Three months in...

The last 3 months have been a roller coaster. In startup mode, I had to go from high level vision down to setting up my business credit card and everything in between. While I have zero experience in the capital “P” Philanthropy, aside from working on the ground for a foundation’s program when I lived in Sierra Leone, the first steps on this journey gave me a lot to reflect on. 

Disclaimer: As many who know me, I write these journal posts for myself first, hence sometimes I may not come across the right way and typically jump between startup and social justice speak (apologetic already, how Canadian of me!).

Note: I will also use the word “I” throughout this post as I don’t want to attribute any words to my team that I did not clear with them as I start rambling :)

Why “social innovation” sits funny with me

I used this terminology all the time. But throughout my experiences and now walking into philanthropy, I am starting to cringe a bit when I hear it because of its connotations. This is especially pronounced given my previous role leading Startup Edmonton, the city’s early stage tech startup incubator.

In the private sector startup world, you will always hear language around being “customer obsessed.” This doesn’t have as much to do with good intentions as it has to do with power dynamics. That is also why the other terms you will always hear is the customer’s “willingness to pay.” While it’s not just about the money, even though extremely important in the power dynamic, the “willingness to pay” is a signal that validates or invalidates the startup’s value proposition and helps frame what you build. If you’re a startup that satisfies your customer, you build actual market traction and that is what garners investment (ideally speaking). Sometimes you can find entrepreneurs, for example in clean tech (I’ll pick on them because I was one), where they might say, “if X% of the market adopts this, we could solve climate change”... but it doesn’t matter. If the startup stops at an idea and cannot get market traction, that amazing solution that could have solved climate change will fail. For good or bad, it's sort of how the “innovation economy” works. The innovation economy is about structural power dynamics and relationships that allow people to constantly test and validate these solutions. Any startup product manager will tell you that customer relationships are the most valuable asset. One of the big reasons it gets conflated with technology is because the best and fastest way to learn is by breaking stuff, wherein software and hi-tech can be a bit less risky, cheaper and move faster than other types of innovation.

There is a pseudo-analogy in government where value propositions are validated or invalidated by the citizen (i.e. the “customer”) through their vote and other forms of civic action. However, when I think about some structurally marginalized communities, many of whom are considered “wards of the state,” I constantly wonder about where the power dynamics lie to inform “innovation.” If the power does not lie with the “end-user,” is it actually innovation or is that jargon put on what is actually seeking baseline value creation. Maybe jargon that funders like to hear.

As an investor, I would likely see risks in investing in a snowboarding startup where the CEO and key leaders have never snowboarded in their life.

When I read reports like Unfunded and movements for community-owned or community-led development, one of the many things that pop-out is the historic and current state of inefficient and ineffective investment frameworks with the under investment in the people closest to the issues that are supposedly being aimed to solve, which is a symptom of colonized development. Just like in any solution development space, the people closest to the problem, especially those who have lived through it themselves, will have a greater understanding of the nuances of the issue as well as connection into relevant networks. Hence, it would make sense to invest in those who are closest, such as leaders of lived experience (if you can only connect with a few) or the broader population of interest (if you can connect with many). For those who are outside those communities, the amount of learning and time required to get to relationship building and understanding, while important, can make for an inefficient or ineffective use of resources. I recall doing my dissertation about Fair Trade olive farmers in the West Bank, Palestine while at LSE where it was expected I only do secondary research and no primary research. However, my biggest concern was if my framework actually encompassed the issues which informed the ‘questions’ I asked of the literature (i.e. the data). Hence, I jumped on a plane to visit Jenin and other locations for a month to meet people who welcomed me with open arms and loads of delicious dinners. I didn’t do this for primary research but to open my conceptual scope of what to look for in the literature. Sure enough, I ended up learning a few new angles to take that I would have never known previously. However, that would be very inefficient if that is how I made programming for those farmers. There are many Palestinian farmers or those close to that community who already know all that stuff and doing the good work. When people closest to the issues for which we say we want to innovate on are getting the least investment or very restricted investment (i.e. restricted admin/ops costs, project/program only funding, burdensome reporting etc.), we're missing great innovation opportunities or baseline value creation/harm reduction to my previous point.

There are multiple ways of distributing power closer to the issue being cared about, such as community organization models where governance or some other forms of decision making are led by the community with lived experience - analogous to how a startup has all their validation hinged on the customer to help them build better solutions. But of course, structural marginalization such as racism and other forms of social discrimination are a very real detriment to evidence-based decision making (among MANY other things). I’ll also specify decision making rather than consultation. Anyone in the startup world will tell you that consultation doesn’t mean much compared to how people actually decide to adopt the product. I.e. someone can say they want something, but until they swipe that credit card and/or actually use the solution and are satisfied, it doesn’t matter. Something I learned in innovation across sectors is that continuous trust and accountability with your customer is the foundation of good innovation. As I'm hiring portfolio managers right now, building those trusted relationships will be key, where I have a keen eye on finding leaders of lived experience.

Where to start when I’m the dumbest person in the room

One month into Northpine, I made the decision to not focus on sectors (e.g. education, employment, health etc.), but rather population-level outcomes. This approach gives us the freedom to be solution agnostic and invest responsively to the needs of the populations we aim to work with. The other big reason is based on what I have told many people I have been meeting in the first few months - me coming up with solutions would be the least efficient and least effective way of building solutions for these communities, i.e. I would inherently build junk or at best hope to get lucky if the relationships are not there (can't wait for my portfolio managers to join!). As I looked at populations, that is also very complex - where do we start!?

We chose populations that have a total size of 100,000 or less. As populations get bigger, things get more complex. Throwing a bit of social stats nerdiness, to get 99% confidence at a 1% margin of error, you would need a good representative sample size of about 14,000 people (which is also the early adopters number on an innovation curve). Being in startup mode, we have yet to figure out how and where we can add value. Hence, our aim is to first build trusted relationships with these communities who have shown openness and interest, which then leads to understanding and then onto solutions. The 4 populations we aim to serve are (no particular order):

• Youth in care across Canada, particularly older children who are about to 'age out' or recently 'aged out' of care
• Refugee newcomers across Canada, particularly meaningful settlement of former refugee adults
• Former prisoners across Canada, particularly restorative justice
• Rural Newfoundland & Labrador, particularly those vulnerable to poverty

When I first started, I was having calls with people working within these communities and others who are doing great work. However, I had to take a step back and ask, where should I be speaking to people that perhaps are not in my network? I grabbed a team of data social scientists and gave them 10 days to answer 2 questions: where are these people around Canada and overlay that data with COVID regional risk. The reason I only gave 10 days is because I knew it was going to be imperfect and loaded with assumptions (classic 80-20 rule). People can spend years on this, but I just wanted a high-level overview of what regions across Canada should I be reaching out to - what is my compass. For example, if I want to learn about youth in care, I better be speaking to people in Manitoba. If I want to learn about former prisoners, I better be speaking to people in Saskatchewan. Oh refugee newcomers, who knew Winnipeg and Windsor would be major areas of interest. We mapped out many places, and I will have to write a whole other post about data on these communities from that experience, as many people have noted, it’s messy, complex and, more importantly, left me wondering how community-driven it is.

We have a fifth focus area of nature and conservation. While I saw a thread connecting nature and conservation across the groups, a conversation with the amazing Diane Roussin really connected the dots. As we chatted on the quirks of social innovation, I brought up the concept of “human-centred design”, wherein she replied, “well you know, I’m Indigenous, so it’s not just about ‘human’ centered design but ‘all my relations’-centred design” - and boom was the clarity of it all. Hence, we are incorporating this into the portfolio as an intersectional layer with the above populations to enable a more holistic design approach. Made sense to me, as every human is a combination of many factors and relations. From an operational sense, our aim is that all facets of the organization will have a direct line of connection into these communities, such as business procurement policies, our communications, decision-making on funding and much more. While the scope is large and complex, I see a thread that connects all these communities and we are fortunate to have access to significant funding to hopefully help fuel impact to untap the blue ocean of human thriving in Canada.

Figuring out the ecosystem and how we help

Community development is an ecosystem-wide approach for any kind of change. It has been absolutely wonderful meeting with people from around the country and seeing the amazing work that is being done - and I’m only scratching the surface!

I am also navigating that we are in a multi-sided marketplace, i.e. system. As much as we can talk about population-driven design, we also have to look at the existing ecosystem in place and who holds power there for impactful change. For example, I recall speaking to someone who runs a halfway house for recently released prisoners. They recently had their donations cut significantly due to the drop in philanthropic dollars. I asked her how many people they served annually and how much funding they needed to operate at that level. Her response was about 250 people at approximately $140k. When I look at prison recidivism statistics in Canada and how we spend $20B annually on criminal justice with $5B to jails and prisons, it begged the question, why? Even if this halfway house helped reduce recidivism by 3-4% from the existing over 20%, they are worth at least $400k… but it doesn’t work like that. We are operating in a space of structural complexity.

While it may sound odd to say out loud, I don’t think that philanthropy solves problems. I think philanthropy can fuel a learning machine to help where strategically valuable by being risk capital and patient capital, coupled with leveraging our privilege and networks. We know we won’t see the big outcomes in a single year, maybe not even three or five years, likely longer. But our role is how we can help be a part of the journey that works with the ecosystem to effectively learn together, take risks, experiment, and evaluate in the continuous growth process that is centred around the outcomes of the communities we aim to work with. Also, not everything we do is going to be the flashy “innovation” work. At the same time, there are many acute needs that need to be addressed with these communities. Our key goal is to help build trusted relationships to participate in effective solutions or learnings (i.e. we can fail together) with these communities through that learning machine that leads to their thriving. This is going to be driven at the core by kindness exhibited through acting with excellence, sincerity and agility.

Like with any startup, perspectives will likely change in the coming months as I learn - it better!

The saga continues, inshallah! :)