Last week I was on a whirlwind trip to Costa Rica. I’ve been sending volunteers to Costa Rica for years to work with ASVO- a local charity that supports conservation activities throughout the country. The program always made sense to me. Volunteers work along side biologists and park rangers to help support conservation activities in a country considered to be a world leader in biodiversity and conservation. What better way to learn from the best?
But I have to admit I was never terribly passionate about it. I care about the …

Last year we had a brutal cold spell (for Vancouver where winter usually stays above freezing). I wrote a blog post about it… I was carpooling with my family downtown and saw a man wearing a light coat with no blanket trying to sleep under an overpass. It was horrible. My reaction was quite simply to cry. I felt overwhelmed and compelled to do something. So I went out that morning and bought a blanket from a nearby store. When I went to deliver it to him, he was gone. …

I had an interesting talk with another entrepreneur this weekend. It centred around integrity in the work our organizations do. He said that sometimes you need to adapt your product to what the client wants. But what if in doing this I need to sway away from what I believe is good international community development?
My challenge is that students want to know exactly what they will be doing on the ground when they travel 6 to 9 months from now. When an organization is building a school or fixing up …

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)… Why is it that seemingly harmless words or phrases are somewhat tainted nowadays? In an ideal world a commitment to CSR would focus on all aspects of your business- from how you source and manufacture your product, to how you sell it. In reality CSR can many times mean a corporation continues to do exactly what it wants to do to improve the bottom line while dedicating a small amount of time to a charitable commitment.
What if we had the power to influence a company’s behaviour?
The …

We just posted some great photos of CASA Capilano University students Tess and Jess’s time in Ibanda, Uganda. Tess and Jess were the first of the CASA team to visit Ibanda. Their goal this summer was to get to know the community and see if they had a requested skill set to pass on to community members. Overwhelming the community partners requested learning basic computer skills.
For Canadian university students, this skill set was not a problem! So Tess and Jess armed themselves with some computer workshops that had been successfully …