are trying to solve (2) what is the vision and (3) what is the strategy and how does it get operationalized. He teased a forthcoming announcement – December 9th – about a new social enterprise platform. He also stressed that the Ottawa Community Foundation would continue to make direct impact investing part of its investment strategy through partners such as the Community Forward Fund and the Alterna Savings Microfinance program (which of course I feel is a really good program – run by some fantastic women!).
The day closed with group table discussion led by Michael Lachappelle. The exercise (inspired by Liberated Structures) had groups talking about three questions
- How do we go about building a social enterprise so dysfunctional the social impact doesn’t matter and people don’t care?
- What do we do today that resembles that things that will create the worst possible outcome?
- What steps could we take to stop these unwanted behaviours or activities?
There were lots of interesting thoughts that came out of the exercise, however the one point that I took the time to jot down was that as a sector we need to “stop believing that diversity, safe workspaces, pay equity, and all the other things we strive for, will simply self emerge.”
Final Thoughts
What was missing from the day for me was something to link Tonya Surman’s keynote, which seemed to be calling for a new business model and Marco Pagani’s thoughts, which seemed to be calling for a more business-like approach in the sector. I would have loved to have seen the two engage in a bit of debate on this as I think it is a fundamental question that we are all grappling with. From what I know of both of them, they each have strong opinions, and that is the best kind of debate!