'Reflections on 2024': A Message from Alex Gill, SVZ Director
In a world tempting us to embrace the negative, let’s pause to look at what went right in 2024.
By: Alex Gill
December 17th, 2024
As 2024 draws to a close, it’s customary to take time to reflect back. And this year offers a unique opportunity to do so, as the SVZ celebrated our 10th anniversary this year.
It would be easy to join the majority of people who apparently wrote off the past 12 months. Our friends at global opinion and trend firm Ipsos surveyed thousands of people in 33 different countries and found that (external link) two-thirds said that 2024 was not a good year.
Yet from the standpoint of our 10th anniversary, 2024 offered very similar challenges to SVZ startup founders, teams and those exploring their ideas. How to address the social issues that are the core of your business with a sustainable and enduring revenue model? How to explain your unique value proposition – balancing financial and social return – to investors who may be more accustomed to the “hockey stick” growth of more traditional businesses? How to attract, motivate and retain a start-up team while dealing with the day-to-day uncertainties of growing a social enterprise?
In the year coming to a close, just like every year since our founding in 2014, the Social Ventures Zone continued to support a group of entrepreneurs who were committed to addressing a range of social and environmental issues with their unique business models.
Whether it was attracting a growing amount of philanthropic funding to support outreach to isolated seniors (looking at you, Music Share), working on a bricks-and-mortar location for a café and catering business to train developmentally challenged young adults (Do Good Donuts), finalizing a merger with an international partner to better support women and non-binary artists (Rise and Repaint), or tackling Ontario’s food waste head-on (Eat Impact) – our ventures weren’t dissuaded by the negativity and distraction of 2024. They got on with it, as did the dozens of other ventures we incubated.
Several cohorts of students joined them in this optimistic journey. Our ideation programming saw them work on earlier-stage social business ideas, while the Student Impact Placement Program (SIPP) saw dozens learn entrepreneurial skills and gain work-ready experience through paid placements at SVZ startups.
When you add in our weekly #CaffeinatedInnovators gatherings, panel discussions co-sponsored by the City of Toronto's Business Incubation & Commercialization Grant (external link) (BIC) Program, and our workshop and skills series, we curated more than 1,800 engagement opportunities across the campus and with our partners in the broader community. And we and our dozens of incubated ventures were able to do this in a year that many were ready to write off.
The lesson I took from that is that we know that building a better world will be challenging. And those challenges – and their level of difficulty – may vary from year to year. But we will keep going, because we need the world we are trying to create – now more than ever.
On behalf of Sarah, Jake, Nika and the SVZ team, we thank our SVZ community and partners for all your efforts in 2024. We look forward to hitting the ground running, with you, when we reconvene in January 2025 and start an even better year.
AG
