Telelearning Session 23: The Role of the Social Economy in Sustainable Food and Agriculture Systems

Podcast Now available, click here to listen to the full recording.

Tuesday, October 19 2010, 9:00 – 10:00 am Pacific Time (12:00 pm Eastern time)

Register TODAY and join us for a FREE and pertinent discussion of this 21st century challenge – food security.

BACKGROUND

This session will explore how to build more sustainable food and agriculture systems.
During this session speakers will address the following questions:

1. How will building better sustainable food and agriculture systems help with climate change, nutrition and health imperatives?
2. What are the key ingredients to building sustainable food and agriculture systems?
3. How is the Social Economy and community economic development a factor?

   
   SPEAKERS:

• Aleck Ostry  is Canada Research Chair in the Social Determinants of Community Health and is also a Senior Scholar with the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in British Columbia
•  Linda Geggie is the coordinator of the Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable, is the community food lead for the Capacity Building Project at the Office of Community Based Research, University of Victoria and is a network developer for the BCHLA Capacity Building Project with the Vancouver Island Food Systems Network. 

MODERATOR:

• Rachelle McElroy, Knowledge Mobilization Specialist with the Canadian Community Economic Development Network.

CALL LOGISTICS:
·    Session Date: Tuesday October 19th 2010
·    Call begins at 9:00 am Pacific time, 12:00 pm Eastern time
·    Call-in information will be given upon registration
·    Register before October 19th to obtain dial in information and background papers
·    This session is in English

SESSION FORMAT: 1 Hour
Welcome: 5 min
Presentations: 10 min by each speaker
Discussion: 35 minutes

REGISTRATION:
Register by phoning 250-472-4976, or e-mailing with your name, location, and work or volunteer position. For more information about the Canadian Social Economy Hub, please visit: www.socialeconomyhub.ca

Limited number of spaces available – Register soon!

BIOGRAPHIES:

Aleck Ostry

Dr. Ostry is Canada Research Chair in the Social Determinants of Community Health and is also a Senior Scholar with the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in British Columbia. He has an MSc in Health Service Planning, an MA in history (specializing in the history of public health), and a PhD in epidemiology. He conducts an extensive program on the social determinants of health with a focus on rural health, food security, and nutrition policy.

Linda Geggie

Linda Geggie is the founder of LifeCycles, a community based organization developed in 1994 to cultivate awareness and initiate action around food, health and urban sustainability.  LifeCycles operates projects such as Growing Schools, the Fruit Tree Project, and acts as the hub for Urban Agriculture in the City of Victoria.  She is currently the Coordinator of the Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable (CRFAIR), which works to facilitate education, information sharing and collaborative work of food and agriculture organizations in the region.  CRFAIR also works on policy and planning issues with Municipal Governments, Islands Trust and the CRD.  Linda is also involved in the creation of the emerging Vancouver Island Food Systems Network and is a board member of the BC Food Systems Network.  She also works with the University of Victoria’s Office of Community Based Research as the Community Lead on food and health.  At Blue Skies Farm, situated in Saanich, Linda works alongside her family to produce honey, eggs and shiitake mushrooms.

Rachelle McElroy

Rachelle is the Knowledge Mobilization Specialist with the Canadian Community Economic Development Network and assists with researcher with the CSEHub. For the past 10 years she has been forwarding sustainability in diverse leadership roles for many facets of community, including NGO’s, government, business and institutions. Rachelle holds a Master’s in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), Sweden and is a graduate of the Victoria Leadership Program. Rachelle also serves as board chair of City Green Solutions in Victoria, BC and performs with Kikeyambay, an afro-fusion orchestra and African dance troop.

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The Canadian CED Network’s brief for House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance in preparation for next year’s budget provides recommendations for a sustainable economic, social and environmental future.  It builds on the recommendations put forward at the 2010 National Summit on a People-Centred Economy.

Download: CCEDNet’s Pre-Budget Submission

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THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING, TO LISTEN TO A FULL RECORDING OF THIS SESSION, CLICK HERE

Canadian Social Economy Hub Telelearning Session 20: Building Strong Community University Partnerships

Thursday, September 16 2010, 8:45 – 9:45 am Pacific Time (11:45 am Eastern time)

The Canadian Social Economy Research Partnerships are now in their final year, and SSHRC has recently launched its renewed program architecture including grants in support of formal partnerships. This telelearning session is an opportunity to consider how to build strong research partnerships, including:

1. What have we learned about building stronger partnerships from recent Community-University Research partnerships?
2. What do community organizations need to know before they enter a research partnership?
3. How will changes at SSHRC and other funding agencies affect future Community-University Research Partnerships?

SPEAKERS:

• Jean-Marc Fontan, Professor of sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Co-director of the Social Economy Community-University Research Alliance in Québec
• John Anderson, Principal Investigator on the CURA Measuring the Co-operative Difference and Director of the CCA Governmental Affairs and Public Policy Unit
• Murielle Gagnon, Director of Strategic programs and Joint Initiatives, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada

MODERATOR:

• Rupert Downing, is the former Executive Director of the Canadian CED Network and Co-director for the Canadian Social Economy Research Hub

For speakers biographies and for more information click here

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The Canadian CED Network is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the 8th intake of its CED Work Experience Program, CreateAction! This program is funded by Human Resource and Skills Development Canada. Its purpose is to give out-of-school post-graduate youth, who have a career focus in community economic development (CED), a relevant six-month work experience placement. We are recruiting up to 40 community-based CED organizations to host work experience participants from October 4 – March 18th, 2010 inclusively.

How does it work?

Organizations submit applications to the Canadian CED Network via this website to host a participant. The Canadian CED Network selects the host organizations. The host organizations in turn hire the participants according to job-specific placements.

Eligible work experience placements may include project management, participatory research, communications, social entrepreneurship, business planning, social marketing, CED financing and asset mapping, to name a few. A special focus for this intake will include placements with positive environmental impacts. For examples of CED work experience placements from last year, click here.

The Canadian CED Network requires host organizations to be members of the Canadian CED Network or become members once its application for hosting work experience participants is approved. For information about being a member, click here.

The Canadian CED Network will select the host organizations according to the following criteria:

• relevance of proposed work experience to community economic development (For the Canadian CED Network’s definition of CED, click here)
• whether the proposed placement qualifies as an environmental work experience (e.g. includes Environmental Protection, Conservation and Preservation of Natural Resources, Environmental Sustainability, etc.);
• organizational capacity to assist participants with their daily work, mentoring and career development;
• provincial/territorial and urban/rural diversity;
• track record in hosting work experience placements, students or interns;
• ability to recruit participants from diverse backgrounds.

The Canadian CED Network will give preference to organizations that can successfully recruit Aboriginal participants as well as persons with disabilities.

The Canadian CED Network will:

• manage the CED Work Experience Program;
• employ the participant at $15.00 an hour for a total of 37.9 hours a week, including participant Mandatory Employment Related Costs or statutory benefits;
• coordinate monthly intern teleconference calls to share experiences and to network
• offer major travel and accommodation for provincially diverse participants to attend the national intern gathering October 21, 2010; and
• provide peer learning and mentoring opportunities to the participants related to the National Youth CED Engagement project.

Host organizations will:

• supervise the work experience participant;
• contribute to the work experience participant’s learning opportunities
• allow the work experience participant to spend approximately one day per week to work on their National Youth CED Engagement project;
• Allow the work experience participant to spend a minimum of three days at the national intern gathering October 20-22, 2010.

Participants must meet the following the criteria:

• between the ages of 15 and 30 inclusively at the time of selection;
• a Canadian citizen, or a permanent resident, or a protected person within the meaning of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act;
• legally entitled to work in Canada;
• legally entitled to work according to the relevant provincial and/or territorial legislation and regulations;
• out-of-school;
• a post-secondary college or university graduate;
• not receiving Employment Insurance benefits;
• can demonstrate a lack of labour market attachment to field of study (under-employed or unemployed);
• can demonstrate that working in the field of community economic development is a career goal;
• has not previously participated in a Career Focus work experience placement.

How to apply?

Deadline for host organizations to submit an application is September 13th, 2010, 5:00pm Pacific Daylight Time. Download the CED Work Experience Host Organization Application Form here.

Youth interested in the program may submit an application to the Canadian CED Network or may apply directly to the host organizations. Download the CED Work Experience Participant Application Form here. The successful host organizations will be announced on this website.

For more information and to submit your application, please contact Matthew Thompson at or phone at 416-760-2578.

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Commentaries have pitted this as an either-or debate regarding protectionism versus free trade, the higher costs associated with preferring local business over cheaper ones and about the ramifications of us doing something that the rest of the world supposedly is not.

To begin with, this debate is not an all-or-nothing conversation. Trade has its benefits, but it also has its flaws. To pretend that “free trade” and “fair tendering” are really free and fair is naive. Free trade has allowed some local companies to expand and hire more Manitobans, while others have been forced to move, close or sell out, resulting in lost jobs.

Extreme measures either way do not make responsible public policy. Our public institutions are mandated to act in society’s best interest, and our best interest is not served by blind adherence to the cheapest bid. This is why tendering policies already consider a host of other criteria. Adding locality to this mix is not in and of itself protectionist; it ensures maximum value for publicly spent dollars.

Some fear that local preference will escalate costs and result in fewer or lower quality service and products. Again, it is not simply one or the other. When weighing competing bids of similar quality and cost, it is possible to add other considerations, such a locality, as tie-breakers.

In looking out for the public good, governments increasingly consider safety, quality as well as life-cycle and ongoing operating and maintenance costs of various tenders in addition to up-front prices. We should also favour businesses that reduce taxpayer costs related to poverty, crime and incarceration, unemployment and health care while increasing government revenues through payroll and income tax revenues and consumption taxes. This is not about charity, this is about efficient use of government funds.

To present this approach as something no one else is doing is also misleading. Integrating economic, social and environmental objectives, also known as a “triple bottom line” approach, is becoming increasingly common and governments and other institutions are getting on board through their procurement policies.

For example, the Vancouver Olympics gave consideration to social enterprises in their procurement process. As a result, social enterprises employing women returning to work, inner-city residents and aboriginal youth working in social enterprises produced the flowers presented to medallists and the podiums that they stood on. The City of Calgary has implemented a sustainable environmental and ethical procurement policy. Ontario’s recently released poverty-reduction strategy includes commitments to developing procurement policies that support social enterprise. New Westminster, B.C., recently adopted a living-wage policy, ensuring that work it contracts out is awarded to companies that adhere to wage and benefit standards greater than what is legally required.

The Scottish government is implementing a policy that gives 10 per cent preference for social enterprises in certain procurement fields, including three per cent for subcontracting to social enterprises. In Great Britain, a Conservative MP has brought forward a bill in support of social enterprise procurement preference. Italy has long given extra weighting to purchasing from co-operative businesses, recognizing that their business model of collective ownership creates economic democracy and a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Our neighbours to the south understand the value of balancing free trade with strategic purchasing. More than 140 municipal governments have passed “living wage” ordinances regarding their procurement contracts, including big cities such as San Francisco, Santa Fe, N.M., Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles and St. Louis. The U.S. government has targets of procuring five per cent of contracts from small female-owned businesses, three per cent from service-disabled, veteran-owned businesses and gives small businesses located in “HUBZones” (historically underutilized business zones located in economically distressed communities) a 10 per cent price evaluation preference on tenders and aim for three per cent of all federal contract dollars to be awarded eligible businesses. In Minnesota, targeted small businesses that are located in economically disadvantaged communities or are owned by racial minorities, women or people with disabilities are given up to 6 per cent pricing preference. The U.S. Army has a green procurement strategy.

Leaders around the world are beginning to understand the ripples of procurement. They are seeing how even incremental cost increases in procurement are dwarfed by the direct financial payback that certain enterprises provide, never mind the longer-term financial savings relating to the costs of poverty and poor health. Municipal governments could catch this wave.

Brendan Reimer is the prairies regional co-ordinator for the Canadian Community Economic Development Network, a national member-led non-profit association of organizations committed to community renewal and poverty reduction.

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/2010/08/06/buy-local-policies-growing?viewAllComments=y

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The Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) International Committee welcomes you to their Blog so that we can share information with our members, the Canadian public and interested persons around the world. We welcome information, either in English or in French.

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Deadline for applications is July 30, 2010

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The people-centered economy has progressed considerably in Canada in recent years, but the gains are still fragile and challenges substantial. The continued development of a people-centered economy cannot proceed without an overall perspective that draws a link between local, national and planetary, between where something is produced and where it is consumed and between worker and the socially aware investor. A people-centered economy cannot be fully realized without the mobilization of a society as a whole.

Click here to view the full Declaration of the 2010 Summit on a People-Centered Economy.

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Karim Harji est gestionnaire du développement des partenariats de Social Capital Partners (SCP) à Toronto. SCP est un organisme sans but lucratif pancanadien de fi nance sociale. SCP fournit des services-conseils en fi nancement et en stratégie de croissance à des entreprises qui affichent de bons résultats, qui font preuve d’une mission sociale au plan des ressources humaines et qui veillent à élargir les occasions de carrières professionnelles destinées aux populations défavorisées. Karim est également cofondateur du site Web socialfinance.ca et membre du comité des nouveaux leaders du Réseau canadien de DÉC.

L’entreprise sociale : Un modèle alternitif d’affair avec Karim Harji

Lire tout les histoires d’Économie sociale en témoignage

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