Community Innovation in Uncertain Times: Building Resilient Main Streets with Local Solutions

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to citytalk@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Community Innovation in Uncertain Times: Building Resilient Main Streets with Local Solutions

City Talk, April 17, 2025

Mary W. Rowe Welcome to CityTalk. Delighted to have you be part of this conversation about local … Just a reminder that I happened to be in Toronto today. I was in London yesterday, the Canadian Urban Institute’s located across the country, as you know. But CUI’s head office, historically Toronto, the traditional territory of, well home now, to many Indigenous, Inuit and Métis peoples, but traditional territory covered by Treaty 13, the Williams Treaty, and ancestral territories for the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Wendat peoples and Haudenosaunee. And we always encourage people to put into the chat where you’re signing in from. I see someone is coming in here from Saudi Arabia. Great. Always wonderful to have an international group of folks as well. And today we’re going to talk about something that’s resonant to people really, regardless of where you live, which country you live in or where you are from, the whole idea that local opportunity, local economics, local resilience … It all boils down to local. I said to somebody the other day, you know, riffing on Michelle Obama, “when they go low, we go local”, that part of the way I feel, although this is largely, I don’t think it’s just subjective, part of the way we cope with all the noise and the confusion and the debate that seems to be occurring at the geopolitical level, way, way, far from where most of us have any sense of, we’re not empowered and we don’t have an engagement particularly .. … When you are being faced with that, one of the ways to reground yourself is to go into your local community and pay attention to what you see around you. And we’ve got folks who are coming on to talk with us about their particular perspective of how you can actually build local economies, strengthen local economies and in turn strengthen local places. So many of you know that CUI is active in the main street space. We’re making the case that streets are the backbone of communities, whether they’re in big downtowns or they’re small rural communities, that the main streets are the spines and they often, when they intersect, become the hearts of communities. And as a result, we have continued over the last several years to start to document what do you see on main streets? What’s present there? What’s absent there? How do we start to open our own eyes to what we’re seeing in our own main street? How it could be strengthened? And we have launched MainStreetCanada.ca – someone will put it in the chat so you can have a look. And you can go there and you can map your street. You can have look and see what the assets are. And you can give us feedback about, you know what I’d really like to know about My Main Street that you don’t tell me … Could you think about how you could get this kind of information up there or that kind. And also, as part of Main Street Canada, we put up a tariff tracker. And for us, tariffs are a proxy for economic uncertainty or economic change, obviously, and we’re hopeful that the tools that we’re continuing to put on Main Street Canada, you’re going to hear about some of them because they’re coming from partners like the ones we have today on CityTalk, that there are various ways in which, as I suggest, we can become more aware of what’s on our Main Street. We can invest in our Main Street. We can figure out what the gaps are in terms of what’s difficult to have happen on a Main Street that could be better … This community would be more strengthened if we could do X or Y and that main streets are essential infrastructure. So, I’m going to ask my gang to expose their screens, come on and join us. And as you know, with CityTalk folks, we publish the transcript, we record this and edit it a little bit to take out any sort of gaps, but we don’t edit it very much. And then we post it live. And I noticed that the production guys are getting very fancy, and when we go online first, they start to show you what’s already been posted. So there are sessions from the last few weeks that are already posted there. We also have a podcast program, which is a bit in abeyance at the moment, but it’s going to come back strong in a couple of weeks. And we post all of that there. And so please feel free to use the chat as ambitiously as you’d like to. People put lots of comments in there, and then they post links, and I always say it’s a parallel universe over there. I can see it, I can see it. And we always appreciate how enthusiastic people are. And if you’re one of those people who’s signed in to CityTalk forever and never actually participated in the chat, you don’t know what you’re missing. You could multitask and read all sorts of other views and links and stuff, as well as listening to these three lovely innovators that are joining us. So welcome to CityTalk, Mary, Tori, and Gwen. I don’t think either or any of you has been on before. Are you all first timers to CityTalk?

Tori Williamson I’ve been on before, so I’m happy to back.

Mary W. Rowe Oh Tori, you’re a veteran, you’re a returning guest, as they say, a returning guest. We’ve had 275 I don’t know, maybe Emilie will put into the chat how many CityTalks we’ve had. It’s many. We started in April of 2020, when we were all trying to figure out what the heck is going on. And we just thought … And I remember we had a call and someone said, “Oh, there’s this thing called Zoom.” I’m not kidding, it was before we all used it all the time. And we said, “okay, let’s sign up for that. Let’s figure that out.” So I always say that CUI is in the connective tissue business, trying to find ways in this vast geography called Canada. How do we learn from each other? How do understand what’s working in one place that could be adapted or copied or whatever, inspiring for another place? And I think that’s part of the challenge we have is that solutions come from places. And they’re often hyper local, the solution that’s going to be the most effective. And we need these channels to share with each other to see, well, what’s Tori’s local might be something different than what’s Mary’s local than Gwen’s local. So, we’re all in that business of bridging the local to the “one to many”, you know, how do we share across? And I know that all three of you are working in places, but you’re also interested in – how do get the best practice working across the country? What are the tools and all that kind of thing. So thanks for joining us. I’m going to start. We’ll go west to east, as is our courtesy, because Tori, you’re still working on your first cup of coffee, probably. Okay, let’s go to you first, and just tell us a little bit about your … I’m interested, you should tell a little bit about you affiliation and why you’re doing what you’re doing. And then we can talk specifically about the particular things you’re observing in this particular moment of time around the challenges that we’re facing in local economies. So over to you, Tori. Thanks for joining us on CityTalk.

Tori Williamson Awesome, it’s great to be here. I’m Tori Williamson. I’m the Chief Operating Officer at Buy Social Canada. We’re a small social enterprise that works nationally to advance and grow social enterprise and social procurement across the country. So these moments like the tariffs and COVID, which are crappy, they suck, but they’re a moment when people actually start to think about supply chains. And normally when I say the word procurement, people’s eyes start to glaze over a little bit. But we’re really passionate about supply chains and about purchasing because we recognize that our economic decision-making through what we buy can be huge, huge potential to support whatever our goals are. We say that every single purchase has a social, economic, cultural, and environmental impact, whether you intend those impacts or not. So, by thinking strategically about how you spend your money, who you purchase from, you can start to leverage a pretty significant strategic tool within the existing spend and the things that you are already buying. So, we work with governments, corporations, institutions to really look at their purchasing policies. But I think in this moment right now, we’re also really recognizing that even as individual consumers and purchasers, we often are already thinking about how are we spending. How do we prioritize our values in our purchasing? So… I’m sure many of us love going to our local farmers’ markets and supporting local independent businesses, and local independent businesses are so important to our communities. They’re really the fabric and culture and social environment that shape our communities and that just goes beyond the actual economic impacts of buying local, of which there are many. So we’re really passionate about this. We do so much work in this area around procurement so I’m looking forward to diving in deeper today, into what the impacts of local purchasing can have and giving some examples of how organizations are doing this.

Mary W. Rowe Let’s also encourage everybody on the webinar, please post the links you’re aware of too, because that’s the whole point. Everything is local, it starts local, and then it bubbles, bubbles, and so nobody has a corner on this. I always say, you know, nobody owns an idea. Like, there are many, many versions of these kinds of things, and so I’ll come back to you once we’ve got everybody else sort of on the … Introducing themselves. And let’s talk a little bit about how do we actually aggregate this up because you know, we’re salmon going against the stream here. You know, I don’t know if anybody in the chat wants to comment on this, but we’re in the middle of an election campaign. So you hear a lot of … and then we’re the middle a trade war. So, you’ll hear lots and lots of narrative about the economy, the economy, the economy. And it’s invariably about a sector. It’s about the automotive sector, or it’s about biomedical, or it’ about oil and gas, or it about agriculture. And it’s rarely grounded in a local, a place. And where the economy actually lives. So we’re going to come back and talk more with you about that, Tori. Mary, let’s go to you next. My name’s sake, Mary to Mary. Mary and I always joke, well, we don’t always, we’ve only met once, but I did joke that our name, our given name is not a very common given name anymore. Just saying. Mary’s unite, nice to see you. Thank you for coming on CityTalk. Describe for folks a little bit about what your particular perspective is on this.

Mary Pattison Yeah, great, thanks for having us. Well, me, and I know that my co-founder Kim Lesbrons is also on this call, so I just want to shout out to her. To the two of us, our perspective is that we know that in times of crisis, people want to do the right thing and they’re often told what that right thing is. Um, but as we all know, there’s that great big gap between an intention and an action. So you want to shop more locally. You want to support your local businesses, but what really gets you to take that extra step. And so what Kim and I did is we started right at the same time that CityTalk started, right in the middle of the pandemic. And we said, “how are we going to get people to actually go and shop locally?” Um, you know, particularly when it was, you know, curbside pickup only, you know, odd hours. So we just launched a contest at the hyperlocal level, you know, 400 businesses in our area, and we incentivized people to shop locally with a chance to win a thousand dollars if they could produce a receipt. It was that simple. And fast forward five years later, we’ve run 68 contests across North America, as far as Coconut Grove, Miami. We’ve really perfected the way to help BIAs help their businesses ask for the business. Ask people to shop locally and then you know reward them for doing it. So ultimately that’s where we are, you know, now and what we’re looking to do in the next couple of months and why I reached out to Canadian Urban Institute is just to help us you know scale this now because we’re in the middle of another crisis and we now have five years of experience on how to get up to $400,000 of an economic impact in a local community by incentivizing people to shop and spend more and try new places. So we’re excited to take this national with a pooled capital model, which we can talk about later.

Mary W. Rowe Okay I’m just making a note of all these sort of topics that the two of you and now a third are going to give us to chat about and again I’m going to encourage people to put questions in the chat and comments, and “have you heard of” and “what about” and da da da … okay Gwen, number three, um I meant to ask you… Sorry I didn’t even ask you but Tori where are you today?

Tori Williamson I’m joining from beautiful Squamish BC.

Mary W. Rowe Squamish BC … and Mary where are and then Gwen. Mary, where are you, Mary?

Mary Pattison Midtown Toronto.

Mary W. Rowe And Gwen, where are you?

Gwen Patrick I’m joining from Waterfront, Toronto. Waterfront Toronto, okay. All right. Well, apologies to the East, sorry. We do know that Canada continues to exist, East of Toronto, just saying. We’ll make up for it next time to make sure we have somebody from the Maritimes or from Quebec or from the North, because it’s a big place. But we’re happy to have the three of you. So, Gwen, you tell us a little bit about what your particular angle is here, what your particular perspective is, and then I’m going to ask you all to put your screens on and we’ll have a collective chat.

Gwen Patrick I think our story comes a lot through Shorefast’s mission which is all about building and we started to build economic resiliency on Fogo Island and a big way we do that is through our community businesses and the way we did that is our own purchasing and procurement on Fogo Island and its surrounding communities. So it all started, I guess it’s hard to talk about the whole story, but for those that aren’t familiar, Fogo island is a rural island off the coast of Newfoundland.

Mary W. Rowe You should assume that people aren’t familiar, although Zita Cobb, the founder of Fogo Island Inn and of Shorefast, and the builder of the Inn, has been on CityTalk a number of times, but that let’s just assume that we all know nothing.

Gwen Patrick Ok perfect, then I’ll try to give the spiel, and I’ll try to be quick, but Shorefast was founded in 2004 to build economic resiliency on Fogo Island and to build an economic pillar in support of the primary fishing industry. And through looking at the inherent assets on Fogo Island, it became very clear through the assets of hospitality, nature, and culture that tourism was such a natural fit to do so. And we started by building the Fogo Island Inn. And through building the Inn, we made our purchasing decisions by everything that went into that building had to come from Fogo Island, if not Fogo Island then Newfoundland, if not Newfoundland then Canada, and if not Canada then a country that shared similar labour standards of proximity to Canada. And that’s how we built the Inn and that’s, how we continue to operate the Inn, and all of the other community businesses, but we are struggling to show that. And I think if you’ve ever looked at the Inn and maybe looked at, the price of the Inn, you might see it and go, whoa, where does all that money go? Which is a completely rational and normal reaction to have to any price. Same with prices that might be too low. And in 2018, we were struggling in trying to figure out ways to show and display these purchasing choices and these very specific procurement policies that we had, but we were struggling to tell that story beyond just through words. And what we created, and what my colleague Diane Hodgins created in 2018 was something called the Economic Nutrition Label, which was modeled after food nutrition labeling, which is a similar concept … Like tonight after work, I have the day off tomorrow, I might go to the grocery store, get some chips, and I’m not going to look at the food labeling too closely. That’s not my goal. But maybe tonight I have a friend coming over and maybe that person’s on a particular diet or they have an allergy or now I need to flip over the food labeling and make some choices using the information that’s there. And the economic nutrition labeling concept is built on a similar thing. We make food purchasing choices. We have information to align to health goals. What if we could create something that could align, help provide information to align to your other purchasing goals. And so we created the nutrition labeling, which I’m sure I’ll get into and I have some pictures ready to walk through it, but essentially it’s a tool to showcase where your money goes. And I’ll pause there because I know we’re going to dive into it much deeper.

Mary W. Rowe No, that’s great. Let me just get everybody’s cameras on. But Gwen, do you want to share your screen? Just show us this economic nutrition label if people haven’t seen it. This is the tech challenge. I always dread this moment because whenever I share my screen, I think you’re going to see how many items I have open on my desktop.

Gwen Patrick I know I think you will too, and I have the PowerPoint up here but let me …[There it is!] Perfect. You can see it?

Mary W. Rowe I’m seeing the economic nutrition label, are you guys seeing it? And we’re seeing the notes saying, “explain the label”.

Gwen Patrick Right, so you can see, and I know Mary’s going to ask me, but this is taken from a recent presentation I did. Can you see the main thing now?

Mary W. Rowe That looks great. Can everybody … Can you see it, Mary and Tori? You can see it. Okay. So this is so interesting. So you can slap this label on … Talk to us about this. What is this? What does this tell us?

Gwen Patrick Yeah, I’ll dive into it more now. But here, I guess I’ll just go backwards. There’s the Fogo Island Inn that really inspired this to show … and how we created the tool. And so we started with the Inn to be able to show both when we make our own purchasing decisions, but also to customers and to the community to hold ourselves accountable as to where our money is going. And this is the label that you can see on screen. The top half shows where the money is going, so this is an example for the Inn, but when guests stay at the Inn, you know that over half your money doesn’t leave off the ferry, it stays on Fogo Island. Then 16% to Newfoundland, then Canada, and then there’s a 4% international fee that goes off into things like wine. We do have lots of Canadian wine suppliers, but also some off in Europe too. So those types of purchases. And then the bottom half tells us what your money pays for. So we have salaries, room operations, costs, et cetera. When we created this label, it ended up being one of the most impactful tools at the time we could have created. We’ve been telling this story about how we make our purchasing decisions, prioritizing these places, but we’ve been missing the information to show it. And we found that the response both from internal and external has been great. And we ended up using this as a data tool for ourselves internally. So now we set benchmarks on, for example, what that Fogo Island target should be, what that salaries target should be, and use it to hold ourselves accountable to. And it grew, it grew from just being a tool available to the Inn, to then going to all five now of our community businesses that we have. And I’ll pause when I need to pause, but this is one of the workshops, Fogo Island Fish, a hand-line cod business.

Mary W. Rowe Let’s stop at the fish for a sec. So that is a piece of cod.

Gwen Patrick That is a piece of cod.

Mary W. Rowe And we’re saying that 70% of the value of that cod goes to the island. [Correct.] Goes to Canada. I’m assuming through taxes and stuff. A little bit Newfoundland. []Correct. And then, I don’t know, some international something, something, who knows.

Gwen Patrick Yep, so for the rest of Canada, a lot of the product is shipped to restaurants as far east as Ontario, so part of that is shipping money and other things that we can use to explain some of these choices. And this was started in 2018, has grown to all five of our businesses. And during that time period, we’ve been asked by lots of other businesses and organizations on how do we create this, how do create this tool and – for so long, we’ve been Fogo Island focused, as Shorefast has been intended to be, but throughout the period and especially as of recent, we’ve gotten a lot of asks to expand this tool to other places and now through the launch of the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies, which we’re launching at the end of this year, which is translating our 20 years of economic development experience on Fogo Island for tools for other places. This is one of the tools that we’re launching now nationally through the Institute. And an exciting piece is for those businesses that want to get in early, we’re opening a pilot up this summer. And there’s a pilot registration link that I believe will be shared, but we’re looking at businesses …

Mary W. Rowe She’s just posted it.

Gwen Patrick Oh, exciting. So we’re looking for businesses that want to use economic nutrition, are ready to showcase these types of purchasing decisions and where their money goes. And we’re looking to pilot that this summer and then have a national launch of this as a certification mark in 2026, in partnership with all those incredible businesses that that sign up and are a part of it. So …

Mary W. Rowe Well, it’s interesting, and we used to talk this way about COVID, a couple of things … One that COVID, certain things surfaced as challenges that existed before COVID, but COVID made them big challenges. Like practical things, like we don’t have enough bathrooms outside in public spaces or that kind of thing. And it’s interesting, here we are with this economic uncertainty climate that is coming out and manifesting as tariffs. And it’s doing the same thing. It’s suddenly bringing forward certain things that existed before that we weren’t doing, that now we’re doing. So suddenly, as you know, people are going into stores and they’re looking to see, well, is this from the United States or not? And it’s just a very interesting moment where we’re taking some time, and we can influence. So this is perfect timing for a label like this, right? To be able to be reflective. Question that Richard Gould’s asking, “how does it show … maybe one of the other labels is a better example … How does it show if there’s a profit? I guess it’s saying, what does the money pay for? Does it show … And if you’re a private sector business and you’re making a profit, how would it show?

Gwen Patrick Right now the profit is currently not included in the label and there’s several reasons for right now for doing so. For us, all of our community businesses all profit are reinvested in Shorefast, which is the charity that owns which owns all the businesses and then we track where our money goes now through the charity end of things, so that’s the answer for all the business that that you’re seeing here …

Mary W. Rowe It’s interesting though, when you start to look at for profit businesses? And will they be willing to be transparent and show you that their markup is so extraordinary that they’re making 70%? I mean, I don’t know. They’ve got a house in the Cayman Islands. I don t know how that’s going to show.

Gwen Patrick It’s a great question. And it’s also a tough question because profit, we don’t, I don’t … I’ll speak for myself. I don’ necessarily see profit as always being a bad thing when a business makes profit and reinvesting it back in the business. And there’s different businesses of all different sizes that are all going to have different profit years. And for transparency for our businesses, many years, we don’ also have a profit. So then showing a deficit, sometimes let’s say these businesses when a lot of our local reinvestment is through our purchasing, was opening us up to more, I guess, questions that defeated the point of what we were trying to get at with the label, which was about transparency and where money was going, both physically and what it’s paying for. So it’s a great question and one that we are absolutely exploring through the pilot that we’re launching this summer. Those are one of the questions that we have to ask for those maybe that want to opt in and include it or those that don’t. We’re very open to that, but it’s a tricky one and not one that we’re going to require on those that join the pilot to display this summer.

Mary W. Rowe But this is why pilots are great, because it exposes, oh, it would work well here, might not work so well there, or maybe it needs to look …  That’s why we have pilots.

Gwen Patrick Exactly.

Mary W. Rowe Glen Royce is asking you, how would it work for arts and culture organizations? So again, everybody stop at that link that Emily’s put there. Just totally deluge Gwen with people that want to give it a try and who are curious about this, so that she’s going to have a really great sample to be able to continue. But it’s all about transparency and people paying attention. So let’s … Thank you for sharing your screen. I’m going to ask you to release us from that. Let’s get all of us on here. I’m interested, all three of you are very entrepreneurial in your approach here. You’re looking for, you have some common, I think it’s, the common thread is, I think, you’re trying to empower the consumer to make local decisions, I think. Is that right? Would you say that’s a thread? Mary, you’ve also got a particular initiative. I need to know how you got into this. Why are you in this?

Mary Pattison I mean, I think just the fact that we moved to Toronto with no family, you know, only children, you know, had to create our community. And so it became, you, know, our neighbors, friends like Kim, and we got to know so many of the business owners and I became very involved, and so did Kim in our local community. So when we saw them suffering through the pandemic, we just felt the sense of … you know that we have a capacity. We’re both lifelong marketing professionals we knew how to do this and so it was supposed to be just a one-off passion project but the reason that it’s gone on for so long is because what we realized that this was doing for … Yes we are empowering that consumer and trying to incentivize them to shop local more as opposed to the online retailers only or big box stores but our clients are the business improvement areas, we’re not going directly to the businesses. We’re working through the …

Mary W. Rowe So just to be clear though, you’re a for-profit business. And Gwen, you are a charity, right?

Gwen Patrick  Correct. I work for Shorefast, which is a charity. So economic nutrition will be one of our charitable initiatives.

Mary W. Rowe But Shorefast owns some businesses?

Gwen Patrick Correct. Unlike a traditional endowment, we invest through our community businesses, and then if there is a profit, that gets then reinvested through the charity.

Mary W. Rowe Got it. And Tori, what is Buy Social Canada? Is it a business?

Tori Williamson So glad you asked. So we’re a social enterprise and the definition of a social enterprise is a business that sells good services, has an embedded social, environmental, cultural mission, and reinvests the majority of profits back into the mission. So about 85% of the social enterprises in Canada that Buy Social Canada certifies are non-profits operating businesses, similar to what Gwen just shared about a charity. There are in BC and of Nova Scotia, hybrid incorporations. Where you can still have shareholders, but there are, in the articles of incorporation, there’s a requirement that 60% of any dividend payouts would have to go back into the mission instead of to the shareholder. So there’s limitation on that profit payout, as well as if there was a sale of the company, then 60% would have go back into our mission, which is to advance and grow social enterprise and social procurement. So we operate both a triple C and a nonprofit. So it gets complicated. We do have in our network, for-profit incorporations because there’s only two provinces that have that hybrid incorporation who’ve amended their articles of incorporation to say, you know, this is a priority. We want our business in perpetuity to exist to support our mission, and we need that to be locked into our incorporation.

Mary W. Rowe Can a charity be part of Buy Social Canada?

Tori Williamson Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got lots of … So charity is again, is your tax status, like you would have your non-profit incorporation and then you would go for the CRA tax status. And we do see that kind of approach that Shorefast has where you can have a charity or a nonprofit owning for-profit. So the finances of it, if people want to learn more, you can check out our guide to social enterprise. We dip our toes in a little bit, but it’s very interesting how that incorporation status, again, speaking to kind of Richard’s comments in the chat, you know, where is the profit going in perpetuity? I think that’s really important too.

Mary W. Rowe And then who owns the asset. So Mary, just back to you. So you and your neighbour, Kim, you say, “oh, wow, local businesses are going to struggle through the pandemic”. And as I say, these are things that predate COVID, big box stores and chains were dominating the retail space prior to COVID, but then during COVID, it kind of went crazy. So just take us, Mary, to the journey. So you figure this out, and then how did you come up with “Shop Local to Win”?

Mary Pattison Yeah, so we ran our very first contest. Kim and I put in the money to print things, and we found two local realtors who were willing to put in a prize purse. And we, at the end of it, just said, oh, you know, it’s coming to an end. The sponsors would probably like to know what the impact was. And so we just, we surveyed everyone who participated and we asked them. And the net result was $85,000 of recorded incremental spending. 75% of people telling us that they tried new places as well through the pandemic when it was most difficult. Then we started getting calls from other BIAs as the word spread and it suddenly turned into my full-time job. I was in between jobs and I thought, you know, let me throw myself into this because as Gwen said, there are different kinds of for-profit companies and I would say that although we are, we are so mission driven. I can tell you that there’s years we haven’t made a penny. We’ve been reinvesting almost everything into newer platforms, better processes. We’ve made sure from day one to pay our suppliers a fair living wage in Toronto. And we’ve been looking always and spending a lot of our energy on finding one major sponsor for our entire program that would allow it to be underwritten so that we could bring it to the BIAs at you know, a hugely reduced fee and that’s what we’re so happy about being able to say – that today we have found that sponsor so that we’re now going to … Just at the time that we have a second crisis we have the expertise and the experience now to take this nationally and we now have a sponsor that’s picking up the entire prize purse of $66,000 for this national contest and allowing us to bring our program to the BIAs at 75% off.

Mary W. Rowe So, you know, I’m a huge fan of BIAs, just saying, so anybody on the chat, I suspect you’re all BIA lovers with me, but I think we need to encourage our BIA friends, and I’m sure there’s many of them on the Chat. We need you to find another name, just sayin’, or maybe you just go with the acronym, which is generally what’s happening, but the business improvement area, the improvement is the part I’m struggling with, because it suggests that there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed, you now? And we do this in cities all the time, we always say, “oh, we need revitalization. We need a renewal strategy.” And it always suggests that there was something wrong. That’s why I …so there’s our challenge for today, folks, let’s rename the BIAs into something else, because they’re a fabulous unit of organization that works at the community level, right?

Mary Pattison They’re hugely impactful because people behave totally differently when something feels local. So we know that a contest ran in 2020 at a national level. We only had 30,000 entries for an entire contest that millions and millions was spent on. We get eight thousand entries when we run it in a little community because we figured out how to make it really resonate with the local community. So, yes, I think that the BIAs are tremendously perhaps unsung heroes and especially in stepping up to deal with crises like the ones that we face, right? I mean, it was them who really activated and helped the businesses understand what to do. The businesses looked to them as experts. There’s a lot on their plate.

Mary W. Rowe You know, the ideas are pouring in on the chat. Anne-Marie is saying the Business Investment Association, that’s maybe better, local economy associations. Yeah, I mean, the thing is the idea … From the CUI’s perspective, you know, we’re always interested in how do we get attention to the ground? How do we pull conversations and how do make them smaller, not less important, but just more at an operable level? So we want to make money smaller because not everybody needs a hundred million dollars. Maybe they only need ten thousand to put an awning on or something. And similarly … So that’s why the BIA unit is so interesting to us. It’s place-based and it came out of a business sort of fraternity or sorority. But now it’s broadened because it’s not just business that cares about it. So Tori, just back to you in terms of how long have you guys been at this? How old is Buy Social?

Tori Williamson We’re coming up on 11 years now. We celebrated our 10-year last year.

Mary W. Rowe That’s great and tell us what you think the major challenges are to building the movement that the Buy Social movement has been incubating for 11 years.

Tori Williamson I mean, I think the momentum that we’re seeing on social and sustainable procurement right now is incredible. Even since I’ve been with Buy Social Canada for, just about over five years now, organizations, people are really seeing that this is something that they can and should do. Now, how do we do it? How do we it well? And I think that there’s so many, you know, on an individual purchasing level, you know we talk about buying local, so supporting local businesses, buying from social enterprises. Mary, your type of business, I would call it a social purpose business, so supporting those types of businesses, also Indigenous businesses, you know, there’s so many things for us to do. And I think what I encourage you to do in your own purchasing, whether or not at your organization or individual level, is really look at what you’re buying and what your options are. And you’re not going to get everything local, as we saw in the economic nutrition label. It’s not likely possible. We are currently still in a global market.

Mary W. Rowe And we like, I mean I think this is what’s interesting about the niches you guys are all identifying. It’s not as if you’re turning your back on the world. You know, we’re not moving back to a time of, you know, where we don’t have, you know, borders are always going to be porous and there will always be some form of trade, obviously. But these are tools to do informed decisions. So keep going, Tori.

Tori Williamson So it’s really about looking at, okay, what am I buying? Where are the opportunities? And how can I move the needle just a little bit? What’s one step I can take? And as we continue with that mindset of small wins, one after another, then it can just continue to snowball and grow and improve over time. I’m a huge fan of measurement. So I love the economic nutrition label. I love that transparency. So if you set a baseline, Buy Social Canada has measured our own social procurement spend with social enterprises and then other local businesses, social purpose businesses. And now we’ve got a number we can look at each year. You know, where is there room to improve? You know we saw, like software is a great one, the question in the chat. You know where is there Canadian like …

Mary W. Rowe Somebody said to me the other day, maybe you guys or you gals will all be too young for this, but maybe we’re going to go back to WordPerfect. WordPerfect was a word processing software program that many, many folks, I don’t know if there’s anybody in the chat that will reinforce this for me. But my understanding is that the legal profession loved WordPerfect, it had a much better tracking mechanism and it got overtaken by Microsoft. So it’s I think some people still use it but but it’s rare. So I don’t know, somebody find us a broadcast platform that is Canadian-owned, we’re ready to hear about it. But the thing that’s so interesting is we’re now asking ourselves that, right? We’re just asking ourselves what kind of redundancy do we have if a particular relationship is broken or just is disrupted? I shouldn’t say broken, it’s disrupted. So just back to Tori, when you were-

Tori Williamson So what we’re doing though when we make those small steps is that we’re increasing demand for those types of businesses. And that’s core to our entire theory of change at Buy Social Canada. By purchasing and prioritizing from these types of business in your supply chain, you create the marketplace for them to grow. So more organizations prioritizing them, more people buying from them, more local businesses, more social enterprises having incredible impact in communities. That’s the whole point. So we’re really just recognizing that. Again with each of those purchasing choices. So I think the biggest barrier is just that people can feel overwhelmed, or people might not know about this or they may not know how. We can help you with all of that. We’ve got that covered. We’re from Buy Social Canada, we’re here to help. Yeah, we’ve got training, we got consulting, we’ve got free guides. If you want social procurement, we are here. So I really think it’s about taking those steps, having that conversation with what’s your strategic priorities. And really aligning it within your organization so that this becomes a win-win. You’re already spending, you already need to buy, you already probably have goals to support different community things that are priorities to your organization. So bring those two things together. So I think it’s just about maintaining this over time. And maybe on the shouting out to the data side of things, as an example, in the city of Vancouver, they have a policy on really big construction projects that have goals for local procurement, social procurement, and local and inclusive hiring. So we’re working on multiple projects like this where we’re to track the construction project, spend and hiring. So the biggest one and the one that’s been happening for the longest time is the new St. Paul’s hospital project. And so this is a huge like- [Where is that?] It’s in the city of Vancouver.

Mary W. Rowe In the city of Vancouver, okay.

Tori Williamson Big new modern hospital that’s being built and it’s got … we’re tracking so we’ve got as of last year most recent data … 17 percent of the project spend was within that city core neighborhood and then 58 percent was in the wider metro Vancouver area and then one percent for BC and then 24 percent outside of BC.

Mary W. Rowe That sounds like an economic nutrition label doesn’t it? [Yeah it does.] Yeah sounds just like it and you know for years we were always citing the Evergreen Collaborative or Cooperative out of Cleveland where they really focused on altering the procurement strategies of an institution, large like the Cleveland Clinic, to invest in local businesses and now I’m so glad we can now start talking about the new St. Paul’s project.

Tori Williamson  And what’s good is the conversations that come. So it’s like about those small decisions on this type of project. So we work to support the GC and the sub trades and looking at and measuring their supply chain. But we also support them to find businesses and connect with businesses. And we had a conversation where one of the sub-trades flagged that the current city of Vancouver building code meant that they had to buy US made pipe. And they said, you know, there is a similar alternative that’s made here in the lower mainland. If you can adjust and make an exception for this building code we can buy this pipe here in the greater Vancouver area. And the city of Vancouver overseeing the policy said, yeah, that’s approved. And so they were able to make that switch. So I think creating that environment. I think creating that environment.

Mary W. Rowe That’s an important replacement. And it’s a very sound … It takes time and you have to be alive to it. You have to being paying attention to it. Gwen, one of the things I … a question I have for you about the nutrition label is, you know, it’s not … I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that a lot of this really important work was incubated in an environment of scarcity. Fogo Island, if you haven’t been there folks, it’s only 2,600 people. It’s fiercely rural. Uh… And uh… It’s not a dense, urban environment and out of that necessity and I think the process that went into the Inn where they tried to source everything as local as they could, they sort of had concentric circles if you can find it on the island great, if you can’t you find it  in Newfoundland, if you can’t, you find in the region. How do you think the economic nutrition label approach will work in denser markets, in more competitive markets I guess. I’m trying to just imagine it in a Montreal or in Ottawa or in Vancouver or Toronto. What do you think?

Gwen Patrick We are partnering through the pilot with organizations and businesses that are in denser areas. And to be clear, economic nutrition through the institute is one of many economic literacy tools that we’re putting out. It’s the farthest along because we’ve been using it for so long internally and have been asked to find ways to get it out there. But it’s a series of tool sets on finding ways to better understand your economy. [Some of the other ones that you’re looking at?] Oh, well, some that I know we’ve chatted through, but there’s various ones of economic mapping, so being able to identify assets within communities, those that are both inherent and ones that we might think about and consider, and various other tool sets. But economic nutrition is the main one we’re putting out now for helping with those purchasing decisions.

Mary W. Rowe I mean it’s all about, as you say, I like that literacy piece, it’s also about just making visible what people don’t know. It’s like looking under the hood. We can’t use those car analogies anymore.

Gwen Patrick Completely. And it’s, it’s a tool that’s there, like, like I mentioned, like with our food labeling, sometimes you use it, sometimes you don’t. And also, I’m from Salt Spring Island, BC. And I can relate to growing up, sometimes the economically nutritious choice for our family was my parents going off island to get groceries, because they couldn’t do it all the time. Making that choice was what allowed them to stay local, stay on Salt Spring island and remain in the economy. And that was the economically nutritious choice. So it’s just additional information to use for decisions. And we have been partnering with organizations in a larger cityscape, it honestly works no different if anything those numbers are even going to be greater for local spend for some of those in the larger city where there are more options that are available, for example, with who we’re working with in Toronto. It’s going to be a very different label look and feel probably, with even more in Toronto than Fogo Island does but honestly not too much of a difference. The biggest thing that we’re looking at when we are working with maybe larger, larger businesses to small businesses is just the level of data and finding ways to to make it work for the label. Because for us, Shorefast is an organization of now over 200 employees across all community businesses and we have a great accounting team. I’m an accountant and I used to audit financial statements of many different size companies across the country and you’d be surprised at how little do track the data of where their money is actually going. So a lot of our effort through the pilot is developing those right training materials, those right guides to help companies along their way. We’re piloting additional versions like a light version. What are other visuals that we could show? I think arts and culture was mentioned. We are wanting … an organization from St. John’s that does run a venue hall, we had a great conversation of what could we show now? What visuals could we create now to help show the economic spinoff from an arts and culture industry? Like the babysitting fees people have to purchase to go out for a theater or the restaurant. How could we that spinoff while we work with them to get the data to a level where we can create the label? So there’s a lot of ways in and that’s what we’re working to really fine tune this summer, but the big and the small of the place hasn’t been …

Mary W. Rowe It’s not a deterrent. Okay, well, that’s great. I mean, I think this idea of making it more visible so that we can become better informed consumers. Mary, I’m interested about the role of incentives. So your contest approach created an incentive. Why do we need an incentive?

Mary Pattison I think because as wonderful as all people generally are, we still are motivated by self-interest. You know, we do care and some people care more than others, but we need everybody to care. So, you know, the first time we ran our contest, it was a chance to win a thousand dollars. And one of our neighbors walked by while Kim and I were sitting on the porch and said, are you going to do that contest again? And we said, yeah. And he said, you know, I wouldn’t enter that contest, he said, because I feel like my family’s well off. I would rather let other people win. So he said, you should share the prize with the businesses. So you’ve got people that are just so incredibly altruistic and there are also so many people that are like, what’s going to get me, you know, to go and walk down the street to get that fan, instead of just ordering it on Amazon when it can be delivered to my house. And we know for a fact that this worked. Our very first winner was a 27-year-old woman who told us that she literally needed a fan, and because of the contest, instead of ordering it on Amazon, she walked down to Annie’s Hardware Store. So we know that we need incentives sometimes. My friend Lori lives here, 25 years in the neighborhood, the butchers at the end of our street, 56 years has never set foot in the local butcher, got all her meat from the corporate store. Because she wanted more receipts, because she really wanted to win, she’s now a loyal customer. Five years later, she’s spending a ton of money locally. So we know we need it.

Mary W. Rowe And we know the big guys do it. I mean, just saying, you know, there’s a reason that our favourite coffee, Brazilian-owned coffee chain, that shall remain nameless, but everybody knows who they are, they have “roll up the rim” for a reason. Like, it sells a lot of coffee, so it’s another way of sort of engaging the market instinct. And there’s some questions coming in here about the Community Benefits Network. Judith, thank you for posting that. I was thinking about Rosemary as Tori was talking about the St. Paul’s Hospital experience We do have a national now, Community Benefits Network and it’s all about trying to think locally in every way – how we purchase, how we hire, how we promote … Just going back to the “shop local to win” model of incentives any particular obstacles Mary to getting people to … other than you’re removing some friction, you’re creating a carrot … come on in and enter. Anything else that you’re observing that’s an impediment to people shopping local?

Mary Pattison I mean, I think that the impediment sometimes is just the reminder at point of sale. You make the effort to go down to your local store, then you don’t necessarily feel recognized. There isn’t a loyalty program for the local butcher that there is for Shoppers Drug Mart. But when we get people to enter the contest, we now have their emails. We’re now able to develop a relationship with them on behalf of all of the businesses on the main street. So this becomes not only an incentive, but also a loyalty program. And you mentioned “roll up the rim to win”. And I just want to say that, you know, many of you probably on here are too young to remember when that launched, but I’m not. And that was over 35 years ago. That’s how successful, over 35, years consistently running that program twice a year. And that’s where we’re going. Our intention is to run this pilot right now in August. And our sponsor has agreed to do this twice annually, to put in $66,000 of prize money and more, and we’re able to bring on additional supports. And our goal is, you know, and I hope you all feel like you were here at the beginning of something, you now, hopefully we are creating the roll up the rim to win for Main Streets.

Mary W. Rowe Okay. Well, you heard it here first. Well, and listen, there’s room for lots and lots of ideas. So anybody else is on this call or other people that are aware of initiatives to try to incentivize people to invest in their local economies is welcome. So let’s hope that there’s a whole bunch. Let’s hope we’re unleashing all sorts of creative things. So just going back to the, um, uh, it’s a bit of a thread that I feel like I’m pulling here because Tori, you’re talking about businesses and business procurement largely, right? Not individual purchasing.

Tori Williamson Yeah, and government for sure. We focus on the big purchasers primarily, but it applies to consumers. It’s just more regulated, you know, and there’s trade agreements and all sorts of things that make it more complicated on a big scale.

Mary W. Rowe So if you, as you look at the next 90 days in Canada and who knows what the heck is ahead of us, we’ll have a transition federally and then we’ve got continued transitions happening to the South and how they affect us. Are there particular regulatory steps that you think we should be doubling down on, Tori, to get this, to make it easier to do the kinds of economic transactions you’re promoting and that a lot of the people in the chat are reinforcing?

Tori Williamson I would say that looking at your organization level policies because those you have complete control over. So making sure that those direct you to prioritize local businesses and social enterprises for your below threshold spends and raising your thresholds to align with the trade agreement policy threshold levels. We have a whole local briefing note on our website that talks about what public sector purchasers can do within the current trade agreements, as well really highlighting that there is an exception allowed within the trade agreements, that all governments should be utilizing, which allows them to direct award above threshold with non-profits. So non-profit social enterprises, there’s amazing ones, especially in the construction sector, working on housing, advocating to their local governments and provinces to be doing those direct award contracts. So really utilizing that. Beyond that on a policy level, there are multiple levels of free trade agreements. There’s inter-provincial ones, there’s Canadian ones for all the provinces and territories, and then there’s international ones, bringing the inter-provincial ones up to the same level as the Canadian free trade agreement would be a good way to have more discretion around prioritizing local in the supply chain. So those are kind of the top ideas off my head.

Mary W. Rowe I mean, the thing that’s so interesting is it scales, doesn’t it? I mean I know that all the mercantilists here are going to be delighted that I use the word scale. But that it can work hyperlocal on your block for businesses next to each other. Mary, I’m sure with the “shop local to win” kinds of contests, one business talks to the next business, talks to next business and suddenly, you know, you’re incentivizing me to make a purchase here, walk six doors down, make a purchase there. This kind of critical mass. Gwen, is there any thinking on your part about whether or not a labeling program could grow virally like that? So if you had, let’s say, one business gets the economic nutrition label, and then do you find that, well, actually eight businesses on that street are then going to get, or gee, that part of Mile End is embracing the economic nutritional label so that more money stays in Mile End. That’s a neighborhood in Montreal. Anybody thinking about that? Whether you could get a kind of …

Gwen Patrick Absolutely, especially, we’ve always felt that way. And just through businesses that have reached out even before recent times, but we see this being a real, real shift towards putting places at the forefront when making all sorts of economic decisions and being able to help turn our purchases into investments in the future of the local economies of the places that we live. And we see this lasting far and beyond whatever these times are that we are in and we’re hoping that economic nutrition can be something that can grow. And so a lot of the businesses that we’re looking to work with this summer through the pilot but also as we launch nationally we’re hoping and we’ve seen them already want to be champions of this. So it’s not just us yelling about this and sharing economic nutrition and getting so excited. We’re thrilled to be building a network of local procurement champions across the country, starting with Canada that are able to share this and bring it out on a larger scale. And we can’t wait.

Mary W. Rowe But there’s got to be a way for us to do this in a way that doesn’t feel jingoistic, you know, that we’re somehow… Because don’t forget that, sorry, I don’t want to forget that Canada is composed of all sorts of people that come from all over the world and have deep international relationships and deep… And that’s part of the great strength of Canada is that people are in contact with their home countries and their family members and… And you know, you want that dense weave, right? But at the same time, this is how economies evolve and grow, is by stitching together these local relationships and I can supply this to you, you can supply that to me, and then suddenly we start to build something fabulous together. So it’s an interesting moment, isn’t it, to rethink this. Someone is in the chat complaining that they’re seeing too much of me. Danielle, I think that’s in your settings, in your Zoom settings, because I just checked and other people are seeing the Hollywood squares, you’re only seeing me and one other person, Poor you, sorry. But you can adjust your settings so that you can see all four of us. And as we sort of round the corner here, what’s your gut telling you? Are we on the right side of this? Do you think we’re making the progress we need to? Mary, you first.

Mary Pattison I think organizations like yours that are hosting these kinds of conversations, I think are helping so much. I had no idea about what Gwen is doing and what Tori’s doing and already I can see synergies. I think there are some really great things happening. I think we need more dialogue like this and I will be attending all the future CityTalks but I think what needs to happen is we need to be working on things that have a long runway that are going to make impacts in the long term like the things that that Gwen and Tori are talking about. And then we also need the, you know, the stuff that just hits today. Immediately, it’s going to have a measurable economic impact. So I think it’s just making sure that we’re supporting things that are doing lots of different things. And you know we’re hoping our program that this pilot, you know generates $15 million of measurable economic impacts. And what I’m really excited about is then sitting down with Gwen and Tori and having them critically look at how we collect and measure and report out our economic impact and our social impacts and getting better at telling a better story about this. So these kinds of connections are just so incredible.

Mary W. Rowe This is what we’re trying to do with Main Street Canada and measuring Main Street. Both of those sites have been posted in the chat. We’re trying show the economic value of what’s generated off of a Main Street and Main Street is just a proxy for local. You know, 70 or 75 or 80% of the population works in a business attached to a Main Street and people just don’t realize it’s so significant, right? Gwen, what do you think? What’s your gut telling you?

Gwen Patrick Of course I think we’re on the right track, for us, and especially through working together and learning from each other too it’s an exciting takeaway. But the Shorefast Institute for place-based economies that we’re building is all about shifting our mindsets from a ground up place first perspective so tethering capital closer to the places we live and being able to start our economic development approaches, again from the places we live with the assets that we have and going from there to develop. So economic nutrition is one of many tools trying to tether capital and as well as tethering everything closer to place. And I think you brought up a good point at the end. You’ll see that none of our businesses have a 100% spend target on Fogo Island. That’s never going to be a goal as much as we’d love to put a vineyard on Fogo Island. Well, maybe with the weather, who knows in a few years if that’s going to become possible, but at least right now it’s never going to be. So it’s about building out those dense supply chain networks as opposed to chains, but really networks, building and growing and strengthening those. And then tracking and being able to share our story through presenting tangible data that people can see.

Mary W. Rowe These are all about tools and motivation and inspiration. And also just to be aware, I always feel this, that when you feel hopeless, which a lot of people can feel, they can feel overwhelmed and hopeless, just try to get yourself out into an environment where you’re aware of people around you and what they’re doing. And you’ll find something remarkable within not a very far distance from where you are, if we just open our eyes to it. Tori, what about you? What’s your gut telling you?

Tori Williamson I think we’re 100% on the right track. I think the challenge and the opportunity is how do we scale this? We are having these conversations, we are passionate about this, so many communities are, but if we look at the business section in the Globe and Mail, are they talking about this? Maybe they’re talking about local, but they’re not talking about social procurement and all these solutions in the way that they need to be. So I think that we need to be advocating and holding businesses accountable that we shop with, our communities, our politicians, all accountable. So that we can create an economy that works for everybody.

Mary W. Rowe There you are, you heard it here first on CityTalk. Thanks for joining us. You know, the work always … We always say that the CityTalk, it’s never the end of the conversation, it’s just the beginning. Thank you all three for the work that you’re doing to highlight and make visible to us what often is not as visible as we need it to be so we can actually start seeing. On that theme, just to say that next week we are doing a CityTalk to celebrate the legacy of Jane Jacobs, who was all about seeing and observing and in fact, import replacement, which is what you were just describing Tori, with an anecdote about the product that they were getting from the U.S. that they could replace. That is a Jane Jacobs observation that she made about how economies grow import, replacement. So next week we’ll be talking about Jane’s Walk, the great legacy, and Jane Jacobs. And I always encourage people just know she wrote more than just one book. She wrote “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, but she also wrote “”The Economy of Cities. And it’s not just about cities, it’s about places. So read that. Why not? Between now and next Thursday when we do that. And there’s a couple of other sessions that are coming up, one on encampments with SHIFT, about temporary housing. So really pleased to have you all here to join us to talk once again about why the local matters and delighted Tori, Gwen, Mary. Thanks for joining us and thanks everybody in the chat. Always great to be with you. See you next time.