Safeguarding women’s financial dignity.

Sabotaging her job. Refusing to work. Taking her money. Demanding she account for every cent. Destroying her credit. Denying her food, clothing, transportation, a telephone, education, employment, medications, heat, housing. Threatening her access to her children. Refusing to pay child support.

These are just a few examples of economic abuse. It’s a form of domestic violence that affects most women in abusive relationships — often preventing them from leaving or forcing them to return to their abuser. The effects, says Meseret Haileyesus, can be lifelong, and ruinous.

“Even after a woman has left the perpetrator, the impact of ruined credit scores, poor mental health, sporadic employment histories, and homelessness caused by the violence can make it extremely difficult to pursue economic safety.”

Through the Canadian Centre for Women’s Empowerment, Meseret is tackling economic abuse, working with victims, frontline workers, financial institutions, governments, criminal and family justice systems, researchers, and other stakeholders to address policy and procedure gaps and advocate for women’s economic rights and justice. The CCFWE is the first and only organization of its kind in Canada.

Indigenous Innovation for a Sustainable Future

Lee White has three main passions: data sovereignty, climate activism, and Indigenous reconciliation. As co-founder of ChinookX Technologies, he’s combined all three. ChinookX partners Indigenous communities with the tech sector to build data projects powered by Indigenous-owned, clean-energy sources. In the process, it’s helping to create a strong foundation for Indigenous economic and cultural autonomy.

“The current state of the Internet — of our collective digital existence — is fundamentally exploitative,” says Lee. “Centralized tech powers, like Facebook and Google, have monetized individual data for massive profit, without regard for community and environmental well-being.”

Data exploitation is all too familiar to Indigenous peoples, who have long seen colonial governments and corporations collect, store, disseminate, and profit from their information without their input or consent. Indigenous data, notes Lee, has been used to create policies and narratives that perpetuate the colonial stranglehold on and economic exclusion of First Nations communities.

Building a more ethical, intentional technological future

“Wait: what is engineering?”

That question — posed, ironically, by the dean of a Canadian university engineering program — has driven Mark Abbott for more than a decade.

As an “accidental engineer,” Mark worked his way up through the corporate engineering ranks, growing increasingly dissatisfied with the disjunct between his profession’s relentless focus on developing technology for human convenience — while shying away from the larger, often negative, impacts of that technology on humanity.

Real change, Mark realized, needed to come not from tweaks here and there in the engineering profession to make it “greener” or more diverse, but from a radical reimagining of engineering itself. “We need to critically rethink about how and why we build technology, not to mention who builds it, who governs it, who has access to it, and who and what is displaced by it.”

In 2015, Mark established the Engineering Change Lab to grapple with such questions — and as a platform to redefine the profession and its relationship to the larger world. The lab established the framework of technological stewardship: a set of principles, tools, and practices that enable a purposeful, regenerative, inclusive and responsible understanding of the role of technology and the professionals who create and apply it in everyday life.

A farmer-centric approach to land conservation

Want to create healthy landscapes? Get farmers and ranchers on board.

That’s the brilliantly simple concept behind ALUS, which harmonizes the demands of agriculture with the health and functionality of the natural environment. Farmers are the single largest group of landowners in North America, points out ALUS CEO — and 2021 Ashoka Fellow — Bryan Gilvesy. “They’re therefore in a unique position to provide solutions to environmental challenges like climate change or biodiversity loss.”

Historically, governments and conservation agencies have incentivized farmers and ranchers to protect pieces of their land, making them unusable. Or, agencies impose penalties for not complying with environmental regulations. Neither approach has done a particularly good job of fostering environmentally sustainable farming practices — let of enabling positive relationships between agencies and agricultural workers.

ALUS — the name is an acronym for “Alternative Land-Use Services” — is changing that. The organization, which currently operates in six provinces and 31 communities, puts farmers at the centre of agricultural sustainability efforts. It trusts these landowners to identify, initiate, and maintain environmental projects on their own land — for example, restoring a wetland on marginal or uneconomic parcels — and supports them financially, technically, and practically throughout the process. Ranchers and farmers are rewarded to maintain or enhance the natural ecosystems (like watersheds and wetlands) already on their land, and to actively produce new ones.

Rethinking disability.

Al Etmanski has applied the discipline of imagination to the world of disability. In the process, he’s transformed — for the better — the way families, communities and governments understand, include and care for people with disabilities. He’s learned how to be an ally of disabled peoples’ movements to assert their social, artistic, economic and political power.

When his daughter Liz was born, it didn’t take long for Al Etmanski to realize a fundamental truth: Liz’s Down Syndrome wasn’t going to stand in the way of her quality of life. Rather, society’s structures and attitudes towards disability would be the real deciding factor in his daughter’s ability to thrive. Since that moment, he’s been a tireless ally and advocate for “recognizing people with disabilities for who they are: authoritative sources on creativity, resilience, dealing with adversity, and living a good life.”

In 1989, Al and his wife, Vickie Cammack, co-founded the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network (PLAN) to help parents and primary caregivers create community-based estate and social plans for people with disabilities. Instead of focusing on programs and services, they asked, “What constitutes a ‘good’ life?” Then, they applied those pillars — relationships, home, choice, contribution, wealth — to every solution and innovation in their work.

The PLAN approach, versions of which have been adopted around the world, builds “Personal Networks” around people with disabilities, made up of people who share interests and commit to being part of each other’s lives. In 2008, Al led his team in establishing the world’s first Registered Disability Savings Plan (RDSP). Today, Canadian RDSP deposits totalling more than $4 billion collectively benefit hundreds of thousands of Canadians living with disabilities, and provide their parents and caregivers with peace of mind. Al and Vickie followed up by developing Tyze Personal Networks, an online tool to bring together communities of people around receivers of care.