Mike Rowlands

President & CEO, Junxion Strategy

Board Chair, Hollyhock

Agile Strategy for the Social Venture

How do you translate ideas into impact? How do you hold to your values, while competition and opportunities try to push you off course? And how do you decide what’s most important now—compared to what you thought was important during your last planning retreat?

Today, effective strategy integrates culture and brand, embraces the change that’s all around us, and is captured in a living document that empowers leaders through change, growth, and organizational development.

In this session Mike Rowlands will share insights into Junxion’s Turning Point™ approach, which blends Agile methodologies, Appreciative Inquiry, stakeholder engagement and systems thinking in an integrated model that’s been implemented by many SVI alumni in their ventures—and a long list of visionary, social purpose organizations.

Ivellisse Morales

Founder & CEO, bombilla

Shine Bright: The Art & Science of Heart-Centered Branding

Branding is more than just a logo, a flashy marketing campaign or slick graphic design. Branding, primarily, is about feelings, meaning-making and relationship-building. Great branding is memorable.

Your favorite brands make you feel. Feelings come from the heart. Think about the feeling you get unpacking a box from your favorite brand or the warm welcome by a friendly face at your favorite local restaurant. You feel love, acknowledgement, cared for, listened to, special, belonging. You feel great and because you feel great, your brain makes a positive association. This positive association helps build brand loyalty and lays the groundwork for customer satisfaction and success.

This is why branding is both an art and a science. It’s the intersection of data, design and delight. Data is needed to stay customer-centric, strategic and results-oriented. Design is needed to explore and experiment with the number of strategies and tactics to make a positive impression. Delight is the human and heart-centeredness in it all.

In this workshop, you will gain a deeper understanding of the art and science of heart-centered branding. We will explore how psychology, neuroscience, data and art all interplay as we intentionally build and manage brands. You will walk away with practical ways to start infusing more meaning into how you treat your staff, customers, vendors and community.

Chloe Gow-Jarrett

CEO, 3Fold Partners

Leading Through Your Core Values

Our personal core values shape our standards of behaviour. They are formed by our life experiences and are further crystallized by a variety of influences like family and culture. When our core values are clear, we can make choices grounded in what we care about most. When our core values are not clearly identified, we often have confusing and sometimes unproductive responses to situations that conflict with these unconscious values.

Leaders tend to be most effective and fulfilled when their outward actions are congruent with their inner values.

Join Chloe Gow-Jarrett for an interactive and reflective workshop where you will uncover your core values and define what they look like in action, in both your life and your leadership. Together we will move through a process that allows you to gain clarity about where you are currently honouring your values and where you have opportunities to make choices that are best aligned with the things you value most.

Bill Stoddart

CEO, Iroquois Valley Farms

Unit Economics and Due Diligence Essentials

This workshop will focus on some of the key elements of creating a financial blueprint for your business and developing a financial story for prospective funders. We will share some sample spreadsheets and will also provide an overview of due diligence considerations that business owners should be prepared to discuss.

Michelle Lee

Strategy Director, Gensler

Limia Shunia

Senior Strategist, Gensler

An Engine for Purposeful Growth: Break Out of Normal Questioning Patterns

New approaches to questioning can spark new awareness of what is working and what is not. Changing how a question is asked could be the key to getting at the valuable information we look for, especially what’s effective for our companies and industries.

Examining where we find ourselves is an essential task as we build preferable futures together and seek growth. Sometimes teams and companies get stuck finding ways to do so. Schedules, orthodoxies, or other obstacles prevent valuable insights from becoming visible that could advance your company’s services, approaches, and offerings.

This workshop will use an approach that helps us ask differently what is working and what is not. In an easy, effective, and fun way, we will be able to identify pain points, rewards, and successes and even tap into drivers of behavior. We will use these insights to build tactics for getting to the desired shift you’d like to see. The goal is to leave you with increased clarity and generate new momentum in a relatively short time.

Gagan Levy

Founder, Guru Media Solutions

Where Play Meets Purpose

As kids, we don’t know anything but play. The world is a game—a stage for make believe with an audience of fellow kids and adults who don’t have a choice but to play with us. Then we become adults with responsibilities and mondays and TGIF’s and can’t wait till the weekends. The majority of our week hijacked by that 4 letter word…work. What if I told you that this is a myth and that it’s not only possible for your team to love their respective j-o-b, but that in that love, in that purpose they will also reach new heights of their individual and collective potential. Turns out that the panacea for brand movement building from the inside out is right at the nexus of purpose and play. In this PLAYshop, we will not only explore the purpose of play, but also how it’s possible to play with purpose.

Shannon Ward

Chief Growth Officer, Genus Capital Management

Simple Sales Strategy for Impact Entrepreneurs

Inspiring your target market to take action is the key to your business having the impact you envision on the world.

Sales is essential, but struggle is optional.

This workshop will give you a framework and the knowledge you need to build a simple, effective sales plan for your business so you know who to approach, how to approach them, and what to say when you’re in front of them! You’ll also learn key psychological tips to help yourself stay motivated to take action when it comes to sales.

Aliko Weste

Founder & Executive Producer, U Productions

Returning to our Houses of Magic: Community as Capital Center

Are relationships the new currency? A rising tide raises all ships. In a time where social business culture shifts to reflect ever evolving values, learn to be the rising tide. Join Aliko as he shares a brief history of capitalism in relationship to primitive accumulation, it’s impacts on our bodies and nervous systems, and how building community as a business practice is not only an antidote, but reparations for a system that has perpetuated alienation for far too long.