The Robertson Building

The Sage Centre (Suite 363) and its Ontario Project Manager Doug Kerr
are rather new additions to the Robertson Building community. After nine years with the United Way of Toronto, moving to 215 Spadina Ave., and a position where he will work primarily with virtual co-workers across the country, we thought Doug might be feeling a bit lonely up on the third floor. We hope that featuring him in our profile this month might help introduce and welcome him to our community. We encourage all of you introduce yourselves to Doug. We know you'll get along famously.

The Sage Centre was established five years ago in British Columbia as a sister organization to the Tides Canada Foundation (Suite 363), Canada's first national public foundation focusing on the environment, social justice, and innovation in the non-profit sector that connects donors with innovative projects. Both organizations recently opened Toronto offices at the Robertson Building and after only a few months on the job Doug is already busy fielding requests from a network of small organizations and independent groups interested in talking to him about how to get their ideas off the ground.

Sage represents a pretty unique model of organizational support acting as a structural backbone to emerging and new projects, or as Doug refers to it: "an umbrella for people with really good ideas. In essence Sage takes care of all the practical issues around finances, human resources, governance and infrastructure allowing the project leaders to spend their time working on the ideas. The projects must meet Sage's mandate of charitable activities with environmental and social sustainability objectives in order to be considered. As Doug explains: "Small is beautiful. Especially in Canada where we have so much diversity and so many emerging communities, we need organizations that are closer to the ground. So we work to support emerging charitable activities."

"One of the things that's exciting about this job is I get to work with a
lot of people with really great ideas who are trying to set up organizations or movements. It can be challenging because a lot of them think that the way to move forward in the non-profit world is to set up their own organization, which isn't always the case. So a lot of what I do is to show them there are different models and ways of achieving their goals." Clearly Sage is one such alternative model, but there are others and shedding some light on these choices is one of the things Doug is looking forward to working on. It's difficult right now, because there isn't really even language to talk about what Sage does, but the hope is that through example, Sage can influence the shape that organizations take in the
future and the nature of charity law, which is restrictive to innovative
models and in need of revisions.

It is clear that Doug is very passionate about what he does and as a
self-proclaimed "organization nerd" he is also well versed in the intricacies of organizational infrastructure. There are amazing organizations like Roots of Empathy (Suite 160) and Mary Gordon who is passionate, dedicated, and managed to form an organization that is working well. But that's not the best route for every initiative. Every day Doug encounters people doing really significant work who are struggling to find funding. This is the vital question in Doug's opinion and certainly central to his work at Sage; where do people who don't want to form an organization go to find funding?

With their new office in Toronto, Sage is extending their mission of project incubation for groups working on environmental and social sustainability issues to a new province. This holds some challenges for Doug, but he is
definitely up for it.
www.sagecentre.org