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SPP Canada: The gateway to a new way of doing business
January 31, 2005
By Nicole Zummach
"Small opportunities are often the beginning of
great enterprises."
-
Demosthenes (384 BC - 322 BC)
Imagine your workplace had the opportunity to buy its office supplies
from a local company that hired hard-to-employ people from within your
community. Wouldn't you feel better about your purchases than if you were
buying from a faceless corporation that had its head office in a different
province or even a different country? What if a company that was also
a nonprofit enterprise catered your next office party? Assuming all things
were equal, most of us would probably want to do business with companies
that have a positive impact within our own community. Of course, unless
you already know about these companies, it can seem a lot easier to just
flip through the phonebook to find someone. Enter the Social
Purchasing Portal (SPP), a promising new initiative that helps connect
businesses, nonprofits, and government with suppliers that provide a social
impact along with their goods and services.
Putting the puzzle pieces together
The Social Purchasing Portal was first launched in Vancouver in June of 2003.
Research had been conducted on similar models in the United States that
were using government purchasing to create economic opportunities. At
the same time, Vancouver-based Fast
Track to Employment (FTE) was looking at ways to create opportunities
for low-threshold and hard-to-employ people. By putting together the different
pieces of the puzzle, FTE - in partnership with BC
Technology Social Venture Partners - launched the SPP program as a
means of creating employment opportunities for the hard-to-employ, while
also initiating targeted business growth in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
SPP is actually just a web application that connects purchasers and suppliers.
The concept is simple really. Purchasers, whether they are businesses,
nonprofits, or governments, sign up for free. They then have access to
a list of suppliers from whom they can purchase goods and services that
they would otherwise be buying elsewhere. The suppliers, which include
both businesses and nonprofit enterprises, must commit to certain requirements
that foster community economic development. For example, in Vancouver
suppliers agree to post any job openings they might have with FTE, and
consider the candidates that FTE provides from its 30 different training
groups. "Most of that is actually quite self-selecting," explains David
LePage, CEO of Fast Track to Employment and project manager for SPP
Canada. "The companies that want to work with us are the companies that
are looking to grow their business, but they are also looking to be part
of the community. We have a formal review at the beginning; we do a site
inspection and they have to sign a letter of commitment to post their
jobs with FTE. If they are just using the portal to market their business
but not employing from the community then we would be able to remove them."
Early signs of success
Although SPP Vancouver has been around for less than two years, there is a clear
indication that David LePage and his colleagues are onto something. The
site has already attracted about 115 purchasers and 45 suppliers. Even
more impressive is the fact that more than 60 people have been placed
into jobs with portal suppliers and over a million dollars worth of transactions
have taken place. "We didn't expect the number of jobs right away," says
LePage. "It's actually been much more successful [than we anticipated],
not only in terms of the number of jobs created, but we also didn't have
any idea of the social capital that would be built in the community. It's
quite amazing to see nonprofits and businesses working together, or businesses
working with businesses who are a kilometre away from each other and didn't
know they existed a year ago."
In Vancouver, SPP targets businesses that are located in the Downtown
Eastside and/or employ from the inner city community. This is spurring
a tremendous increase in social capital. Local businesses are being introduced
to one another and to government, and there have been training opportunities
for the small companies on how to grow their business. It's also providing
a boost to the area's nonprofit social enterprises, giving them a market
and helping them develop their business skills. "A necessary part of a
healthy community is social capital and the portal contributes significantly
to the business people interacting in a totally different way," says LePage.
"All of a sudden you have the private sector and government and nonprofits
working together on a common issue. Previously they would have been in
different silos looking at different problems or looking at the same issue
from different perspectives. We actually create a common lens through
which they can work together."
Communities across Canada taking notice
As a result of the portal's success in Vancouver, other cities are approaching
LePage all the time asking how they can get involved. SPP
Winnipeg is already in place, with a goal to increase employment opportunities
and economic activity for businesses in the city's North End. SPP
Toronto is also gaining momentum, focusing primarily on employment.
As well, ten other local portals are currently in development, including
Calgary, Surrey, West Kootenays, Abbotsford, Victoria, Halifax, Ottawa,
Edmonton, London, and Sault Ste. Marie. The beauty of SPP is that it is
really just a network so replication is quite simple. It's designed so
that each site is operated and managed independently by a local nonprofit
organization, but all the portals share common branding and common technology
in a common database. So if a company has offices in a number of different
cities it will be listed on each of the portals. And if purchasers can't
find something they are looking for in their local community, they can
stay on the site and look in the other cities.
LePage says the next few years are going to be about building local support
in a number of communities and stabilizing it. There is a lot of relationship
building in the first two or three years because the portal is dependent
upon a business model as opposed to a charity model. "It's actually about
changing the way people think," says LePage. "We're talking about creating
partnerships between government, businesses, and nonprofits; traditionally
those sectors are pretty separate. We are actually integrating the social,
the public, and the private economies into a common project to address
the issues of poverty and economic marginalization. It twists the relationships
and that's a behaviour change."
He wants initiatives such as the portal to become a normal way of thinking
about addressing the issues of economic disparities, as opposed to continuing
with the model that hasn't worked, which is a handout. "This is about
trying to look at how we can change the very basis of the relationships
between the three sectors in the economy, so together they can address
creating healthy communities.
For more information about the Social Purchasing Portal, or to contact
the SPP manager in your area, visit www.sppcanada.org.
