Foundational Talks

Indigenomics By Design: The Rise of Indigenous Economic Empowerment 
Carol Anne Hilton
​An Indigenous worldview brings with it into today the balance of the feminine. Indigenomics By Design names  the concept of Indian Act economics and brings to light the worldview of the patriarchy and colonial  constructs that have shaped the economic regression of Indigenous peoples for hundreds of years. Indigenomics is modern Indigenous economic design.  Indigenomics By Design conceptualizes the potential of the evolution of a 100 billion dollar Indigenous economy. 

Canada is  now embarking on a new pathway of Indigenous economic empowerment through the growth of the Indigenous economy. The Indian Act has been central tool serving the displacement of an Indigenous worldview, ways of being and knowledge systems since 1867. This empowerment  is shaped through economic meaning stemming from within from an Indigenous worldview and through the modern expression of rights and title.
 

What does it mean to be a feminist business?
Dr. CV Harquail

Being a feminist business asks for more than just being fiercely feminist as you go about your work, although that really helps. It also means building feminist values into your business model, your mission, your products, and your leadership practices. CV will share some insights from her forthcoming book on Feminist Interventions in Business thinking. This talk will help set a foundation for attendees' shared learning throughout the EFF.

Diversity and Inclusion is Not Enough: Decolonized Feminism and Design
Dr. Dori Tunstall
What does it mean to be truly inclusive in design? How do the values that we hold as individuals translate to the experiences we design for? Dori Tunstall walks us through the values aligned with decolonization and explains how to put them into intersectional praxis. Dori will demystify how trends of “Diversity and Inclusion” are not the enough for creating inclusive spaces. Dean of Design at OCAD University, Dori is the first Black and Black female dean of faculty of design anywhere. From this unique perspective, she offers guidance on recognizing key barriers and creating new paths towards decolonizing design, so that everyone can participate with a sense of self-determination and belonging. 

Movement Sessions

Working with the Life Force of Ferocity - Embodied Resilience Workshop with Jane Clapp
Explore how your life force and ferocity is harnessed in your body through innovative movement and mindfulness activities. Learn to start making friends with anger with your body as a conduit for action and develop a more intimate relationship with your personal power. 

Boxing 101: The Art of Not Quitting
Savoy Howe, Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club
Boxing is a metaphor for life. When your grounding in the ring is strong, your grounding outside of the ring is strong. Having good offense and defense in one's back pocket... never a bad idea. And let's not forget the footwork that's important for dancing around obstacles. When the dance moves are learned individually and put together, anyone can look and feel like a fighter. Being reminded of this fighter inside is extremely helpful in life, business, and in advocating for one's self. Come explore the "dance moves" of boxing in a safe, light impact, low cardio class. Non-contact. Perfect for all abilities.


Workshops 
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Feminist Marketing for an Emerging, More Inclusive Economy
Kelly Diels
This workshop is an overview of feminist marketing and a social media how-to that will get you started on feminist marketing in theory AND practice, now. The mainstream, popular and apparently feminist archetype of “empowerment” and success  (think: professionally pretty white women in heels and sheath dresses a.k.a “The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand”) that’s held out to women leaders and entrepreneurs as a model is an empty one. Worse yet, this archetype reinforces the gendered and racist norms limiting the lives of women and gender non-conforming people. It’s essential that we create new narratives to help grow our feminist businesses. Learn how to deliberately audit your practices and build feminist and culture-making criteria into your marketing app and vendor selections. Develop a system for creating and distributing business-building feminist messaging, and get started creating new materials right away.

Designing and Unleashing the Power of Enterprise Ecosystems
Dr. Barbara Orser and Petra Kassun-Mutch 
The term “ecosystem” was originally used in environmental fields to describe an entire system of living organisms plus abiotic factors such as air, water, minerals that occupy a particular space and inter-relate in that ensures its ability to flourish despite barriers and forces outside of its control. Today, we use the word ecosystem to name and describe a system of relationships related to the advancement or sustainability of an idea, project, or entire enterprise.   Compare mainstream entrepreneurship ecosystems to women’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, and look at examples of firm level ecosystems via a feminist lens. Participants will discuss how an ecosystem mindset ensure resilience, accelerates impact, and advances financial sustainability.  Map out your own enterprise ecosystems, apply feminist principles to ecosystem management, and identify new opportunities and “triple plays” that can help your enterprise breakthrough.

Feminist Businesses Require Feminist Business Models: Design Yours with the Feminist Business Model Canvas
Dr. CV Harquail and Petra Kassun-Mutch
Surface, articulate, and clarify values that are most important to your organization. Build these values into your products and operating model. Connect your business model to your larger social purpose. This workshop is designed to give you an overview of one feminist approach to building a business, and to compare this approach to more conventional business modeling and tools.

Negotiating Like a Feminist​
Olga Semenovych
"How Women Can Negotiate Better at Work" or "10 Tips for Negotiating that Women Need to Know." Have you seen these types of articles? If you read a few of these, you will quickly notice that the focus is primarily on the individual and their skills. For women, the most common advice is that they need "to speak up" or "be more assertive." Is that really all there's to it? As a ubiquitous business practice with such as an abundance of dedicated literature, resources and skills training, negotiation has attracted very little critical discussion. So what would a feminist lens bring to the practice of negotiation? What can we learn by examining negotiation as a gendered practice? This workshop will explore our own experiences in negotiating and different negotiation strategies and tactics as a way to discuss what kinds of conditions shape a negotiation process, who is viewed as a legitimate negotiator and what is it that gets negotiated anyway. Through our conversation we will aim to generate ideas about how a feminist approach can help us transform the practice of negotiation, and how we, as feminist entrepreneurs, could leverage negotiation processes and strategies in our efforts to create a more inclusive society.

Generative Decision-Making: Sharing Power in Our Organizations
Samantha Slade
Decision making tends to be a source of confusion, tension, and conflict in organizations. The good news is there are ways to make decisions together that are both human and efficient for doing business. This is one of the key domains of practice for more horizontal organizational ways. Decision making methods we are most familiar with have patriarchal roots. Not only does it feel good to reconnect with a decision-making process that is more true to our nature, is more effective. In this session, participants will gain a live experience of “generative decision making” and share stories of power and decision making. Participants will learn how to make consent based decisions with sensing, what kind of decision making system they want to use, and how to unravel some of their own stories of power and decision making.

This is What a Feminist Business Looks Like: Lunapads' Insights  & Actions from the Frontlines
Madeleine Shaw & Suzanne Siemens, Lunapads
Explore and expand your definition of feminist business values with founders Suzanne Siemens and Madeleine Shaw of Lunapads. As pioneers in the reusable period care industry, the pair will share their diverse personal leadership journeys, including stories of the (literal!) blood, sweat and tears that have built their 7-figure, internationally recognized, multiple award-winning company. How have their feminist values and politics inspired, shaped and/or collided with the discipline of building a successful business over 25 years, and what can be learned from their journey? Learn how personal identity and narratives about being a feminist, businessperson, and/or entrepreneur are can limit or lift us. Deconstruct the gender binary in organizational design and marketing. Learn how to approach financing, competition, HR, and social impact with a feminist lens. Take away a list of real-time next steps to enhance your feminist business practice. As a participant, you’ll have the opportunity to share your own challenges and receive feedback from peers.  

What Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders Can Learn from Activists
Rivera Sun
Audre Lorde wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This unique session brings the tools of constructive activism and power of enterprise together to introduce alternative ways to drive systems change. Participants will discuss how to create and support movements for social change in a powerfully transformative cycle. Learn about economic activism, the key characteristics of leaderfull organizing, the connections between mass movements and cooperatives, and how constructive programs, like Gandhi's Salt Campaign, demonstrate how the merging of business and social change can become an unstoppable force. If you are disillusioned with the pace of change and looking for new ways to move the dial at little faster, this workshop is for you!

Whiteness without White Supremacy: A Generative, Creative Workshop
Dr. Dori Tunstall
After the American Presidential elections in which 52% of white women and 63% of white men, across all income spectrums, voted for Trump, there was an epiphany for many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color folks, that many white people could not imagine a form of Whiteness (i.e. white identity) without accompanying white supremacy built into many North American social and legal systems. It raised the question: What could the experience of white identity be like without the reliance on the denigration of others to feel valued and loved? In a more positive and generative sense, are there new histories to be shared, individuals to be admired, and creative ways of adding back the nuances of identities erased by Whiteness? In this workshop led by Dori Tunstall, the Dean of Design at OCAD University, participants will co-create art and design in different forms (i.e. posters, paintings, installations, interactions, objects, etc.) that demonstrate what feminist identities of "whiteness without white supremacy" could be like today.

Make Better Business Decisions Using a Personal Governance Framework
Theresa Yuan
It is accepted wisdom that diversity drives both performance and innovation. Companies who fail to build diverse and inclusive workforces risk being left behind. But it’s not enough to encourage “best practices”; gender equality must be enacted in our laws, cultural norms, and business values and practices. Understanding the “gender gap” in entrepreneurship requires a focus on individual, institutional, and structural barriers. This workshop will employ constructivist learning methods to illuminate ways in which gender bias has informed the entrepreneurial process, the underlying enabling conditions for diversity and/or inclusion, and how a personal governance framework for responding to these conditions can help entrepreneurs align their work and vision with building sustainable businesses centered on feminist values. Learn which values guide your business choices and goals and how institutional and systemic structures either support you or hold you back. Learn governance structures you can work with to move the needle forward in enacting your entrepreneurial feminist vision. 

Put Your Values into Policy and Practice In Your Business: The Case of The Gladstone Hotel
Chris Mitchell and Christina Zeidler, The Gladstone
As feminist entrepreneurs, we model new ways of working, living, creating, and flourishing together. We acknowledge and appreciate the whole humanness of our employees, clients, suppliers, and partners and value our inter-independence. In this workshop we will collectively explore how to formalize and evolve “feminist best business practices” and share key learnings from the herstory and case study of the Gladstone Hotel as a feminist-led arts and hospitality-based business. Inspired by the Gladstone’s arts-based strategies we will workshop how to develop a partnership framework that aligns values, goals, and expectations to build collaborations that impact a higher social purpose beyond profit. Activities will include case study of policy development, facilitated work to draft a partnership/collaboration framework unique to your business, and group collaboration to explore how we can aggregate, share, and build on how we individually operate as feminist entrepreneurs to create a collective feminist business model for now and the future.

Lightning Talks
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Starting and Running a Business on Your Own Terms
Vicki Saunders, Founder, SheEO (Moderator)
Pauleanna Reid, Co-founder, New Girl on the Block
Cher Jones, Founder, Socially Active
BE (barbara) Alink, CEO, Founder and Inventor, The Alinker
​Bianca Sprague, CEO, bebo mia & Baby and Me Fitness

Vicki Saunders will moderate this lightning talks session featuring five different entrepreneurs with five very different stories of how they launched and grew their business. While some of these business owners became entrepreneurs rather unexpectedly by following their gut instincts, others got started building their business by holding onto a strong vision from the start. All of these entrepreneurs have challenged the way business gets done while embracing the inevitable hurdles that come along with growing their business. What does it take to grow? What does it take to grow on your own terms?

Why We Gather: How to Create Community Through Feminist Content, Practices and Values
Chanèle McFarlane, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Do Well Dress Well (Moderator)
Amanda Laird, Feminist nutritionist and host of Heavy Flow Podcast
Rachel Kelly, Founder, Make Lemonade
Karlyn Percil-Mercieca, CEO, KDPM Consulting Group Inc. and Founder, SisterTalk Group
Nancy Wilson, CEO, Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce
“Community over competition.” We’ve all heard this phrase countless times, right? We’ve seen so many women-centered and/or feminist communities come to life in recent years. From mentorship circles, blogs, and podcasts to co-working spaces, conferences, and membership organizations, these communities can allow us to collectively support and validate each other’s experiences. But, beyond ‘community over competition’ as a hashtag, how do we actually put the phrase to practice in a meaningful, authentic way? This stream explores the values and practices that inform the ways we gather. Get actionable tips on how to build your own unique community using an intersectional feminist lens.

A Feminist Look at the Fast-Growing Cannabis Industry
Lisa Campbell, Founder, Lifford Cannabis Solutions (Moderator)
Reena Rampersad, Owner/operator, The Limin Coconut & High Society Supper Club
Madi Fuller, Manager, ncTakeOff
Sabrina Ramkellawan, Founder & CEO, Canadian Institute for Medical Advancement & VP of Clinical Affairs,  TerrAscend
Michelle Cliffe, Founder & CEO, Stashie and Founder, Love Collective
Allyson Morris, HR Manager at Auxly Cannabis Group Inc.

Cannabis advocate Lisa Campbell will moderate a panel of women entrepreneurs and business owners in cannabis to reflect upon the current state of the cannabis industry. While diversity stats are low for publicly traded companies, cannabis companies listed on the TSX have experienced even more of a dearth of female directors and executives. Now that cannabis is legal, the stigma is finally fading and more and more feminist focused startups and women's organizations are coming to the forefront. With the global cannabis industry projected to grow to $194 billion within 7 years, ample opportunities exist for feminist entrepreneurs and executives to enter the space. Find out more about the unique challenges of the cannabis and how are feminist entrepreneurs shaping what comes next.