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First, thank you for visiting my website!  And for taking another few minutes to learn more. I hope we find a reason to work together or connect! ​

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My Social Location

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I am a hyphenated Canadian, systemically privileged GenX, cis-het white woman originally from Northern Europe (Lübeck, Germany). I came to Canada as a child and am a modern-day settler living on treaty land (Treaty 13). My mother raised my sister and me. Various father figures-including our own--came and went. I left home at 17. I paid the bills by serving as a minimum waged worker, rock n' roll bar waitress, cleaning lady, dairy entrepreneur and artisan cheese maker, and for 18 years "worked my way up" (with the help of awesome mentors and people who believed in me) up the corporate executive in the publishing industry. I earned an EMBA at the University of Toronto. After a divorce, I spent 12 years experiencing life as a single mom. My life partner and muse today is a brilliant musician. I live with gratitude in one of Toronto's (tkaronto) most diverse (64% non-white) and fast-growing neighbourhoods (Etobicoke North). 

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My Worldview and Work

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If you work with me, you will learn I am a resourceful, creative quick study, and unpack the world via a distinctly Canadian intersectional, socialist, radical feminist lens. Professionally, I am a micro/small enterprise creator, advocate, leader, writer, plus strategic advisor, non-profit board director and university /public educator. Entrepreneurship, to me, has been a financial lifeline, a bottomless well for intellectual inquiry and personally, very transformative. Today, I work to explore and align entrepreneurship with dreams of liberation and post-growth and solidarity economics. My full profile can be downloaded here. 

 

My advocacy work is focused on driving systemic change for women, trans, and genderqueer people. I work with micro-entrepreneurs, design support programs and strengthen grassroots enterprise ecosystems because that is where transformative expressions of next-gen entrepreneurship, work-life relationship remaking and alternative economies are emerging--and thriving.  

 

It's also where alternative futures thinking, imagination, emergent strategy theory and practice collide. It's where we are free to explore, trial and error, what an inclusive, fair, flourishing-for-all 2063 society might look and feel like. It's where the bricks needed to build the road to a new world are forged. 

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I Believe

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Thus, the freedom to engage in enterprise work is fundamental to both individual and collective well-being. But capitalism, as a governing system of this instinct, is not. Thus, the questions that underline my work are: "What could our economy and entrepreneurship look like in a 21st-century post-capitalist, post-consumerist, post-patriarchal, post-colonial, post-white supremacy-based world? How can all entrepreneurs and small business owners (who make up the majority of our economy's base) conquer their own fears and system-generated traumas and increasingly align their work in ways that help to advance rather than hold back liberatory change? 

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Deep change can only happen from the bottom up and by fostering curiosity and authentic relationships with transformational movement work and communities.  

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My Practice

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I explore my questions in many ways. I read. A lot. I participate in diverse communities of practice. I try to learn and implement radical, new ideas into my own enterprise's operations and policies. I dream up alternative business models. I make collage art to try to visualize and imagine alternative worlds. I research and design radical, socialist feminist and post-growth informed alternative entrepreneurship workshops and programs, plus teach advanced entrepreneurship concepts as adjunct faculty at the University of Guelph.

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I manage and run a consulting practice called the Highwire Collective. We help entrepreneurship ecosystems better support activist, liberatory, and anti-capitalist entrepreneurs in their communities. 

 

And I also source, publish and write my own stories about feminist, liberatory and post-growth entrepreneurship for LiisBeth.com, rabble.ca and repost some of my stories on Medium so more people can find them. 

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The only social media platform I give time to is LinkedIn. If you want to hang out with other like-minded folks and me, I recommend joining the Feminist Enterprise Commons. Membership is approx. $200 CAD per year. 

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If you want to hear from me from time to time, subscribe to my Substack newsletter or magazine at www.liisbeth.com.

 

My Teachers
 

So many people have influenced my work. Only some are noted here.  I acknowledge that 90% of what I have learned is through reading or being in a community with others.  Yet, how I practice, interpret, add on or engage with shared wisdom and ideas is 100% the work of my own hands and resources.  

 

Favorite quotes:

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“Living is a creative act, with self-determined making or producing at its core. Colonized life is so intensely about consumption that the idea of making is reserved for artists at best and hobbies at worst. Making is not seen as the material basis for experiencing and influencing the world.” (p. 23)--Leanne Betsamosake Simpson, Indigenous writer, creator, from As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance

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"While men's revolutions have often been about dying for a cause, feminist conceived transformation is about daring to live for a cause." -Petra Kelly

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