Amanda Hachey Grabs the Reins of Social Change at NouLAB
When she first graduated from university, Amanda Hachey was on a very different path than she is now. Her younger self was naive and unaware of the world around her. As the new director of NouLAB, a social innovation lab that connects innovators to help find solutions to major social problems, much has changed for Hachey.
After studying at University of New Brunswick in Saint John and being involved in student government and community, Hachey ended up in Halifax. She found herself selling equipment with a photocopying company, which she found very unsatisfying, noting that she didn’t understand why she was selling things to people who didn’t really need them.
After contracting a travel bug, Hachey moved to Panama where she thought she would be starting up a chamber of commerce for small businesses, but ended up selling real estate to foreigners. After seeing morally questionable practices in her field, such as lack of concern for environmental impact assessments and restricting land access to locals, Hachey decided she wanted to do something that would help rather than harm.
“I think it was there that I could see that businesses can be very powerful,” Hachey says. “How can we not use it to be a force for good? I was starting to understand how things were connected and seeing things from a bigger picture.”
Hachey realized that if nonprofits and businesses could get together and adopt some of each other’s practices, they could get more done. Hachey completed a masters program in sustainability and organizational change in Sweden and came back to New Brunswick with an interest in helping facilitate change.
“I travelled around a lot and was feeling a little hypocritical with this mindset of wanting to change the world but never coming to New Brunswick where we needed help,” she says.
“I knew about NouLAB and don’t know that they could have created a position that’s better suited to what I like to do: to bring multi-stakeholder groups together to share different perspectives and help them see the system and not just their piece of the pie, to hopefully look at developing solutions that are sticky and not just these bandaid solutions that we tend to apply either because we’re forced to from a time constraint or because we don’t really have the full picture or we’re treating a symptom and not the real problem.”
Hachey says there are a lot of areas in New Brunswick that need attention, and that one of the most important pieces is to build a place that people are proud of and that attracts and retains people. For that to happen, she says there needs to be the right infrastructure and access to employment opportunities that are meaningful.
Hachey identifies areas where work needs to be done here such as gender equality, housing, and rural and urban relationships. She says New Brunswick is the perfect place to connect those who have ideas with those who can make change happen since there are so few degrees of separation here.
“We don’t tap into that and take advantage of it enough so I think if we have a facilitator of that process, which NouLAB could be, we could really try to solve some of those big issues we have,” she says.
“What really gets me jazzed, no matter what the topic, is helping people who are passionately working in these topics, whether it’s from the provincial government or the social sector or within a business or within a municipality, to bring them together to help facilitate a process so that they can start to see the opportunities and solutions to that problem.”
For Hachey to accomplish what she’s setting out to, she has to change the way businesses think and operate. She says businesses are beginning to move more towards understanding the impact they have beyond their own bottom line, but that there’s still a long way to go. She wants businesses to not only do the best thing for the environment and society, but to run smart so they’re ready for the future economy.
“It’s not just about giving money or donating or sponsoring different events or different programs, but it’s helping use some of the amazing human resources businesses have to help nonprofits learn better about managing their business or to help them understand better about communicating a message,” she says.
Hachey connects with these businesses by talking to owners and managers on a personal level. She often asks what’s keeping them up at night, what sort of difficulties they’re having with their business.
“A lot of times it’s attracting and hiring staff and retaining them,” she says. “More and more, staff want to work for a company that does good things and they can be proud of and they can take part in and feel like they’re a contributor to the community.”
Through NouLAB, Hachey wants to get at the heart of social problems by connecting innovators and conveying the message of social change in ways that make sense to them and are applicable to what they do.
“NouLAB will provide that deep dive with multi-stakeholder groups to identify what is the issue that we want to address and then prototype solutions,” Hachey says. “What’s the smallest thing we could do right now to address the actual problem that we’ve identified and if that doesn’t work we can pivot and iterate. It’s almost like applying a lean business principle to solving a big hairy problem.”