Subscribe: Spotify
Approximately 5 million people in Canada live in poverty. While many are fortunate to have a house to live in, they often lack the means to furnish it properly. That’s where Furniture Bank comes in. With a mission of breaking the cycle of furniture poverty, the organization redistributes furniture from donors to individuals struggling to make ends meet, including women and children leaving shelters, the formerly homeless, newcomers and refugees.
Since it launched 25 years ago, Furniture Bank has provided over 100,000 people with the gift of a furnished home. It’s also evolved significantly over those years, and today social enterprise is embedded into its mandate in impactful ways. To learn more, we speak with its fearless and innovative leader, Dan Kershaw – next.
Welcome to In the Business of Change where we speak with social entrepreneurs working on challenges in their communities and around the world. I’m your host Elisa Birnbaum, publisher & editor in chief of SEE Change Magazine.
On today’s episode we speak with Dan Kershaw, executive director of Furniture Bank. In our conversation, we discuss the issue of furniture poverty in communities across Canada and the uniquely innovative solutions the organization has adopted to tackle it. We then chat about the importance of seeing challenges as opportunity, leveraging corporate allies, and the many other lessons he and his team have learned along the way.
Listen. Learn. Enjoy. Share.