Social Impact Authors: How & Why Madeleine Shaw of Aisle Is Helping To Change Our World

An Interview With Edward Sylvan

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Sometimes all we need is to know that someone believes in us, to ask for help from those around us, and to be willing to expand how we think about ourselves in order for our lived insights, skills and creativity to become viable ventures.

As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Madeleine Shaw.

Madeleine Shaw is a multiple award-winning social entrepreneur and author based on unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver BC). She is best known as the co-founder of Aisle (formerly Lunapads), one of the first groundbreaking ventures in the world to commercialize reusable menstrual care products, today a thriving industry. In 2014, she founded G Day, a national event series for tween girls and their supporters, and in 2017 she founded Nestworks, a family-friendly coworking community. In her upcoming first book, The Greater Good: Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World, she offers encouraging tips and reflections for aspiring impact-based entrepreneurs.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I am a white settler from unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver BC). My primary background experience prior to starting my first venture in 1993 at age 25 is as a social change activist. As a university student, I came to consciousness as a feminist and led multiple initiatives related to combating gender-based violence, which taught me a great deal about leadership. Wanting to make a positive difference has always motivated me, so becoming a social entrepreneur was not a tremendous leap, at least in terms of my core values.

When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?

I have always loved Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series. One of the stories — ‘The Garden’ — likely influenced me to become a gardener, my favourite hobby.

In the story, inspired by Frog’s beautiful garden, Toad decided that he also wants to grow a garden. Frog gives Toad some seeds but cautions him that gardening is hard work and takes time. Toad plants the seeds, however, is impatient and frustrated that they seem to be taking a long time to sprout, so resorts to all manner of hilarious ways — including playing music and shouting — to try to hurry the seeds along. Finally, exhausted by his efforts, he collapses into sleep, only to wake up to find that the seeds have finally sprouted.

I love this because the power of natural cycles has always intrigued me, and I believe that they are an excellent model as we consider ways to create regenerative ventures and practices. Toad’s behaviour also calls to mind today’s entrepreneurial hustle culture and how flawed the expectation of hyper-fast, exponential growth is.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?

At Aisle, we have a practice that goes back to 2000 of supporting menstrual health and equity initiatives in the Global South. Early in the journey, our thinking was to donate our washable cloth pads as a way to address the issue of girls missing school due to lack of access to menstrual care supplies. As it turned out, the girls were not initially able to use the pads, due to the fact that they did not have underwear. I now understand that this type of well-intentioned oversight was due to a lack of awareness of social privilege and assuming that we understood the girls’ lives and needs when clearly we did not. It was a valuable lesson in how good intentions — when not paired with self-awareness — can lead to unintended and potentially less-than-helpful results. Following that insight, we began to take a great deal more care in gathering feedback and information about user needs and social circumstances before trying to help.

Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?

I am hoping to mobilize a ‘silent majority’ of potential leaders whose identities fall outside of the stereotypical profile of a white cisgender male, tech-focused, scale-driven leader. I believe that thanks to prevalent media storytelling about this one persistent type of person, a lot of others who do not identify this way — women, Indigenous and other People of Colour among others — are perhaps not as likely to think of themselves as entrepreneurs, or the types of ventures that they want to create as important or valuable. I want to change this by sharing the stories of over 2 dozen of my colleagues who are diverse individuals creating impact-focused ventures of all sizes, both for and non-profit. Imagine for a moment if everyone felt empowered, resourced and supported to take steps to create a positive social change of any scale in their lives and communities — that’s what I’m after.

Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?

It’s really hard to pick just one! One of the most meaningful stories to me is tracing the relationship between Aisle (formerly Lunapads, one of the first companies in the world to commercialize reusable menstrual care products) and AFRIpads, a Ugandan venture inspired by it, that launched in 2008. The short story is that the AFRIpads founders came across some Lunapads that had been brought to Uganda by a Canadian volunteer and decided to start a business and create their own versions of the pads there.

They reached out to my business partner and me to ask us how we felt about their idea, and we immediately got on board to support them and mentor their startup. Since then, we have collaborated on dozens of projects and Aisle even became a shareholder in AFRIpads in 2013. AFRIpads has grown to employ over 200 people and their products have reached over 5 million girls.

It has never ceased to move and amaze me how an idea that I had in the early 90s and that was for years met with skepticism and even disgust, became the inspiration for a wildly successful venture that has meaningfully improved lives in a completely different context. The message is essential that when you act with trust and integrity without feeling the need to control or have ownership over a particular idea, wonderful things can happen that you never anticipated.

What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?

Writing a book has been a ‘bucket list’ item of mine for many years, however, I finally decided to take the leap when Covid hit. It seemed like a perfect time to stay focused while also being excited about the opportunity for a better world to emerge following so much destruction. I feel like — because of Covid — many of us are having a collective “If not me, who? If not now, when?” moment, where we are asking ourselves if our career choices are in line with our values, where we are thinking seriously about issues like climate change and racial justice and what we can each do individually to make the world a better place.

Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?

One of the entrepreneurs who shared their story and wisdom with me for the book is someone I happened to meet in the earliest days of starting her venture. She had created a wonderful natural product in response to a health issue that her baby was having, and was starting to share it with other parents in social media groups.

At the time, she did not see herself as an entrepreneur, but rather “just” a Mom who wanted to help her child. I strongly encouraged her to commercialize the product and helped her to find resources and community and today the product has made a positive difference for thousands of people and she is incredibly successful. Sometimes all we need is to know that someone believes in us, to ask for help from those around us, and to be willing to expand how we think about ourselves in order for our lived insights, skills and creativity to become viable ventures.

Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?

I would like for us collectively to redefine who we see as entrepreneurs. As I have detailed, our culture is obsessed with the likes of Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who have outrageously large visions. What about someone in your neighbourhood who organizes something as humble as a local lending library or community fridge? I see their initiatives as equally important and heroic, and yet those stories are less seldom told. Further to this point, it’s also high time for a more socially inclusive picture of who entrepreneurs are.

Along similar lines, I also have an issue with how scale — in a business sense — is defined and valorized. We have come to a place where a venture’s ability to rapidly scale (the famous ‘hockey stick’ growth curve) is prized above profitability, with disastrous results (think WeWork). ‘Scale’ in this sense is extremely limited and defined as simply being about top-line growth (funds raised, sales, customers acquired), and never include anything like sustainability or social impact metrics. I would like to advocate for a slower, broader definition of scale — and therefore success — that includes social and environmental impact, which I call Radiance.

I believe that we need to re-think the entire purpose of capitalism. With climate change rapidly closing in on us, is it not time to place addressing it as a core purpose of all enterprises? If we are capable of funding and developing private space travel, for example, surely this magnitude of capital and ingenuity can be deployed to solving urgent social and environmental issues closer to home?

How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?

I define leadership as taking action on any scale to create impact. One of the common misperceptions that I see about entrepreneurial leadership is that it needs to be ‘disruptive’ and that our initiatives need to be ‘scalable’ from a financial perspective. The examples that I cited earlier of creating a lending library or community fridge in your neighbourhood. These small, local acts are the ‘seedlings’ of a forest of social change. If everyone undertook even the smallest project to improve their communities, imagine the aggregate change that this would create. Leadership to me is about people being willing to go a bit outside their comfort levels, to take a bit of risk to do something for the greater good.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.

I wish that someone had told me that making change is not necessarily as straightforward as I had believed. You know the adage that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? Particularly as it pertains to leaders carrying social privilege. We need to be extremely mindful of this as we create our ventures, and ask ourselves questions like: What are my motivations? Am I actually doing good? How am I measuring my impact? How are the beneficiaries that I am seeking to serve being represented in this transaction?

I also had no way of knowing that creating a successful enterprise (‘successful’ being having a meaningful, verifiable benefit to your constituents, being financially sustainable and being manageable from a work/life balance perspective for its leadership and team members) of any variety is a massive challenge. Doing it while doing the additional work required to — for example — maintain an ethical supply chain, obtain certifications associated with sustainability, taking the time and doing the research required to assure transparency, etc — adds a whole other level of challenge.

I am to an extent a victim of my idealism, which I could have used some advice about starting in around 2015 or so. As an early groundbreaking innovator in the menstrual health space that in the early 1990s was comprised of only the most dedicated, mission-driven leaders committed to working against a prevailing lack of market acceptance for our products and ideas, I assumed that as the market began to grow, that it would continue to be defined by sustainable products and ethical business practices.

Alas, old-school business practices, drawn by a new opportunity for profit, headlines and market share, are increasingly showing up in our space. What this looks like are hyper-competitive, growth-at-all-costs strategies that lead to fast fashion manufacturing, questionable performance and sustainability claims and unethical human resources practices. It’s disappointing to see the same-old, same-old business practices showing up in a space that has the opportunity to reinvent the paradigm if we remain committed to impact as our primary objective.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I have always loved the A.A. Milne quote from Winnie-the-Pooh, “You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” This feels like an excellent pick for ‘everyday’ social entrepreneurs because we tend to underestimate ourselves. It’s amazing what can happen when you start to tell yourself a different story about what’s possible and what you’re capable of. Everything that we see around us — all of the structures and systems — were made up by somebody. If we want them to be different, we are equally capable of imagining and creating something new and better.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

I am a huge admirer of Arlan Hamilton, a leading innovator in the inclusive venture capital space. She is the author of It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage, a book that I recommend to anyone, especially aspiring entrepreneurs who may be struggling with self-doubt or Impostor Syndrome. She is living proof of the argument that I make in my book: that “underestimated” (who I call ‘everyday’) leaders are those with the most vital ideas in today’s world.

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!

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Authority Magazine
Authority Magazine

Published in Authority Magazine

In-depth Interviews with Authorities in Business, Pop Culture, Wellness, Social Impact, and Tech. We use interviews to draw out stories that are both empowering and actionable.

Edward Sylvan CEO of Sycamore Entertainment Group.
Edward Sylvan CEO of Sycamore Entertainment Group.

Written by Edward Sylvan CEO of Sycamore Entertainment Group.

Edward Sylvan is an Entrepreneur and CEO of Sycamore Entertainment Group Inc. and SEGI TV, a streaming app that showcases niche Film, TV and live sports.

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