Mapping Canada's social services

Market Hunt

English - July 07, 2021 15:07 - 58 minutes - 54 MB
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Canada has hundreds of thousands of social services dedicated to helping its residents. Meet the company attempting to map them all.

Episode Guest: Dr. Alina Turner, Co-Founder and CEO, HelpSeeker.

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Questions or feedback on our episode? Get in touch with show host Thierry Harris: [email protected]

Episode Research Question:

HelpSeeker is having problems finding similar Social purposed AI companies. How can Certified B corporations better take advantage of venture capital markets?

Write to us at [email protected] and we'll post some of your answers on our website page.

Guest bio: Alina Turner

Alina is recognized as a leading researcher and thinker on social issues with proven implementation results. Her work on system planning is recognized as a leading practice and often called upon as a model across communities. Her drive and passion for this work is grounded in her lived experience of the social issues she continues to challenge in her professional work. Alina is a Fellow at The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary and serves on the Board of Directors for A Way Home Canada and the Alberta Rural Development Rural Advisory Board on housing and homelessness.

Alina co-founded HelpSeeker as a spin-off social enterprise dedicated to connecting people with the help they need, fast. The back-end of HelpSeeker provides service providers and decision-makers with real-time analytics to inform strategy and decision-making. HelpSeeker is fast becoming a system mapping tool across Canadian communities, essential to mapping and analyzing over 100,000 social and health resources nationally.

Working with the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and A Way Home Canada, Turner Strategies established the Systems Planning Collective - dedicated to building capacity nationally to implement systems approaches to prevent and end homelessness.

Alina has worked at an executive leadership level at both management and board of directors levels for the past 10 years. During her tenure as VP Strategy at the Calgary Homeless Foundation, Alina led the implementation of Canada’s first Homelessness Management Information System (HMIS) and designed Calgary’s Housing First System of Care. She oversaw $35 million in annual investments across 40 programs in Calgary, their performance management and quality assurance. Prior to this, Alina worked at the Poverty Reduction Initiative of the United Way of Calgary & Area, and a variety of front-line immigrant and homeless-serving agencies.

Episode Links:

Thierry Harris

Alina Turner

HelpSeeker

Mapping social services

Certified B Corporations

Digital Supercluster

Digital Supercluster’s Covid-19 related funding

Domestic violence Covid-19 Canada report

Food insecurity among seniors

Opioid crisis

Homelessness crisis