We’re excited today to announce two of Vancouver’s most prominent mission-based consultancies are joining forces!

Octopus Strategies is Swimming into a Merger with Junxion Strategy!

Octopus Strategies has earned a reputation for values-driven leadership, award-winning marketing, and the development of leading brands for a long list of remarkable social enterprises and NGOs.

Junxion Strategy has long been respected for its diligent mission to build environmentally and socially responsible organizations—in both the business and not-for-profit sectors.

Each firm has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades, including Octopus’s recognition this year among Think London’s ‘100 Companies to Watch,’ a list compiled by London’s foreign direct investment agency to recognize companies they think are “most likely to grow and flourish in the global economy.” Octopus was named in a category that also included Panasonic and LinkedIn.

“This already has been an incredible year for us,” explained Mike Rowlands, Founder & President of Octopus Strategies. “By uniting with Junxion Strategy, we’ll accelerate our growth, expand our reach and position ourselves to deliver an even greater impact with our work.”

Peter ter Weeme, Junxion Principal, agreed: “Together, we provide an incredible resource for leaders of 21st century organizations that are wrestling to achieve financial, social and environmental goals. The reality is that leading brands and enterprises in the years to come must be responsible to all three.”

By combining our companies, Octopus and Junxion are solidifying a powerful suite of services designed to help drive the successful brands, organizations and movements of the 21st century:

• Social Purpose consulting, to support the social enterprise and corporate social responsibility movements
• Sustainability strategy, to help organizations adapt to environmental imperatives that really can no longer be denied
• Outreach & Engagement, to help organizations of all kinds to market their products and services, develop donors, and build loyal followings

With a combination of offices in Vancouver, Toronto, London and Delhi, we unite world-class expertise and experience with a significant international reach. The new company will operate as Junxion Strategy.

We look forward to sharing more insights in the coming months, as we merge our operations… and announce more great news!

Octopus Strategies is growing, and we’re looking for an experienced brand strategist to join our London office’s client-facing team. This individual will play a lead role on brand and communication consulting projects, and support the firm’s principals on larger, international engagements.

The ideal candidate will bring a strategic mindset, a passion for the emerging trends of social business, and at least three years direct experience leading brand and communication strategy projects. They will build positive and productive engagement teams, adapting project processes, while maintaining our core methodology, and upholding our values-driven approach.

View the full job description here.

Octopus Strategies is growing, and we’re looking for an experienced brand strategist to join our Vancouver office’s client-facing team. This individual will play a lead role on brand and communication consulting projects, and support the firm’s principals on larger, international engagements.

The ideal candidate will bring a strategic mindset, a passion for the emerging trends of social business, and at least three years direct experience leading brand and communication strategy projects. They will build positive and productive engagement teams, adapting project processes, while maintaining our core methodology, and upholding our values-driven approach.

View the full job description here.

On Friday morning, July 29, W2 Media Café will open for business. This marks the end of an eight year journey to establish this important new social enterprise.

Part cafe, part gallery, part immersion in global electronica, W2 is an internationally connected media arts centre. What appears at first as a coffee shop par excellence is but the first step into an ambitious organization.

W2 Media Café is a euro-styled coffee house experience—a large scale space that has already begun to host and curate diverse social and cultural activity. On this weekend alone, W2 will play host to a Pride World Dance Party, an Artist Talk & Presentation by Pia Massie, and the launch of the Surge Festival of Urban Digital Culture. The café itself is an open, modern and welcoming space, where people can connect with stories, art, ideas and each other. (And fabulous coffee and food, or course!)

W2 will engage people from throughout its Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, and from other communities across the city. Local residents will be able to access media and arts tools and support, to discover compelling arts experiences, to decide for themselves the programming W2 will deliver—co-creating the centre’s work. Some of the anticipated programs include instruction in social and digital media; a micro-enterprise incubator, where aspiring social entrepreneurs can learn from experienced mentors; access to the ideas and work of artists who will take up residence at W2 from time to time; and training and access to a letter press machine that once belonged to the Woodwards store.

W2 is located where the renowned Woodwards store used to stand. Vancouverites tend to associate Woodwards either with the great shopping experiences of the 70s and 80s, or with Woodsquat, the activist occupancy of Woodwards, in protest of housing policies and programs in the Downtown Eastside. W2 Media Café sits today at a symbolic meeting point—where Vancouver’s world class waterfront meets the working class neighbourhood that’s so significantly misunderstood by so many Vancouver residents.

W2 is determined to address some of these misunderstandings, and to bring people and communities together. Today is the beginning of another important chapter in W2. Why not join us there for a cup of coffee and a conversation about the city we all love?

Octopus Strategies has been proud to work with W2 during the past few months, in the leadup to this opening. We heartily congratulate the team for all their hard work, their perseverance, and for holding so closely to the intent of the collaborative that formed eight years ago to achieve the vision that today is opening its doors to the city.

During the recent hockey-disappointment-induced riots in Vancouver, Canada, and in the days that followed, the transparency and rapid news dissemination capabilities of social media were made abundantly apparent.

As the riot itself unfolded on live television, the riot’s instigators and youth caught up in the fray made countless posts to Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, recording and documenting their activities. Some of the images they posted were bizarrely compelling; others were undoubtedly evidence of criminal activity. (The ‘social media vigilantism’ of the following week has also been an interesting topic of vibrant discussion.) News of the riot quickly spread around the world, making cover stories in Australia, India and elsewhere. Vancouverites collectively hung their heads in shame that their fair city—which had received accolades for its positive celebrations during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games just 12 months before—should again showcase an ugly side.

Yet at the same time as the riot was unfolding, so too was the Clean Up Vancouver campaign. Launched on the night of the riots on Facebook, this simple campaign invited positive Vancouverites to come downtown the following morning to help clean up after their not-so-positive fellow citizens. By 7:00am, hundreds of people were downtown with brooms and dustpans; by noon, some reports suggested more than 10,000 had joined the Clean Up. Plywood boarding over the broken windows of one major retailer became the ‘Love Wall,’ on which people wrote messages of apology and respect.

This Jekyll and Hyde capacity of social media is both powerful and puzzling. It’s powerful in its capacity to rally thousands of people to positive action. Yet, it’s puzzling, because it as easily can be used to drive disruption. However and organization might choose to use social media and its unparalleled reach, posts and other content are there forever, for anyone to see. And it is precisely this unprecedented transparency that gives organizations pause. Should we open up?

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Mass urbanization around the world will see hundreds of millions of people flocking to the world’s cities in the coming decades. Already enormous cities like Delhi, Beijing, Mexico City and others are swelling by staggering proportions, and the stresses on infrastructure, the environment and social programs will be extraordinarily hard to manage.

Demands on non-profits and social service agencies are already overwhelming capacity. And those demands will soar in the coming decade as people migrate to urban centres looking for work.

The complexities inherent in these new population dynamics and their consequent social impacts are difficult to fathom. As with any other complex problems, smart practices will allow for effective solutions to emerge. One of those is the development of social enterprise, a nascent, but growing sector that in some pockets is even outperforming traditional commercial business. Already recognized as an important part of the ‘Third Sector’ in the UK, and flashing on to the policy radars of governments across North America, social enterprise is a useful alternative to charitable fundraising for many NGOs and not-for-profit organizations.

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