TL;DR

On Canada Project’s Media arm (our flagship) launched in June 2020 by founder, and primary writer of OCP content, Samanta Krishnapillai, as a temporary solution to meet the needs of Canadians during COVID-19.

Krishnapillai saw a need for plainly and conversationally explained COVID-19 information that met people where they are (on social media) and invited more people to feel informed and empowered enough to protect themselves and others from COVID-19.

Samanta had no plans to grow and scale OCP, but something changed when she realized that the information gaps that existed around COVID-19, which prevented people from making informed choices for themselves and their loved ones, actually existed across so many topics and issues in Canada.

So while OCP started as a temporary solution to meet the needs of Canadians during the early days of COVID-19, we stayed because it was clear that need still wasn’t being met.

So Sam decided to scale it, bringing on a co-founder, Gina Uppal, to support it as a social enterprise - part independent edu-media and community hub, and part consulting studio.

Read our About Us here

Because of our unconventional approach to the work we do, our organization has never gotten a grant that we have applied to. So we are not government-funded.

We are registered as a business but operate as a social enterprise (Ontario does not have a category for it, so we had to pick the ‘business’ category).

A big part of the reason for this is so that we always retain editorial control as our human rights-centered approach to information sharing

Samanta and Gina’s salaries, in addition to the few project-based contract people we have on our team for client work, are paid from the work we do as a consulting hub - Good Trouble Studios

Because we’ve always done that, the world is hard right now, and we don’t have the resources to be the experts on every issue - hell, we’re barely experts on ourselves - so what always made the most sense to us.

How It Started:

On Canada Project launched in June 2020, to help spread evidence informed and easy to understand COVID-19 information. We were grassroots, volunteer driven and anything we had to pay for, was paid for out of pocket by founder Samanta.

During the height of lockdowns, there were a bunch of other COVID-19 Instagram accounts in Canada. That feeling of ‘competition’ (that stems from white supremacy culture) initially kicked in for Samanta, but she did the personal work to push past that.

Afterall, these other volunteer run accounts spreading information weren’t really the competition - disinformation, in adequate public systems and the virus were.

Within a couple of months, all these accounts started to organically connect with each other and by early 2021, there was a group chat that allowed them to touch base with each other and a monthly Zoom call to talk about what people were working on.

There was a shared understanding that we could all be our own individual organizations while also supporting each other. Some organizations were better at technically explaining an issue than our team was, so we would share their content to our stories. Our team was better with creating engaging content, so folks would amplify or repost us. There were even occasions where some or all of us, would work together on researching information, but would individually put our own spin on it for our socials - which cut our research time in half, allowed us to fact check, and still let us approach sharing the information in our own unique way.

This experience planted a seed in founder Samanta’s head while she also reflected on growing OCP into a sustainable social enterprise. Samanta wondered what it would look like to allow yourself the ability to be your own self, while still collaborating with others.

That’s where this idea for OCP Contributor came from. It’s taken some time to launch it, but the idea is to build with contributors while still allowing people to individually shine and own their way of presenting information, as long as they are aligned with our values.