Monday night a city staff report and recommendation to develop an approach to social procurement was passed by Peterborough City Council. Several community members spoke in favour of the report. Council passed the motion without further debate.
Last summer, Councillor Kemi Akapo sparked movement in this direction with a motion requesting city staff explore social purchasing and make a recommendation.
City council’s assent Monday night put the cap on the collected efforts of councillors, city staff, and community members to bring a powerful new practice for civil society development to our community.
Shout outs are due to council, city staff, and the newly formed Kawartha Social Economy Network, as is a nod to David LePage of Buy Social Canada whose visit here was catalytic.
It will take time to develop the purchasing framework, establish practices, and pilot a few different ways social procurement can be done.
With approaches like these, there is the possibility of stepping out of the pandemic and into a new social structure that is better than the one we might have to leave behind.
While those working on the procurement side lay this groundwork, there is plenty to do on the supply side, developing civil society and social enterprise capacity to deliver.
Together, these efforts could transform our community. If time can be taken, thanks to the Great Pause thrust upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic, to establish the groundwork for social procurement and enterprise, our local society could be made anew.
More and more whispers in the wind are suggesting that perhaps we will never go back to the way it was, and maybe it is best that we don’t.
At this moment in history we have before us the possibility of restructuring community, to break the bonds of colonial and power-over patterns, and to build side by side, communities that make better use of our resources, level the playing field, reduce barriers, and open space for all community members to contribute in ways that are meaningful to them.
Social procurement alongside civil society and social enterprise capacity is a practical process for natural partnering between anchor institutions, like the City of Peterborough, and social and green outcome-driven organizations.
In the early post-pandemic times to come, governments at all levels will be burdened with the costs incurred by pandemic response. Local and trans-local businesses will have been hard hit. Civil society organizations will likely have faced decrease in revenues and at the same time an increase in demands on their resources. There will be shock, grieving, loss, a need and opportunity for renewal. We will all be looking for new ways to collaborate more beautifully and for greater effectiveness, and to save money for the many new demands our systems will face.
Social procurement, and outcomes purchasing (more to come on this), together provide pathways for organizing a post-pandemic restructuring.
With approaches like these, there is the possibility of stepping out of the pandemic and into a new social structure that is better than the one we might have to leave behind.
An enlivened civil society, associational life, purpose driven enterprises, with revenue provided by social procurement emphasizing social and environmental goals, offer the architecture needed to flow these intentions and resources into generative forms.
More deeply democratic, locally grounded, asset-based, egalitarian, and empowering interactions are germane to these practices. As such, they are the beginning of distributing wealth and resources more equitably and for directly social purposes. No matter where you stand in the ecology, your contribution is suddenly more obviously available to you to make, and will have beneath its wings the suddenly more obvious contributions of all those others also present in the ecology.
This community decision to embrace and develop social procurement is, serendipitously, a well-timed step towards a more communitarian way of working together.
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