Living in Wolfville is awesome.

Getting out of bed is never easy, but it’s a lot easier when you know you will head to the Wolfville Farmers’ Market to drink locally roasted coffee from Just Us! Coffee, listen to a variety of live music, inhale a fresh baked muffin, speak with farmers and value-added agriculture businesses, eat some fresh garlic-quark stuffed ravioli with maple caramelized onions from the Noodle Guy, and sample various Nova Scotia Wines.

Just one example of why Wolfville is a foodie mecca. We should tell more people about the epic “foodie-ness” of Wolfville.

Do you agree?

I read this article in Progress Magazine and I had to share it.

Sharing is a trend in business that is here to stay and will offer amazing opportunities for the effectiveness and efficiency of all business.

Mike Hayes, a 50-year-old entrepreneur from Halifax, is reinventing business as we know it. He believes the values of new media will soon permeate more traditional industries

I’ve never gone to a conference unprepared. I check the agenda, plan my time, review the attendee list, and set meetings in advance. But an “unconference” is different.

The event was Podcamp Halifax 2012, a gathering for people interested in social media, blogging, mobile, web design, and all the spaces in between. Speakers and attendees accept that the “law of two feet” prevails. Ready, set, go!

Like any other meeting, there is business development going on. But above all, the overarching principle is sharing. Everything from “techie advice” to the sharing of success stories and the motivation that “anyone can do it!”  The vibe was palpable, as the spirit was to help others in their quest to build businesses, social enterprises, NGOs, and personal brands.

Julien Smith, a 2012 keynote speaker, described how, at his first Podcamp, he learned about the process of experimentation, and this idea resonates as I absorb the day’s tips, tricks, ideas, and passions. The audience is supportive of first-time presenters and appreciative of authentic efforts to give of themselves.

Strangely, there is no charge to attend Podcamp. The costs are covered by a committed community and corporate sponsors who want to see the industry flourish. This principle and many others are found among the Podcamp rules:

1.  All attendees must be treated equally. Everyone is a rock star.

2.  All content created must be released under a Creative Commons license.

3.  All attendees must be allowed to participate.

4.  All sessions must obey the law of two feet.

5.  The event must be new media focused.

6.  The financials of a Podcamp must be fully disclosed.

I can remember a time when the concept of “knowledge is power” ruled the business world.  But after a day at Podcamp, I’m starting to understand the mantra of the new media community—share what you know—and wondering how soon sharing will become the future of business.

Today, my dear friend Ashley invited me to go to Brigadoon Village for a Eastlink community forum to represent students.

What is  Brigadoon Village:

We are the Brigadoon Children’s Camp Society. We are a non-profit organization that is going to build and manage Brigadoon – a year-round facility for residential camps for children and youth living with a chronic illness.

The camp is spectacular and the cabin architecture is really innovative with lots of natural light, solar power lights with motion and light detected sensors. Each cabin has a central room that has a high ceiling and has a polished cement floor for indoor activities-they are beautiful. David McKeage – Executive Director, informed us that they hold cooking classes for the chronically ill children and their parents. They also hold organization retreats, I am definitely going to look into that more. The food we had was amazing, tapas and finger foods, and beautifully presented.

I have to go back…I am lost for words…

I am not a fan of Press Releases, but I wanted to send it through Acadia University so I wrote my first one.  Edited by my friend Rebecca J. Let me know what you think:

Alex Cannon returned from a year abroad in Scotland. One day, as he was sitting trying to remember all of the awesome beer he had tried in Scotland and he thought “man, there should be an app for that.” About a month ago he approached me with designs and told me he was getting it developed. I jumped at the opportunity to help him launch that app and I have been working with Scott Hallam, Kyle Gosling, and Alex for over a month now.

Please let us know what you think, we hope you enjoy!

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For example, today, while I took a break to play Challenge Disc (a frisbee golf hybrid game), meet with a professor, and get a much needed haircut, I spent most of the day processing  meetings and planning my summer. I was so effective with my time, I even had time to test out a new drink with Just Us! Coffee Barista Mr. Bourassa–>Ginger Caramel Cappuccino.

From my experience, even if you feel like you have no time to “process,” do it anyway. In the end you will be more effective and save time.

Inspired by Invaluable by Dave Crenshaw, my father,  and a number of close friends.

Ginger Caramel Capp

Change is inevitable.

We see change every day in business and the rate at which it is happening is increasing. The speed at which organizations growing and the speed at which a organization can deliver a message is also increasing. Just look at the viral success of Facebook, KONY 2012, Pinterest, Justin Bieber, Volkswagon Darth Vadar Commercial etc. – the unexpected happens every day. The faster we can learn about what works today, the better chance of we have of emulating it and making our own efforts more successful.

I truly believe that the speed at which an organization learns is the only remaining competitive advantage. The speed at which an organization learns directly correlates with its ability to capture, store, and share knowledge. So I urge all organizations to encourage learning, wherever possible, and find a system that works to capture, store, and share knowledge.

Change is inevitable, so work with it, revel in it!

Inspired by Moneyball and Organizational Development at Acadia Business School

www.sendmetovienna.com/585-Duncan-Ebata.html

http://www.sendmetovienna.com/584-Matthew-Bourassa.html

It has been almost a month since our trip to coffee growing communities of  the Union of Indigenous Communities in the Isthmus Region (UCIRI) of Oaxaca, Mexico, with Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-operative Team. The objective of the trip was for our Just Us! team and investors to learn about the growing of coffee in the mountains and experience the culture of the indigenous people of the Oaxaca region. I learned a lot about sustainable living and sustainable business. I am incredibly grateful that Just Us! Coffee organized this trip and it will forever be a milestone in my life.

Here are a few pictures from the beginning of the trip.

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Education helps to understand, Experience solidifies your understanding

It is one thing to study and discuss sustainability with complex theoretical models, frameworks, and metrics, but when I was in a remote coffee growing and agricultural community experiencing true sustainable living, I finally began to understand it. My perspective on sustainable living and business has fundamentally shifted. In school, we learn about sustainability frameworks and models, we even talk about it as a system, but until you are experiencing sustainability within a system, I do not believe you can fully understand it. Part of the problem I believe, in Canada in particular, is that we lead such complex lives and we work to make them even more complex. Think for a second about all the products you consume in one day. Where do they come from? Who made them? If you ask a community member Chayotepec where the milk comes from, he’ll tell you, “the bottom of the hill where the cows are and insert farmer’s name lives.” Somehow we’ve lost our connection to where things come from in Canada. I find this most scary when it comes to food, but really it extends to all the products that we consume. I’ll stop my rant here and finish by saying, we can learn a lot from our small communities and from being outside and interacting with the earth. I believe sustainability within organizations and on an individual level is possible, it just requires simplifying the model, thinking globally, and acting locally.

Oaxaca, Mexico

The trip began when we flew into Mexico City and took a bus for 5 hours to Oaxaca. In Oaxaca, we visited Monte Alban (an ancient Zapotec settlement), toured the city, consumed delicious food and drink, perused local markets, and absorbed the culture. If you ever have the opportunity to visit Oaxaca, go! It’s amazing, Oaxaca has 7 different kinds of Mole- a delicious sauce of numerous spices and cacao, my mouth is watering just thinking about it. Oaxaca city is a beautiful array of southern Mexican culture and a foodie “mecca.”

Visiting Chayotepec

Following our visit to Oaxaca that we travelled to up the winding mountain to Chayotepec, a small coffee growing community of about 30-40 people, to learn about coffee growing, sustainable living, and community co-operation. We hiked various trails through the mountains and valleys, visited another amazing organic farming community, picked and processed coffee, and visited UCIRI- the first Fair Trade coffee co-op in the world. While at UCIRI we were fortunate enough to meet Frans Van der Hoff, often referred to as the “father of the fair trade movement.” He was incredibly inspiring and is very involved with refocusing fair trade on small farmers through the Small Producers Symbol and  CLAC (Coordinadora Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Pequenos Productores de Comercio Justo)(see http://justuscoffee.com/producers/new-initiatives)

Final Comments

I entered the trip with few expectations and only to gain life experience, what I didn’t realize was that I would gain so much professional development. I learned about co-ops structures, rural economic development, working together, effective sustainable living, sustainable organizations, and so much more. I could go on forever, but I am going to stop now. It was an incredible learning experience and will forever have a lasting impact on my life. I hope that you enjoy the photos that I’ve taken (see below) For a complete, day-by-day account of the trip, see my colleague and dear friend Kathy’s blog. http://justuscoffee.com/blog/mexico-trip-feb-2012-kathys-blog

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Inventor, Basketball Coach, and Executive Director of VANSDA, Robert Ffrench, approached me a few weeks ago to create a t-shirt for Shotloc.com, an amazing basketball training tool which is one of ten products endorsed by the NBA seal.

I collaborated with talented designer Spencer Creelman on this project and am very excited about the results. Check out his awesome design work at www.spencercreelman.com