Taking our message to MaRS
The field of play for our main event at MaRS, Alan Gelberg of MaRS on right 
Bob Willard, top left, during one of the working group sessions 
Charmian Love of Volans as we wind down 
Someone’s left a paperclip 
Joeri (van den Steenhoven, top) and Aaron (Williamson, Value Web) finish up on the visuals
We’ll be posting more on the Volans website imminently, and including a report in our latest newsletter, but in headlines our first Breakthrough Canada events went wonderfully well. we started off with a CEO breakfast, introduced by Ilse Treurnicht, CEO of the MaRS Discovery District. And what an amazing place MaRS proved to be. But then our team member Char(mian) Love knew that already, having worked there as an intern some six years ago, before coming to Volans.
Later in the day, we swung into our first major Breakthrough Canada event, also held at MaRS. I will include a link here to the report-back when it’s available, but meanwhile huge thanks to Aaron Williamson (of our longstanding Breakthrough partners, The Value Web), and to all the others who helped the session take flight–including Ilse, who kicked it off. Among our other key partners in the event were the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), KPMG, Summerhill and two other key parts of MaRS–Social Innovation Generation (SiG) and the MaRS Solutions Lab.
Great to see a fair few people I knew at the sessions, including Nick Parker of the Cleantech Group, who Char and I had dinner with the previous evening, together with some of Nick’s friends. After the MaRS events, a group of us also went off to another wonderful dinner, hosted by Tim Draimin, Executive Director of of SiG. A different world from Colombia, a week or two back, but the sense of being at home–and of warm hospitality–has been very much the same.
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