Thank you very much.
I'm Vicki Saunders, founder of SheEO. Good afternoon. Bonjour.
I started SheEO. I'm just going to give a quick overview of SheEO, how we're dealing with what's happening with COVID and the opportunity going forward afterward.
For those of you who may not be familiar with our organization, we started in Canada five years ago, and we are a complete redo of venture capital. If you were starting all over again and it was designed by women, it would look 100% different from what it looks like currently in the world.
We designed and started this organization to solve the major challenge on the planet that 51% of the population gets 2.2% of the capital out there in the world. It is a global challenge, and it leaves us in a world that's designed mostly by men for men. There are just so many things missing from the existing world that we're living in. Structures and systems are so deeply biased, and that's not a future I want to live in, and so we're tackling this big challenge with SheEO.
We are women who come together in a pretty unique way. We have this model of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. Hundreds of women in each country come together and each contribute $1,100 as a gift. That money is pooled together and it's loaned out at 0% interest to women entrepreneurs who are working on the sustainable development goals with their businesses. Every business that we fund is majority woman-owned and woman-led, is working on the SDGs and has export potential in its business and revenue generating.
So far, we are in five countries with this model. We have exported it from Canada to the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and the U.K., and we have 70 countries around the world that have reached out to replicate this model. We provide 0%-interest loans to women entrepreneurs, who pay it back over five years, and then we loan that money out again. Instead of the economic model that we have in the world right now, under which people invest to get a 10X return, a huge return, and then hold onto that capital and accumulate it so that we have more and more inequality in the world, we have a model whereby women actually gift their capital forward and then they bring all of their other capital—their social capital, their buying power, their networks, their expertise and their influence—to help these businesses grow.
It's a pretty fun model to be part of. If you're an activator in our network, which is what we call you when you contribute capital, you vote for the ventures that you care about, so we have a 100% democratic selection process. We don't have some expert panel with all of the biases that come with it, some investment committee deciding on what's the hottest and latest; we have the intuition of hundreds of women deciding which ventures are creating incredible innovations to solve major challenges we're facing. Then we get behind them with everything we've got to help them grow.
This ecosystem-based approach has created unbelievable resilience in our network during COVID. We have not had a single business go down. We have funded 68 ventures; we have $5 million loaned out, and we have a 97% payback rate. As soon as COVID hit, one of the first things we did was to gather all of our ventures together globally, to get them all on a call and do a quick triage of red, yellow and green—how they were doing—and we put our resources into the ones that were in the red bucket right away, to help them.
These are things like the venture in Calgary that hires homeless people to do laundry for restaurants all across the city and pays them a living wage, an amazing model called Common Good. With the pandemic, 95% of their revenue was lost in the first day because all of the restaurants closed. She got onto the call—a bucket of tears, I have to say, and it was a really emotional moment—and said, “What am I going to do? I can't actually lay off homeless people during this moment. It's terrible,” and ventures in our network came together and said, “What do you need? How much is your payroll for this month?” and they loaned her money, so that she could get through and figure out how to pivot her business.
We have story after story like that across our network, of women coming together because—we call this whole thing radical generosity—we are here to support each other, and that day it was to figure out how we could make sure no one lost jobs and no businesses went down. It's a community commitment we made to do this, so I'm probably a bit of a good-news story of what's going on here. Part of the challenge, however, is that….
I've been thinking, I did a presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance a few weeks ago. I just found myself trying to find what was the simplest, easiest.... I know you have a million things on your plate. I'm so grateful that you're all in these rooms and not sleeping like the rest of the government officials that I know. I think you've done an unbelievable job during COVID.
If you just look at all the different possible things you can do, I would love to encourage all of you there today to please do whatever you can to solve this child care nightmare that we continue to live with every single year. This is one of the easiest things on the planet to solve. If women and men were at the table when we designed our structures, we would have solved this right up front because it's not a hard thing to solve.
Women who have children and are at home are in a world of pain. Women entrepreneurs are in a world of pain with this. What is happening during COVID is going to adversely affect women in so many different ways because people are having to decide whether they are going to keep their business or take care of their kids.
How do you deal with these issues?
The demand for these services is massive. We've noticed that our ventures are really struggling with this. With the number of relief mechanisms that the government has put forth.... For example, we have an amazing agricultural innovator out on the east coast. She's able to get a wage subsidy to hire somebody or to keep someone on her staff, but what she really needs is to be able to use that money for child care. She's not allowed to do that.
She can hire someone to do the job that she wants to do, but she can't actually hire someone to do child care. There are a lot of these biases built into these relief structures because we don't value unpaid care. We've monetized all of these different elements of our markets. I think this is the one thing that I would love to really focus on.
I also, on a go-forward basis, would love to see more focus, from a government perspective, on innovation being outside the tech space. This process innovation that we've created with SheEO of not just using financial capital to create jobs and economic prosperity, but also actually bringing all the other resources that we have in play—our influences, our networks and our expertise—leads to unbelievable outcomes.
I just want to share something very quickly. In the last year we have received women's entrepreneurship funding from Minister Ng's department to help us get this model scaled. In the last year, we created 276.4 jobs in Canada across our 27 ventures and through SheEO. We got $750,000 from the federal government. That is the equivalent of $2,164 per job that's being created. I'd love to see anyone try to match that in what we're doing.
Women are amazingly capital efficient. It's unbelievable. What we can do with a small amount of money is insane. When you are looking at other models and process innovations as you are out there looking at new economic models, I hope you will pay attention to SheEO going forward.
I have a little deck that I'm going to forward after it's translated into French.
Thank you very much.