Communicopia

I've been on the board of BC Technology Social Venture Partners for over 3 years, and find the work we do helping non-profits reach sustainability and scale incredibly rewarding. This week we were happy to see 3 of our grantees become finalists in Vancity's $1M award. One of our primary goals is to use our networks, expertise, and business skills to help non-profits leverage more funding, so the fact that Vancity picked so many up is big news for us.

Below is the letter from our board chair, Don Safnuk:

Three of this year’s four Vancity Million Dollar Award Finalists were BCT SVP Grantees FIRST!

Quest Outreach Society, The Crisis Centre and Atira Women’s Resource Society have each been identified by Vancity as “bold, exciting and innovative…[and having the ability to] be self sustaining in the long term…”

So it looks like we really DO know how to pick winners.

Quest Outreach Food Exchange, a “Donated Food Broker” got funds and expertise from SVP beginning in 2003, for a Warehouse Inventory Management System (WIMS); today, Quest is multiplying every $1 financial donation into $11.52 worth of food, which in turn provides food services to 6 hungry people. They have also reduced landfill waste by 3,330 tonnes and greenhouse gas emissions by 3,762 tonnes of CO2 equivalents.

The SV Partners responsible: Shawn Ostheimer, (The Answer Company), Cathy Brown (Salesworks), George Brown (Salesworks), Paul Welsh, (Karyo Communications) and Blair Simonite, (ACL Services)

In 2004, SVP committed funds & expertise to the Crisis Centre to help them develop their secure, live web chat application, Youth in Crisis, that reaches and helps suicidal and distressed youth in British Columbia with real counselors in real time. Along with increasing daily chat hours, number of chats handled and website visitors, Youthinbc.com is also developing their ASP model for license to crisis centres across North America.

Tom Epplett of IATS Ticketmaster (also a Communicopia client) is the Social Venture Partner leading this project.

Atira Women's Resource Society received a one time capital infusion for their Property Management enterprise, via the BC Social Enterprise Fund, our ‘mezzanine funding’ partnership with Vancouver Foundation and Vancity that targets social enterprises that have moved out of startup and make a sold case for second round funding to consolidate their growth.

Social Venture Partners Norm Francis (Pivotal Software founder) & Ken Spencer (Creo Founder) seeded the fund and Kathy Butler (CIBC World Markets) and Rich Osborne (Second City Capital) coached Atira’s successful financing proposal.

Clearly, we’re establishing an exceptional record of funding and coaching innovative non profits to become more sustainable. If you’d like to learn more about becoming a partner, or for more great stories to send around, please contact our Executive Director Kathleen Speakman at kspeakman@bctsvp.com.