As we plan for our 2021 events, we continue to find that we sit at the intersection of so many great ideas and too little time to pursue them all!

Of course, that's probably an enviable place to be. We'd all be in a much poorer place as a species if good ideas were highly scarce. At the same time, it also makes it more important for us to continually curate the ideas that are best suited to our current time and place in history. Especially as we start to emerge from the pent-up nature of the pandemic, we anticipate that people will be even hungrier for the types of ideas that help us make sense of the next step. We have lots to recover from, and a vast number of choices to make as we attempt to move forward as societies in a post-pandemic world.

As current news reports are constantly reminding us, our journey with COVID-19 is far from over.

Many of us are likely tired of living through a major historical event and continally unprecedented (modern) times. The urge to get back to "normal" is strong, even though we don't know what that will mean for us going forward, or when it will happen.

We find ourselves in a time of great uncertainty that demands a period of physical isolation, but that doesn't mean we and our ideas need to be isolated socially.

What does a spa, an urban planning consultancy and a bus loaded with fruits and veggies have in common? Lourdes Juan builds teams that solve problems across communities!

Lourdes is a Calgary-based entrepreneur and planner who oversees dozens of staff and hundreds of volunteers at the diverse companies and non-profits she’s founded including Soma Hammam & Spa, Hive Developments and the Leftovers Foundation.

Shocked at how much unsold bread a single bakery in Calgary had at closing time, Lourdes founded Leftovers in 2012. Today, the large charity works with nearly 100 Alberta restaurants, bakeries and grocers to keep more than 300,000 pounds of edible food out of landfills every single year by repurposing it through partnerships with local businesses or redirecting excess food to hungry Albertans who need it the most. In 2019, Lourdes and her team launched Fresh Routes, a social enterprise that creates new ways of providing healthy and affordable food to Canadians including through Calgary’s first mobile grocery store.

James Stauch is the Director of the Institute for Community Prosperity at Mount Royal University where he has developed or co-created social innovation, leadership, and systems-focused learning programs for both undergraduates and the broader community. 

A former foundation executive and philanthropy and social change consultant, James currently serves as a Director on the Board of Alberta Ecotrust, as an Advisor tNonprofit Resilience Lab, and on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Philanthropist.  He is the lead author of an annual scan of trends and emerging issues, produced in partnership with the Calgary Foundation. 

His recent contributions to community-partnered knowledge production include The Right to Eat Right: Connecting Upstream and Downstream Food Security in Calgary; Aging in Thriving in the 21st Century; Merging for Good: A Case-Based Framework for Nonprofit Amalgamations; In Search of the Altruithm: AI and the Future of Social Good;The Problem Solver's Companion: A Practitioners' Guide to Starting a Social Enterprise, co-produced with Shaun Loney and Encompass Co-op; and A Student Guide to Mapping a System, co-produced with Systems-Led Leadership and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford.

Jonathan is the CEO of TECTERRA Inc., a non-profit that provides funding and support to companies who develop innovative geospatial technologies. Jon oversees a small and dynamic team that provides their clients with the opportunity to commercialize their products faster than they could have on their own.

It's actually a bit misleading to describe this year's ENGAGE: Deeply event as our "deepest, most engaging event ever." 

The truth is, we'd like to think that ALL of our events over the last decade have been part of building toward this year's culminating event for our 10th anniversary of operating as a team.