Oprah Magazine Feature
Exactly one week after attending the Global Summit, Cree joined an emergency “all-call,” a global zoom meeting of SheEO investors and the owners of the companies they finance to discuss how the pandemic was impacting them.
creating radical connections through trauma-informed + community centred care.
Worldwide, homeless shelters have a 5% success rate of moving people into permanent housing and drug rehabilitation centres only have a 20% success rate.
So why do we keep investing in solutions that are clearly not effective?
Addiction, mental illness and homelessness are symptoms of a deeper problem. The stigma that all these things have happened to people because they simply made bad choices is heartbreaking. People who show these symptoms have gone through repeated trauma, whether physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, which led them into a downward spiral, leaving them disconnected from society and any resources.
“We need to stand in AWE and COMPASSION for what people with trauma have had to carry rather than in judgement on how they carried it.”
The opposite to addiction is not sobriety, it's connection.
Rooted in community is where connection lives. We want to make good more common in business, with a community of social enterprises that are growing their businesses on their own terms. this includes radical actions in:
“There’s no downside, absolutely no downside to switching to COMMONGOOD. The experience is better, it’s easier and it’s local.”
HOSPITALITY | HEALTH & WELLNESS | VETS | FUNERAL HOMES | UNIFORMS
When CMNGD (COMMONGOOD) started in 2016, we scaled out of the basement of the local homeless shelter. Over the years we have tested different ways for the model to work, then COVID hit and we lost 95% of our clients (restaurants) in the first week. It became clear it was time to iterate again.
Here are our impact numbers from 2016 to March 2020.
Homelessness is not free – it costs our systems around $50,000 per person, per year to be homeless in Canada; with 50% being spent on health, then the rest on legal, housing and food. Every time CMNGD employed someone who was facing poverty barriers, we were putting impact dollars back into the community.
Our former employees have become active members of the community; paying taxes, shopping local, attending school and volunteering. We provided on the job training, mentorship and worked with local social service agencies to remove barriers to obtaining their ID, bank account and education.
For every $1 invested into CMNGD, $2.48 of value was created in impact. CMNGD would not exist without the private investment and non-traditional funding like the Social Enterprise Fund in Alberta, SheEO and ATB BoostR. Our employees were paying taxes, shopping locally + engaging more.
Currently we are partnered with a locally owned + operated laundry in Calgary, proceeds from every sale that comes through CMNGD, goes to the trauma-informed + community centred mentorship we are currently exploring + embarking on with local shelters.
Exactly one week after attending the Global Summit, Cree joined an emergency “all-call,” a global zoom meeting of SheEO investors and the owners of the companies they finance to discuss how the pandemic was impacting them.
There are many stories as to why CMNGD (COMMONGOOD) started. People’s stories are woven into the fabric of what we do. We scaled our model out of the basement of a homeless shelter. There, we met Dan. He lived in the homeless shelter and worked in their laundry, volunteering every day. Now he was going to work for us –
Small Business Week is a big deal in Calgary and this year, it was even a bigger deal for CMNGD (COMMONGOOD). Dave & Hannah Cree, Co-founders and Co-CEOs were surprised and honoured to receive the 2018 Social Entrepreneurship Award from the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. (They were pretty sure they didn’t receive the award, they were seated at the very
