Canadian Olympic soccer player, Amy Vermeulen wearing a sports bag made by Common Thread (photo courtesy of Common Thread)

In Vancouver’s inner-city a unique cooperative called Common Thread weaves together opportunities for residents. Comprised of five organizations with sewing programs, this cooperative social enterprise takes sourced materials (donated or recycled) and repurposes them into tote bags, backpacks, and other products. Common Thread began in 2007 when these groups came together in order to seek higher volume contracts than any one of them could accommodate alone. It sustains each individual partner group within it by coordinating a flexible manufacturing process with a more reliable stream of work.

The cooperative was recently chosen as one of a handful of community based enterprises and charities to receive 2010 Winter Olympic Banners donated by the City.

The 800 banners, which were donated to Common Thread via its member organization The Kettle Friendship Society, will be used in an innovative collaboration with Mills Basics to produce a limited edition line of notebook covers with customized notebooks. Mills is a family owned Vancouver company that has provided office support and products such as printing, furniture and supplies to business since 1947. The company supports environmentally and socially responsible business practices and will be donating the profits from the sale of these special notebooks to H.A.V.E a culinary social enterprise in the DTES.

This isn’t the first time Common Thread have received Olympic Banners either. Building Opportunities with Business has been working with Common Thread since May 2009 to help connect the group with high volume sewing contracts like the City’s Great Beginnings Program. As part of this, Common Thread produced 1,500 children’s backpacks from the City’s pre-Olympic/Paralympic banners in a project called Sew A Legacy. The backpacks were filled with school supplies (many donated by Mills Basics) and distributed by the City to inner-city schools. Having coordinated production among more than 20 local sewers from organizations such as the Kettle Friendship Society, the Aboriginal Mother Centre, Coast Mental Health and the Afghan Women’s Sewing and Craft Co-op, Shirley Chan, CEO of BOB, attests to Common Thread’s ability to bridge organizations and bring benefits to the community. “Common Thread is an excellent example of the community capacity building power of social enterprises. Bringing together the resources, cooperation and support of government, community groups and non-profits, their work directly helps residents by creating jobs that contribute to a social and environmental purpose. BOB is pleased to support their work.”

Social enterprises are businesses that are driven by a social or environmental causes. They have become increasingly common engines of job creation and community support in urban and rural areas, and particularly in Vancouver’s inner-city. Common thread is an excellent example and one whose profile is growing. The special edition notebooks made from the Olympic/Paralympic Banners are scheduled to be ready by mid-August and can be purchased through Mills Basics.

For more information about common thread or to place an order contact Melanie Conn

Common Thread
626 Slocan St.
Vancouver, BC
V5K 3X7
Tel: 604-736-0935

Web: http://www.commonthreadcoop.ca
Email: info@commonthreadcoop.ca

Mark began his exploration of commerce and culture as an Imagineer with Disney, developing new theme park experiences. Later, he was the Director of User Research at ECCO Design in New York leading new product development for Fortune 500 clients.

He has a BS in Engineering and an MS in Engineering Management, both from Stanford University. He was a Mayfield Entrepreneurship Fellow and has served on the Vancouver City Planning Commission. He also currently serves on the board of the Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery.

The entire team at BOB would like to extend a very warm welcome to Mark and look forward to seeing his creativity, insight  and experience at work here in the  community!

Recently taken over by local patron of the arts, David Duprey, the front of 108 W Hastings is hard to miss as the neon sign shines with a playful mix of neon blue, red, orange and yellow in a style that combines both a 1950s and 1980s feel (in my humble opinion). Duprey had the sign idea several months before ACME Cafe opened, for a location approved for one of the City’s Great Beginnings initiative facade improvement grants . The Great Beginnings initiative (along with other initiatives relating to the Downtown Eastside Revitalization program) has helped shine up several beautiful old buildings that had fallen into disrepair and disuse. Now, as is the case with Duprey’s 108 E. Hastings location, these buildings are filling up with entrepreneurial and cultural activities. Shops, restaurants, cafes and galleries are all able to take advantage of the affordable rents, newly painted and cleaned facades and enjoy the comfortable and spacious layouts of these classic buildings thanks to the vision and sweat equity of entrepreneurs like Duprey and the support of the City. The neon signs outside many of them are the real icing on the cake, but a very important icing. They celebrate the rich history of Hastings (and much of Vancouver) when it was the neon capital of Canada, rivaled only by Las Vegas itself! A reminder of the once vibrant and important role this neighbourhood played in our city, and an inspiring statement that a brighter future lay ahead.

So what does ACME mean? Rumored to be an acronym for A Company Making Everything, ACME is remembered by most for being the favorite brand of Wile E. Cyote. Employing the use of everything from rocket powered skis, to dynamite, to giant rubber bands, ACME supplied everything Wile E. needed in his endless quest to catch the Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny. In the 1930s though,  there was in fact a surge of businesses named either Ace or Acme, believed largely due to the fact that phone books and other directories began to be organized alphabetically. AAA being another obvious choice. The word acme itself is derived from the Greek word that means zenith or peak, and in the case of Warner Bros and Looney Tunes, is quite ironic. Poor Wile E. never had a venture half as successful as David Duprey or Acme Cafe.

If you have a business idea and need an affordable space, get in touch with BOB today. See our previous post for more information.

Building Opportunities with Business (“BOB”)  is working with the City of Vancouver to implement their “Vacant Storefront Facade Program“.

Simply put, the City of Vancouver will – for approved projects – pay for improvements to a building’s facade up to an amount of $50,000 per building.  We have already identified the buildings with vacant street level storefronts in them in both Chinatown and along the Hastings Street Corridor and, in many cases, have the building owner waiting for us to find them a prospective tenant!

The benefit to you, as the potential tenant, is that we would use the facade grant as leverage to negotiate longer term leases, leasehold improvements, less expensive lease rates, etc.

For more information please email Randy at bds@bobics.org.  and leave him a phone number where you can be reached during the day

BDS@bobics.org

At the first meeting of the group, there were six identified priority areas for which the group agreed to establish sub-committees.  Each sub-committee’s first objective was to prepare a short document on the priority area for the next meeting on July 14th. This draft document is to outline the main opportunity in the specific area, along with 3-5 actions that could lead to green job growth. The Working Group will then research these recommendations and incorporate them into a draft implementation plan for the Greenest City initiative, which will be open for further comment by the entire External Advisory Committee.

The sub-committee that Brian has proposed and is interested in helping to steer concerns Community Economic Development.  This applies directly to the inner-city and people who have barriers to employment, but has positive implications in other neighbourhoods too.

In Brian’s words:

…CED is applicable across the City and, in turn, could benefit a variety of neighbourhoods, small businesses, social enterprises, co-ops and people. Given the City’s apparent commitment to the Greenest City initiative, I feel there is a good opportunity to advance some CED in Vancouver.  BUT, I need your help! So, please reply to BOB with your respective interest and time availability in helping to shape a CED strategy that can be included in the Greenest City Implementation Plan.

Cheers,

Brian

Please read Brian’s overview of the CED Sub-committee below:

Community Economic Development (CED) for the Greenest City

CED is a holistic approach to economic development involving the mobilization of resources from various economic and non-economic sectors in the community with the intention of building local capacity and local solutions.  It is particularly relevant to the world’s greenest city as it uses local resources, which generally are lower in carbon intensity, to find local and more sustainable solutions to local problems.  Integrating CED into the green economy strategies for Vancouver’s Greenest City ambitions compliments the more traditional macro-economic development strategies by integrating localized approaches with broader global outreach strategies. The benefits of a CED approach include:  local employment, local investment, increased local capacity and commitment, local spending in the local economy, and appropriate sustainable solutions to local challenges.

Goal: Foster green business development and associated job creation for Vancouver’s marginalized inner-city residents

Action 1: Apply a CED Lens to all programs and policies of the City, where each department, program, grant, expenditure from parks and social development to legal services and planning would eventually be able to articulate the social, economic and environmental impact of their work/business/purchasing.

Action 1a: Establish a City of Vancouver funded Community Economic Development Commission that would:

• work internally applying the CED Lens and externally facilitating CED on the ground;
• develop and implement procurement policy that directly benefits co-operatives, social enterprises and small businesses that are committed to hiring people with barriers to employment; and,
• educate community (NGOs, workers, and businesses) about realistic opportunities for green job and green business development

Action 1b: Institutionalize – as part of any development permit process, require  a Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) as a necessary component of all new developments (for local jobs, procurement, and/or training).

Action 2: Establish a green zone (may need an incentive attached) in the DTES for piloting green enterprise development projects.

Action 2a: Develop employment agreements with incentives for medium to large size green businesses to hire people with barriers to employment.

Action 2b: Establish and administer a green CED fund to facilitate green employment or business development projects in the inner-city;

Action 2c: By way of an immediate pilot project, establish, through the allocation of City-owned land, an Urban Farm Network that trains and hires people with barriers to employment

Action 3: Develop and direct education and training in green collar vocations to people with barriers to employment.

Please comment below or contact Brian directly at brian.smith@bobics.org to share your thoughts and ideas.

• Oppenheimer Park Reopening on July 24^th
• Heard about Calabash Bistro?  I wrote a blog post about my delicious experience there.  It’s on Columbia, between Pender and Hastings.
• Enchanted Evening Concert Series at the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Chinese Garden in Chinatown.
• Chinatown Night Market.  Every Fri, Sat and Sun 630pm-11pm.
• Powell Street Festival, celebrating Japanese Canadian art, culture and heritage.  Free, July 31 + August 1, 11:30am – 7pm.
• SOLEfood Urban Farm is now selling their vegetables!  Grown locally on the DTES, by local residents.  See here for dates and locations and current vegetables.
• Firehall Arts Centre, until July 19th Dancing on the Edge.
• Events happening in the DTES this month.  Check out this great community website.

Joe's story. One of the many happy tales we hear at BOB.

Here at BOB, our employment team connects businesses to hire locally, connects local residents to jobs, and supports them to see it be successful in the long term.

Check out our latest news!  The link below includes:

• Joe’s story.  He started working at United We Can.
• Employer Profile – FROGBOX
• A selection of our current job connections.
• Upcoming Events

BOB’s Employment News – July 2010

The increasing divide between rich and poor is more than a challenge or opportunity, it is a problem. Perhaps for those on the more comfortable side of the equation it’s a challenge or opportunity, but for the growing bottom percentage? Access to clean potable water in developing nations is more than a challenge, and for those struggling to find it it’s a problem far more than an opportunity. The myriad environmental, social and economic disruptions we’ve created from years of exponential production and consumption are more than just an opportunity or challenge, collectively they have become a problem of global scale.

The reason why it’s important to acknowledge that there are problems is because it creates the urgency to recognize problem solvers. Without problems how can we even have problem solvers? Challenges and opportunities are indicative of competitive language, the kind born out of free market ideologies. They denote opportunism, and that’s fine. We need opportunists to capitalize on the wealth of opportunities in the fast emerging green economy, but to Jones it goes deeper than this.  In the Green Collar Economy the challenges and opportunities that will help to create equitable wealth come from solving these environmental and social problems. It’s more than opportunities within an emerging economy, it’s about the health of human society and the living planet we depend on. Because of this, the people who are most in need of problem solving  naturally become crucial problem solvers themselves:

“We cannot afford that kind of moral shortfall. To solve our global problems, we need to engage and unleash the genius of all people, at all levels of society. Some of the minds that can solve our toughest problems are undoubtedly trapped behind prison bars, stuck behind desks in schools without decent books, or isolated in rural communities. A green economy that is designed to pull them in—as skilled laborers, innovators, inventors, and owners—will be more dynamic, more robust, and better able to save the Earth.”

Van’s book and his theories on job creation and environmentalism ring particularly true right here in Vancouver, which is simultaneously facing the challenges of rejuvenating the ‘poorest postal code in Canada‘ and  becoming the greenest city in the world.

Elastomeric coatings being painted onto a roof. Basic jobs doing straighrforward things can have a powerful effect in greening society

One of the crucial points Van makes is that this Green economy should not just be embodied by the health conscientious crowd who drive hybrids, eat organic specialty foods or buy fair trade coffee.  It’s a paradigm shift where members of society at all levels have an important role to play as laborers, planners, community leaders, investors and innovators. This perceived eco-elitism can be replaced with what he terms eco-populism, whereby those who would otherwise view being green as expensive and detached from their lives can find green options more accessible. I would say the same for those who view the green economy predominantly as emerging technologies, renewable energy and other higher-order activities. This is also part of it yes, but let’s not let the large venture capital numbers eclipse the large transformative power of communities in action.

Environmentalism here in Vancouver has demonstrated elitism as it has everywhere. Looking at it as technologies and capital investment is only a fraction of this paradigm shift. Focusing on eco-chic products, organic free range specialty foods, and other consumer goods is also only a fraction, and some argue it is the more shallow fraction at that. A rethink of how we interact within and create society, including a fundamental rethink of the shapes, sizes and flow of cities is another fraction. The deconstruction and reconstruction of urban space, repurposing of materials, waste diversion, on-site energy creation, increasing of urban agriculture and a complete re-adjustment from the old industrial paradigm to a far more equitable and community-centric paradigm will take more than Soy Lattes and Hybrid cars, no slight to either. And it will take more than investment in higher order R&D as important as this is. This change is already happening here in Vancouver, along with groundbreaking technological R&D and delicious organic fair trade Lattes we’ve become renowned for.

Seann Dory of United We Can directs a SOLEfood Urban Farm information session

Referring back to the list of recipients from BOB’s Consultant Fees Program we can see Jones’ paradigm shift taking form here in Vancouver’s inner-city. Two visions, one of a rejuvenated inner-city that historically has struggled with many social and environmental challenges, and one of Vancouver becoming the Greenest city in the world seem to be coalescing; where an experience of community economic development in which grassroots innovation and sweat equity are translating into problem solving is unfolding. This kind of problem solving creates opportunities and builds community capacity through and for an increasingly engaged population. If we can continue to do this here and continue to do this collectively, in other cities and towns around the planet, then we’ve created the global shift that Jones envisions. Like that old saying, “death by a thousand cuts”, the old paradigm is cast away from our disparate but collective movement. But how can we recognize and actualize a movement that is inclusive and simultaneously comprehensive? Societal relationships are complex and tense; particularly the relationships between those with seemingly little power and those with seemingly unimaginable power. Jones proposes that we recognize collective ideals that are clear and simple, yet able to bridge the complexities between diverse stakeholders, and appeal broadly.

Movements need principles. History teaches us that it is impossible to guide a complex series of deep changes without grounding efforts in unchanging ideals. Strategies can be complex, but goals and ideas should be clear. Bearing this in mind Jones puts forth 3 principles:

1. Equal Protection for All.

2. Equal Opportunity for All.

3. Reverence for All Creation.

These principles can appeal to free market enthusiasts eager for opportunistic reward, to problem solvers in inner-cities or rural areas, and to those who feel strong about either the social aspects of environmentalism or the ecological.

The challenges we face moving forward will require bottom-up as well as top-down solutions. The middle ground in this continuum is where the policy makers mix with the problem solvers and where the innovators mix with the investors. Here in Vancouver the inner-city/DTES is one of those places, and I hope that these principles will continue to become the pillars that support that middle ground here and elsewhere.

SOLEfood Inner-City Farm Network in Vancouver, Hawks and Hastings

I recommend Van Jones’ Green Collar Economy to anyone interested in Vancouver’s development on the whole, and in its inner-city in particular.

This year’s speakers include Mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson, Deputy City Manager for the City of Vancouver, Sadhu Johnston (who has contributed to leading sustainability policies in Chicago, Portland and now here) and Carol Sanford, an acclaimed speaker considered a leader of leaders. Her consulting clients include Fortune 500 businesses and emerging ventures such as Seventh Generation.

The Keynote speaker will be Jared Blumenfeld, currently the Director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 9.

About Jared Blumenfeld:

Jared Blumenfeld is the Director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 9—which includes California, much of the U.S. Southwest and Hawaii. With a background in international environmental law and an active career with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Jared was appointed in 2002 by San Francisco to build and lead its Department of Environment.

Under his leadership, San Francisco initiated landmark policy and laws, starting with precautionary principles and reaching into every area of urban practice. He believes that international and other broad-based frameworks are well-intentioned but produce limited on-the-ground results. During his tenure, San Francisco convened World Environment Day that brought 80 of the world’s largest cities together to define urban
sustainability and map strategies.

EPA Region 9 includes 47 million people, 4 of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., and 24 of the hundred largest.

Blumenfeld comes to Gaining Ground on Tuesday, October 4th to speak about the adoption of new technologies, measuring what’s happening, and the sweet spot where policy and stakeholder engagement merge. He will also lead a policy salon during the afternoon workshop portion of the program.

To register and for more information please visit: www.gaininggroundsummit.com

Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden $5000

Concept: Green Audit for traditional Chinese garden including office, visitors service area giftshop and business operations. Improving sustainability best practices.

EMBERS Staffing Solutions $5000

Concept: A business plan to analyze the viability and employment potential of of starting and operating a weatherization business focused in the Greater Vancouver Area. Full service green retrofits, air sealing and blower door testing, insulation, water conservation etc.

Saul Good Gift Co.$7500

Concept: Brand development (including brand discovery workshop, development of brand pyramid and 3 COR brand drivers) website development, redesign of logo and packaging and marketing collateral, to aid in the growth of company and increased procurement from inner-city suppliers and social enterprises (such as Tradeworks Training Society)

Recycling Alternative. $4200

Concept: Assess the success to date with the organics waste pickup service; evaluate the opportunity to target and partner with local community organizations providing food services in the DTES; Develop an initial business plan for pursuing these target clients.

Strathcona Business Improvement Association. $5,500

Concept: Materials exchange network, development of online infrastructure to run the exchange via a web platform.

Potluck Cafe and Catering. $8000

Concept: Creation of a business plan for reusable dishware/container service social enterprise in the DTES, reducing waste from to go food containers and creating healthier storage options for housing challenged residents.

Megaphone $1300

Concept: Fundraising consultant to help raise the profile of the publication and assist in a fundraising campaign over the summer, ending Sept 5th.

Vancouver Aquaponics Initiative (Limited funding for consultation with David Lee)

Concept: Creation of a feasibility study and business plan for a sustainable urban aquaponics project in Vancouver’s inner-city (Tilapia, Salmon and organic vegetables/fruits)