Lisa & Alaina Make a Podcast! Here’s Why We’re Happy to Be Here

Written by Lisa Hrabluk

Best-selling author. Award-winning journalist. Purpose-led entrepreneur. Find me hanging out where culture, people and ideas collide.

July 16, 2020

This is the story of what happens when a former politician (Alaina) and a former newspaper journalist (me) walk into a coffee shop and somehow end up recording a podcast.

We were brought together by a mutual friend (hi Paula) because we both want to build purpose-led businesses that allow us to make a decent living, afford our daughters’ educations and help others chart a path towards greater sustainability, wealth and well-being for communities, companies and the planet we all call home.

Our podcast inspiration comes from another pair of women, Manoush Zomorodi and Jen Poyant, who created ZigZag. You should definitely check it out (and thanks to my friend Bill for telling me about it). They started out by asking this question; “is it possible for them to simultaneously be entrepreneurs, mission-driven journalists, and good mothers without falling off a financial cliff?”

Ho boy, that really spoke to me because that’s what I had been trying to do with Wicked Ideas, the company I started back in 2012 in an attempt to figure out a new path for telling public service journalism – the stories that helped people understand the bigger issues of the day in their communities so they could be active and informed citizens in our democratic system. It’s been a dipsy doodle existence, as the entrepreneurial journey often is, but it’s also introduced me to some amazing people. Like today’s guests.

I met Bojan Fürst almost two decades ago when we were young journalists who had landed in New Brunswick, me from Ontario and Bojan from Croatia, by way of some short stints at small papers in Canada. I stayed, he left for St. John’s, NL, where he has combined his photographer’s eye with a deep intellectual curiosity to delve into the culture and connections that drive local development, with a special interest in island communities. These days he’s the Knowledge Mobilization Manager for the Harris Centre at Memorial University.

Sarah White and I met on the shore of the Hudson River just over three years ago. We had both answered the call from fashion designer Eileen Fisher to gather the women founders and CEOs of BCorps together to talk about mission-driven business and how we could support each other in creating businesses that were forces for good. Sarah is the co-founder along with Denise Taschereau, of Fairware, a Vancouver-based company that supplies sustainable, eco-friendly, and ethically-sourced promotional products for companies such as Ben & Jerry’s, Hootsuite, MEC, Patagonia and Aveda.

To access out podcast on all the popular streaming platforms, click on over here.

Further Reading

Read the WeTheChange statement demanding justice and equity for black people and find out more about the women CEO and co-founders group that Lisa and Sarah helped to create.

Credits

A co-production of the Deep Change Network and Unsettled Media

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