Blog Post
This blog was authored by Chelsey MacNeil (CEO, The Purposeful Group) and Vanessa Paesani (Executive Director, UNB’s Pond-Deshpande Centre)
Atlantic Canada’s Defining Decade Starts With Us in the Room
In 2018, the federal government announced the Social Finance Fund, a landmark commitment to catalyzing new ways of financing community-driven change across the country. By May 2023, that $755 million was flowing through three fund managers, Realize Capital Partners, Boann Social Impact, and Fonds de finance sociale – CAP Finance, into intermediaries and social purpose organizations from coast to coast.
Atlantic Canada, with its four distinct provinces and deep regional identities, does not always find it easy to organize as one voice, even when the will to work together is there. To borrow from Gen Z language, sometimes it seems like Atlantic Canada is in a situationship: four provinces, one shared future, and a relationship we’re still figuring out how to define.
That challenge is exactly what Chelsey MacNeil and the Purposeful Group set out to answer. When Chelsey put up her hand and offered to host a convening on social finance as the Atlantic Social Impact Exchange, it became the first time in a long while that the region’s social impact sector came together as one.
Convening in Newfoundland and Labrador as part of pandemic recovery to discuss social finance in Atlantic Canada felt like just the beginning of something exciting.
Since then, I (Vanessa) have kept in touch with Chelsey to see about co-hosting the conference, but this time in New Brunswick. The world feels like it has changed a lot since 2023, and that’s why we at UNB’s Pond-Deshpande Centre are so excited to be collaborating with the Purposeful Group to be co-hosting the 2nd Atlantic Social Impact Exchange, this time in Dieppe on October 5-7th at the Centres des arts et de la culture.
We chose the Centre des arts because it sits at the crossroads of the Maritime provinces, in a community shaped by the vibrancy of Acadian culture. Over three days, we’ll dig into the policy, the culture, and the capital that this region needs to move forward together, because Atlantic Canada is standing at the start of its defining decade.
What that decade looks like, and what it will take to get there, is where I’ll hand things over to Chelsey.
Uncovered Momentum
I have spent years obsessed with how movements happen. How regular people become the catalysts of big change. The through-line is almost always the same: people saw a future different from the status quo, and they rallied. Against injustice, environmental degradation, the mistreatment of people, the misuse of resources, the fraying of our social safety nets. When I think about what it took to mobilize in those moments, the conditions look nothing like today’s. But one thing carries across all of them, and that is courage.
There are moments when you look around at your colleagues and think, this might be it. This might be the window for something to catch. And if you don’t work together, strategically, you can miss it. Worse, if we stay fragmented, we get ignored, because fragmentation is easier and less risky to engage with than a sector that speaks as one.
We are in one of those moments now. A national conversation is forming around economic sovereignty and community resilience, about keeping wealth and decisions closer to home. There is an opportunity right now to make sure communities are at the center of that sovereignty, not an afterthought to it. Our communities are the foundation of our economic and social systems. Atlantic Canada can help shape what comes next, or we can inherit whatever others decide.
This is a region where the institutions that carry this work are stretched thin. Small organizations, limited local capital, small governments doing a lot with a little. In conditions like that, effort spent in isolation is effort wasted. When each of us improvises on our own, treating each other’s work as competition rather than as part of the same push, we spend ourselves without getting anywhere.
We are positioned for change whether we like it or not, no matter how badly some of us want things to stay the same. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to stay close to what they know. It feels safe. But you don’t get transformation without change.
If we convene, coordinate, and engage stakeholders around shared hopes for our communities and our neighbours, then we have the kindling. What we need now is the spark. The spark is strategy. It is bringing our efforts together with coherence and intention, working in lockstep, where no single activity is treated as a threat but as part of a greater purpose. When the work is coordinated like that, I am genuinely excited about what this region can do.
This window will close. Right now we have a shot to shape Atlantic Canada’s defining decade. What’s at stake is whether we take it.
Come to the Atlantic Social Impact Exchange – we need all hands for this one.
