Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Does achieving gender equality only benefit women? Are gender quotas thwarting meritocracy? Are women more risk averse than men? If you think you know the answers to these questions, then think again! Busted is an audio podcast series that busts prominent myths surrounding gender and the economy by teaming up with leading experts in the field. We uncover the origins of each myth and give you the tools to bust each myth yourself!
Busted is a GATE audio series production from the Institute for Gender and the Economy.
Entrepreneurship is an idea and it's a set of actions. It isn't about making money. It's about change making. It's about driving change. Be driven to change the systems around you.
Mick Elliott:And I would say that's really what it what entrepreneurship is all about.
Sonia Kang:What do you think of when you hear the word entrepreneur? For a lot of people, the same kind of image comes to mind. A founder, usually a man, who finds a gap in the market, builds something to fill it, and becomes incredibly wealthy, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. Today, we're gonna challenge that prototype and the idea that entrepreneurship is only about risk, innovation, and profit. Because for many people, especially those from marginalized communities, entrepreneurship is about much more than making money.
Sonia Kang:It's about community, liberation, autonomy, survival. We're gonna explore the concept of emancipatory entrepreneurship and what it can teach us about who entrepreneurship is really for and what can happen when it becomes more inclusive. I'm doctor Sonia Kang, academic director at GATE.
Carmina Ravanera:And I'm Carmina Ravanera, senior research associate at GATE. Welcome to season five of Busted, our podcast that debunks myths that hold back progress on equality. In our last episode, we focused on indigenous entrepreneurship. We heard about indigenous communities that have been creating sustainable and community focused businesses for thousands of years. This episode connects to that conversation, so make sure to check it out if you missed it.
Carmina Ravanera:Today, we'll challenge the idea that entrepreneurship is always profit driven by focusing instead on examples of emancipatory entrepreneurship, where people start businesses that confront systemic inequality and try to change them. We're going to focus specifically on queer and 2SLGBTQI plus communities.
Sonia Kang:So let's get into it. Who did you speak to for this episode?
Carmina Ravanera:I spoke to researchers Mick Elliott Keewatin and Doctor. Micah Rajunov. Both study entrepreneurship, especially among 2SLGBTQI plus communities. I'm excited to share their perspectives. I'll let them introduce themselves.
Mick Elliott:My name's Mick Elliott Keewatin I also go by Okamawatik, which is my spirit name that was gifted to me in ceremony. It means loosely tree of life or boss tree. I'm from the Okanese First Nation, which is Treaty 4 territory, just Northeast of Regina. I'm the inaugural Indigenous Business PhD candidate, ABD, at the Hoskins School of Business at the University of Calgary.
Mick Elliott:My research centres around institutional change, organizational change, how to make space for Indigenous peoples. I'm two spirit. So two spirit means in in many spaces, gay. But in an indigenous perspective, it's much, much different. So means we have two spirits, but there's actually many more spirits that I embody.
Mick Elliott:But in indigenous community, it means I can participate as a male or female roles. And so that's really important as part of my identity.
Micah Rajunov:So my name is Micah Rajanov. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Alberta. I've been working on the 2S LGBTQI plus Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, or the rainbow hub as we call it for about a year and a half. And we got a grant from the federal government through the Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce to build an entrepreneurship knowledge hub. And so we've started the project from the ground up asking, what is a knowledge hub?
Micah Rajunov:What are the needs of the community? My research overall focuses on work on the margins. I'm interested in how people find meaning in their work.
Carmina Ravanera:Micah's team has traveled across Canada to uncover unmet needs of queer communities and opportunities to fulfill them through entrepreneurship. So first, let's talk about how society usually thinks about entrepreneurship. I think it's often a pretty narrow perspective.
Micah Rajunov:When most people think about an entrepreneur, they imagine a risk taker spotting an opportunity in the market and creating a business to fill it. So this notion of traditional entrepreneurship in, you know, mainstream society and research even, it's very much focused on the individual who's raising funds or capital, and has a focus on growth and profit.
Sonia Kang:Right. So we usually just think of entrepreneurship as being about people finding market opportunities, and building a product or service to fill those gaps, hoping they'll be profitable. But what's emancipatory entrepreneurship?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, the term emancipatory entrepreneurship was coined by Violina Rindova, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at UC Irvine. Her research has uncovered examples of entrepreneurship that have brought about new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments for marginalized communities that can take on different meanings.
Micah Rajunov:So emancipatory entrepreneurship is a different idea that shifts the focus from the individual to the community, away from profit towards emancipation. Now, what do we mean by emancipation? We have breaking free from barriers and constraints. So, these constraints can be economic, lack of funding, access to capital, which is usually the focus of entrepreneurship, right? But we also consider social constraints like discrimination, and psychological constraints like lack of self confidence, for instance.
Micah Rajunov:The second part involves breaking up the systems that create those barriers in the first place. So this notion of, entrepreneurship as a path to broader systemic change and liberation. And obviously, the social context matters a lot. So for LGBTQ people, for other marginalized communities, entrepreneurship is often a response to discrimination in the traditional job market. You know, we've had our, you know, non discrimination laws, you think about them, they're really recent, like twenty, thirty years old, if that.
Micah Rajunov:So they've been really excluded from the mainstream labor market. And even today, there's either outright discrimination or just people feel like they don't fit in, you know, quiet microaggressions, not seeing yourself represented in the workforce. So entrepreneurship is not something that they go searching for as an opportunity in the market as making a profit. It's more of as a need. And this is where the idea of emancipation comes from, right?
Micah Rajunov:It's not just a need that they have, but it's a tool for autonomy, authenticity and liberation. So it's not just based on the idea of barriers people faced and removing the constraints. It's also identifying opportunities and resources. There's a very sort of positive side to this. Emancipation comes because it can be a path to autonomy, to identity, and more importantly, entrepreneurship as a path to changing the system by doing things differently.
Micah Rajunov:And I know we'll get more into that later, and I'll give some examples. But just to sort of preview it, something that came up a lot in my research for the Rainbow Hub is this idea of queer joy. So instead of focusing away from the hardship of the LGBT community, which we've been through a lot and are still going through a lot recent, especially with the recent political climate, it's this idea of celebration and celebrating our identity, celebrating our resilience, and celebrating the community.
Carmina Ravanera:I also learned from Mick that in some communities, emancipatory entrepreneurship is a response to barriers that block them from engaging with Western formal economies, barriers that just don't exist for people who don't face marginalization.
Mick Elliott:From the emancipatory perspective, in indigenous communities, particularly from two spirit folks, you know, when you're looking at profit and that move, In our spaces, you know, with racism and systemic racism and barriers, entering into an economic space that is neoliberal or western paradigms coming from our reserves and coming from these spaces, often it just isn't an option for us. So we're not driven necessarily by profit, although it is that is something that, you know, you need to survive, but we're often engaging in collective opportunities, something that matches our cultures, our ways. And so it's driven by, in many ways, survival. And so when we're engaging in spaces around us, our motivations to engage in the economy and participate in the spaces around us, the motivations are just much different. And if you look at a typical entrepreneurship model, which is often wealth maximization or exploiting market opportunities or individual individualized profit versus, you know, on the other side, I would say it's more about liberation from, you know, economic or social and or even institutional constraints, this alignment with that self determination or autonomy, and then the change.
Mick Elliott:We want to change the systems around us and change the economy so there's actually maybe an opportunity to look at what does an Indigenous economy look like around us? And can that be collective versus individual or even both? That emancipatory entrepreneurship really starts to play a different drumbeat, so to speak. From a two spirit perspective, how do I say this bluntly, there isn't room for us in the economy, you know, to be quite blunt. The colonization effect and religious push of some religions, not all, has created this negative space for us.
Mick Elliott:And that bluntly also has had some continuous impact because of residential schools and the assimilation policies, what have you within our communities. For some communities, it's more present than others. So it's often not safe. So I don't know that this is known, but Canada has one of the highest suicide rates globally and that's indigenous populations. And within that space, it's even higher for indigenous LGBTQ2S IIA plus But in that, we have our folks, and I mean, spirit LGBTQ, TIAA plus, they're reaching for entrepreneurship activities because that's how we survive.
Sonia Kang:So entrepreneurship is often about more than just profit. It can also be about individuals breaking down barriers and building new systems. And in oppressive environments, when there really aren't any other options, entrepreneurship can be a crucial tool survival. There's the collective aspect too. Entrepreneurship can create space for authenticity, autonomy, and liberation for entire groups, not just the one or two people who come up with an idea.
Sonia Kang:And it can generate amazing examples of how our systems can change for the better.
Carmina Ravanera:Exactly. And I learned about an example from Micah's research that showcases how entrepreneurship can go so far beyond just making a profit.
Micah Rajunov:One of the trips, we went to St. John's, and it was a really great and amazing and welcoming community, and I can't recommend it enough if you haven't been. And there I met an entrepreneur who had retired from her job in the Mounties. So she had never been out. And she suffered a lot of discrimination, obviously, invisible discrimination.
Micah Rajunov:She just felt she couldn't come out, couldn't be herself. And she had a lot of trauma from that job. So she retired, and she started woodworking just as a hobby. And then she started selling her products. And she was seeing a lot of success.
Micah Rajunov:And I think she doubled her sales year over year. She was selling her products at, you know, farmers markets, online, locally. And for her, it really exemplifies how entrepreneurship became a path to autonomy and to authenticity. And this was a place where she could really be herself. So, again, instead of focusing on profits and growth, which she was doing, she was being successful, she also does a lot for the community.
Micah Rajunov:So she told me she donates money and products to local charities, she mentors other queer entrepreneurs, she mentors youth, and she also explicitly wants to hire people from the queer community, and especially from the trans community, because she recognizes they face greater barriers to employment. And so this is part of doing things differently, and really being intentional, and it came up a lot. I think almost all the entrepreneurs I talked to were like, I want to make it a safe space. I want to hire people from marginalized groups. I want to give diversity training.
Micah Rajunov:Like, were very intentional and explicit about these things. And I have a great quote that I pulled up from someone call it, blending commerce with care.
Sonia Kang:That's a great example of how entrepreneurship can not only help someone break free from barriers, but also create the environments they wanna see in the world.
Carmina Ravanera:And Mick and Micah also shared examples of how communities themselves can work together to support emancipatory entrepreneurship.
Mick Elliott:Just even by example, if you look at an energy project or a renewable energy project by a community, you know, that generates revenue, which is an economic side. And then if you look at even putting a project together on our lands, that's assertion of our lands and our sovereignty over the project. And then you can have a language component attached to it, which is cultural, even a cultural match where it's not extracting hydrocarbons or tearing up the lands to do that. And then there's a whole relational aspect which brings Indigenous values to play within the whole project, which, and again, we have to look creatively at these projects. The driving force isn't that profit.
Mick Elliott:It's really looking at a holistic approach to what a project might look like.
Micah Rajunov:In St. John's, we visited the farmer's market. We talked to the executive director. We talked to the business owners at their stalls. And it's a a really interesting example because the farmers market makes it a point.
Micah Rajunov:They are so deliberate and so intentional in highlighting and giving opportunities to minority entrepreneurs. So they, you know, and what does this look like? I always hate when we talk about diversity, and it's very abstract and vague, and you really see these practices in a tangible way. So they make their stalls really accessible by putting it at a low price point. So, you know, entrepreneurs who are just starting their business can afford to put up a stall in the farmer's market.
Micah Rajunov:It's not excluding people. They also host quarterly focused markets, so like queer owned entrepreneurs, women owned, BIPOC owned. So they're really highlighting the kinds of businesses that minority entrepreneurs can create, and really giving them a dedicated space for them to, to display their products and to shine. And they also support the businesses to grow and establish themselves. And they're really proud of like, oh, this person started in this one little stall selling pancakes, and now they have like a brick and mortar restaurant, and they're doing amazing.
Micah Rajunov:And so they're really about giving these opportunities, to these entrepreneurs to to grow their business and highlighting them and not hiding their, you know, their status, like, we're very proud of having a queer market, and we're announcing it to people, but it's also about the products they sell. So in a way, this this farmer's market functions as a business incubator. They make sure that people who faces these systemic barriers actually get support they need to launch their business and to grow their business. And obviously, this creates a community. Right?
Micah Rajunov:It's not just one person giving opportunities to someone. It's the whole community, a whole farmer's market. Everyone knows everyone in in the the stalls. They help each other out. And so at the community level in St.
Micah Rajunov:John's, it was really just heartwarming, you know, everyone said, everyone shows up. Everyone shows up for everyone.
Sonia Kang:It's true that emancipatory entrepreneurship can emerge as a reaction to enduring hardship. But there are also stories about communities uplifting each other through entrepreneurship while building thriving, sustainable and ethical local economies. It's an important reminder that our economies could be very different. They could be organized to support communities, enable autonomy and allow people to pursue work that they're passionate about, while also creating meaningful livelihoods. It's a huge contrast to doing business in a way that puts profit, especially for the wealthy, above everything else.
Carmina Ravanera:Hearing about these examples is helpful for imagining a different and better future, especially in times that feel so unstable.
Sonia Kang:So what would we need to get there? What are some ways that policy or institutions could support emancipatory entrepreneurship?
Carmina Ravanera:Micah mentioned a few areas of policy that need immediate attention. One of them is the psychological barriers to entrepreneurship.
Micah Rajunov:There were some things that really consistently came up. And I think the biggest one, which is something that is very much not in mainstream research, and I don't think it's in policy, or it's in any of these traditional support organizations we think about, and it's psychological barriers. So LGBTQ entrepreneurs, marginalized groups in general, they've been through a lot, there's a lot of systemic discrimination, you know, outright or invisible. And their mental health suffers, there's a lot of trauma in the community, their self confidence might be low, there's fewer role models that see themselves represented as successful entrepreneurs. And so a lot of things that came up is we're a support organization, literacy training, we provide financial training.
Micah Rajunov:That's obviously super important, especially because a lot of these communities don't have access to, for instance, higher education. But they also make it a really big point to support the whole person so they recognize that life skills are just as important as technical ones. And consistently, if you found the biggest barrier was like self confidence, knowing you can do it. And that, again, comes from community support. It comes from mentorship.
Micah Rajunov:It comes from networking. And it comes from just building up this resilience.
Carmina Ravanera:There's also a clear need for collaboration between communities and organizations.
Micah Rajunov:A thing that came up was collaboration. So we talked to again, lot of support organizations, and sometimes these organizations, were in the same region, but they didn't talk to each other. So they are developing these resources independently, and they either don't know about each other, or they know about each other but just don't collaborate. There's also like local or regional chambers of commerce. I won't name any specifics, but in a lot of cases, some people felt included and some people felt excluded.
Micah Rajunov:So there's this notion of they don't invite everyone to the table. Let's say people don't get invitations to networking events, or they feel like they're, you know, don't belong. It's like, you know, all these white cis gay men, for instance, at a queer networking event. And so that excludes a big part of the queer community. So there's a lot of issues there around duplication and redundancy of resources, or resources that seem to fill the need of a community, but only fill the need of part of the community.
Carmina Ravanera:It's also important to recognize that the same policies won't work everywhere. Local communities are so different and they face different constraints.
Micah Rajunov:We went around to all these different regions and obviously it stood out each region is completely different. There's different resource constraints, there's different opportunities. We traveled to Vancouver, to Toronto, to Yellowknife in Northwest Territories, Whitehorse in Yukon, St. John's, Saskatchewan, Edmonton, Ottawa, Halifax, like, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. So I'll give a few examples because I think they're really illustrative of how like a nationwide policy change might not address everything.
Micah Rajunov:So in Vancouver, it's a big city, but people felt very isolated. It was actually really hard to get interviews. We to even find people to interview. Like, it's a huge city. You'd think we'd have a lot of access.
Micah Rajunov:But people felt really disconnected from resources. They didn't know about them. They felt they were hidden. They didn't know about each other. And then you have the opposite end, which is Toronto, another large city, arguably much larger, but there were too many resources.
Micah Rajunov:So you think that's great, but it was also a problem because people got information overload. They didn't know where to go, they didn't know which was right for them, they felt the queer community was too segregated in these like sub niches, and so they felt like there was too much going on. So you have these two like really large cities, and you think, oh, urban area, urban is going to be the same. And it's actually not, the needs are different. It's not a homogeneous problem.
Micah Rajunov:And then you have sort of the opposite end, which is these remote regions. You have Yukon and Northwest Territories, and they have obviously a whole different set of needs, in large part because of their geography. Right? So it's not just that they're rural, it's that they're really remote. So things like internet and groceries, things we might take for granted are actually really difficult logistical challenges.
Micah Rajunov:So if you're an entrepreneur, there's maybe one industry where you can work at, and that's it. There's like no opportunities. Or how do you how do you physically deliver a product when the postal service takes weeks to deliver? So these challenges that you might not think about when you're living in an urban area, I haven't talked about capital. I haven't talked about funding.
Micah Rajunov:I'm talking about different ways of doing business, different ways of relating to the community, and what businesses are needed in the community, what's most likely to succeed. How is the community going to interact with this business, how is it going to fit into the local economy. And there's just so many different regions and so many differences, and Canada is just so heterogeneous in how we can approach this. So a one and done, one fits all policy solution really won't work. It has to be about talking to the local community, local organizing, getting to know, what organizations there are there.
Sonia Kang:Right. So these kinds of programs are super important, but they can't be one size fits all. There are so many differences between regions and within communities themselves.
Carmina Ravanera:And looking at this from perspective, Mick pointed out that there are still huge gaps when it comes to emancipatory entrepreneurship for marginalized communities. Even in our own work at Gate, we saw how hard it is to actually find academic research on these issues.
Mick Elliott:Unfortunately, there isn't enough research being done on this. Know, I'm part of a group now that is looking at this and the research isn't happening. There's no research on this yet. And this really is a call to action. This must be researched.
Mick Elliott:There's no funding for it. There's just questions. There's no answers.
Sonia Kang:It's also true that emancipatory entrepreneurship hasn't really been a focus in business schools. And that matters because institutions play a huge role in shaping how we think about what entrepreneurship even is.
Mick Elliott:So I'm in a business school and I come for many, many, many, many years in big business, multinational corporations. And I say, we're not doing enough, first of all. Right? Our focus is on supporting the business. And and within business, we're looking at a very specific type of business and entrepreneurship that supports our business lines.
Mick Elliott:And so what I just spoke of, you know, it isn't looking at these niche things that are supporting the broader space of emancipatory entrepreneurship. You know, my specific type of research, which is institutional entrepreneurship, looking at institutional change, which looks at even idea entrepreneurship, right? Which really is like this causal thing of how do we change things to make room and space for folks, a new ideation, right, and make space for a different worldview so that we can have conversations like this quite openly and concisely and say, you know, when we introduce a new worldview that has been well, we try to eradicate indigenous peoples. I'm just saying the royal we. Right?
Mick Elliott:We try to eradicate indigenous peoples and worldviews. And now that we haven't been eradicated, how do we bring this worldview in without saying it's just token and just a brown face with the with it where the worldview isn't welcome. Business schools specifically have an opportunity that we're not imprinting onto the the minds of future business leaders. And until we have a bigger conversation, which I don't think is happening at business schools right now, and maybe it's we have to have conversations like we're having today, you know, where it is more about this broader interface and conversation, asking these big questions. How do we empower our future business leaders to think like this?
Mick Elliott:To think that it's about changing ideas, it's about changing organizations. Because if we continue to act and behave the way we are with this profit maximization and about the individual versus the collective, we see this consumptive behavior that's giving us this very big problem of global climate crisis. So at the end of the day, what I talk to students about is you need to be bold. We need to be different. We need to change challenge the system's ideas because that is all entrepreneurial thinking.
Sonia Kang:So let's bust this myth once and for all. If someone said to me, entrepreneurship is just about profit, what can I say to push back on that?
Carmina Ravanera:First off, you could point to historical examples. Entrepreneurship, especially within marginalized groups like 2SLGBTQI plus folks, has consistently been about community building and pushing for broader systemic change.
Micah Rajunov:What I found is, historically, LGBTQ businesses have been sites of commerce as much as community. So in the past, but also I'd say today, that still stands, LGBTQ entrepreneurs started businesses like bookstores, coffee houses, bars. And it wasn't about making money. It wasn't about, you know, a gap in the market, and I'm gonna grow and profit. It's about offering a safe space to gather and to create this community.
Micah Rajunov:And what's interesting about these spaces is that in many cases, they became really important sites for political organizing. So there, you know, we have the famous Stonewall Inn in New York, which started the riots, which started a whole political movement. So there's a lot also the Toronto bathhouse raid in 1981. There's Edmonton bathhouse raids. And so it was about making the queer community legitimate in the eyes of public society through these businesses.
Micah Rajunov:Right? So entrepreneurs really taking a stake and saying, we are we participate in the local economy. We are members of society. And at the same time, a lot of these places were sort of avenues for advocating for non discrimination rights in the workplace, non discrimination rights in the labor market. So business isn't all about profit.
Micah Rajunov:Again, this is a very good example at a broad level level of emancipatory entrepreneurship in the LGBT community.
Carmina Ravanera:And you could also flip the question, like what kind of world do we actually want to live in? Profit doesn't have to be the only goal. That's just what we're used to. What if instead we all thought about wealth and entrepreneurship in a different way?
Mick Elliott:First, I want to bring people back to remember, what does wealth really mean? Everyone ties this back to dollars and cents. But wealth actually means well-being. Right? So when we ground ourselves in that, and we really ground ourselves that wealth means well-being, that immediately changed our conversation.
Mick Elliott:And so the well-being of one another and the well-being of everything around us, our planet, right? We get what and what does success mean? It's about people, planet, profit, and you're not a cultural cultural match or what we do has to mean something to us and others. You know, it comes back to aligning with balance. Right?
Mick Elliott:And so as we have conversed about and we talked about, entrepreneurship is an idea and it's a set of actions. It isn't about making money. It's about change making. It's about driving change. And that isn't money.
Mick Elliott:Be driven to change the systems around you. And I would say that's really what it what entrepreneurship is all about. Being that agent of change. Step away from wealth as being profit and also link entrepreneurship as being a change maker.
Carmina Ravanera:In fact, Mick shared a great example. If we look at indigenous economies, have existed for thousands of years, we can see really different ways of thinking about entrepreneurship than what we're taught today.
Mick Elliott:We don't often talk a lot about indigenous economies, but they were they're millennia's old. Right? And they're rooted in the basics of giving to one another, thinking of one another. Right? And when when settlement and colonization began, we had the more intricate tax systems than Europeans did.
Mick Elliott:And it was baked into our ways of being, our ceremonies, the potlatch. Wealth was determined, or one's wealth within or position within society was determined not by how much you had, but how much you could give away. Right? Your status was that was your determination of the status within your society. What a difference we have now.
Mick Elliott:Right? I've sat with students and they've shared with me, know, I've asked them the question, what are you most worried about? And they're like, oh my gosh, the world's on fire, the oceans are rising, I can't get a home. You know, the everything's a mess. But everything that they learn and everything that we're being teaching, that we're teaching in schools is more of the same.
Mick Elliott:We have to break with what's going on around us. We have to engage this entrepreneurial spirit. And I revisit some of the things of old and say, I think we have to maybe look back to some of the Indigenous ways and think, maybe there's some stuff in there to revisit where it's more wisdom based. It's it's, you know, think about things versus just like hammering down what we've been doing. That's not working.
Mick Elliott:We have to shake it up. We have to engage in entrepreneurial spirit. We have to demand change.
Sonia Kang:And with that, this myth is busted. Make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. We'll be back soon with a new episode.
Carmina Ravanera:In the meantime, happy myth busting. This episode was made possible thanks to funding from Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce's 2SLGBTQI plus Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub with backing from the government of Canada. Gates Busted Podcast is also made possible by generous support from BMO. If you liked this episode, please rate and subscribe to Busted. You can also find more thought provoking podcasts from the Institute for Gender and the Economy by searching Gate Audio wherever you find your podcasts.
Carmina Ravanera:Thanks for tuning in.