For nine years, the Centre for Social Innovation has been exploring new ways of building communities of common interest--though shared workspaces, incubation, and developing supportive networks to help social entrepreneurs learn and flourish. The next step in CSI's community-building efforts: a new crowdfunding platform dedicated specifically to social entrepreneurs, called
CSI Catalyst. (If you're not familiar with the term, "social entrepreneurship" just means using entrepreneurial approaches to develop organizations that bring about social change. Social enterprises in Toronto range from urban farming collectives to arts groups.)
Catalyst is not unlike other crowdfunding platforms you may be familiar with, such as Kickstarter. One difference, says CSI CEO Tonya Surman, is that this is a homegrown system: "It's actually a Canadian one, takes Canadian dollars, runs Canadian transactions." More broadly, organizations need to be CSI members either by joining their online network or by being tenants in one of their physical spaces, which, says Surman, is key. CSI's theory is that by starting with organizations who are already in their network, and thus are able to access other kinds of support and acceleration services, projects are more likely to do well.
According to their research, only 40 per cent of projects on crowdfunding platforms in general are actually getting funded; improving on that metric on Catalyst is one of CSI's main goals. "There's a real question of quality control" with the bigger crowdfunding platforms, says Surman.
Because CSI maintains an online network in addition to its shared workspaces (there are three locations in Toronto and one in New York), Catalyst will eventually be available to organizations across North America. Requiring membership isn't meant to be a major hurdle, in other words, so much as a tool for ensuring that participating projects are ones that are in a good position to do well.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Tonya Surman, CEO, Centre for Social Innovation