Today, we’re making some pretty exciting staffing announcements. Are you ready for this?
Valerie Fox is our new Acting Director of Social Enterprise!
With the incredible Jo Reynolds (our Director of Social Enterprise for the last 18 months) moving with her family to Kingston to join Queen’s University, we are excited to announce that Valerie Fox will be joining our team in the role of Acting Director of Social Enterprise. This is really exciting news for the community, as for those of you who don’t know her, Valerie co-founded the Digital Media Zone (DMZ) at Ryerson University, which was ranked North America’s number one university business incubator and number three in the world (UBI Global 2015). Last year, she started a new venture called The Pivotal Point, which helps build successful incubation models with corporations, academic institutions and regions, and brings communities of diverse skills together to collaborate, design and deliver impactful innovation. In addition to stewarding our impact and accelerators work and the many relationships that involves, Valerie is going to be working with the team and community to better understand its needs and how to leverage the assets within it to accelerate our collective success.
Barnabe Geis is the Manager of Impact & Accelerators!
For the last five years, Barnabe Geis has been an integral part of the CSI team, primarily in his role as CSI’s Communications Architect. Barnabe has worn every hat possible in the communications department, including being the creator/editor-in-chief of the Collider Magazine. An entrepreneur himself, it’s always been clear to Barnabe that communications was a tool for impact, and that his heart leaned more into the impact side of our work. Over the last year he’s played an increasingly important role in this area, working closely with Jo on developing our Soshent and Impact Dashboard products (more on that soon!), and exploring the creation of a potential Solutions Journalism media accelerator at CSI. In his new role, Barnabe will be co-designing and leading our various programs and products such as Agents of Change, CSI Hookup, Soshent, Catapult, the Impact Dashboard, our newly launched Business Model Innovation Accelerator, and other emerging programs. We are so excited to be able to promote from within, and know that Barnabe will bring the vigour and rigour needed to take your work to the next level.
The hugest of thank yous to Joanna for her many, many contributions to CSI, and for strengthening and elevating our programming and acceleration work. You will be dearly missed! And a huge congratulations to Barnabe and Valerie!
