Sophia Horwitz
BA (Honours) IDS & Community Design, 2007
Director and founder at CoLab in Halifax
Since her years as an IDS undergraduate student, Sophia has cultivated a deep passion for community development, urban planning, sustainability and civic engagement. That passion has led her to become a social entrepreneur and to found ‘CoLab’, a successful collaboration laboratory based in Halifax.
Born and raised in Ottawa, Sophia moved to Halifax in 2003 to pursue a Bachelor’s (Honours) degree in IDS and Community Design. During her BA studies, she participated in the Cuba Exchange Program and conducted research in Havana for her thesis that compared the impact of social capital on community transformation in Cuban and Canadian neighbourhoods.
After graduation, Sophia started working as sustainability officer at the Nova Scotia Environmental Network, where she organized regional conferences and contributed to the formulation of grants and project proposals. As part of her role in the network, she travelled to Honduras and worked with the Honduran Committee for Action and Peace from August of 2007 to March of 2008.
Sophia collaborated with local organizations and female community leaders in vulnerable areas of the city of Tegucigalpa, promoting cooperative enterprise development and applying participatory methodologies for mapping and data collection.
The resourcefulness and creativity that she witnessed in Honduran communities inspired her to bring people together to catalyze social change in Canadian communities. “I had such a fire in me coming back [to Halifax], and I thought ‘people are doing so much with so little, we should be doing more here,’” Sophia recalls.
In May of 2008, she joined a project called ‘Cities & Environment Unit’, which offered resources for residents in Halifax who wanted to make change in their neighbourhoods and the city. As Project Development Coordinator, she applied many of the tools she learned in Cuba and Honduras to engage citizens in common causes, but she also learned the importance of systems thinking and effective partnerships with governmental institutions and other stakeholders.
In order to dive deeper into those issues, Sophia entered a Master’s of Science in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. She graduated in 2010, briefly worked in Turkey, took additional courses in the Netherlands and came back to Halifax by the end of the year, where she was selected for the position of Regional Coordinator at the Atlantic Council for Community and Social Enterprise (ACCSE).
While at ACCSE, Sophia started laying the foundations of her own organization. “I felt that I needed to start my own organization because there wasn't anyone doing the combination of things that I loved doing, and I thought it was needed,” says Sophia. In August of 2010 she founded ‘CoLab’, a collaboration laboratory based in Halifax that combines community resilience, public engagement, urban planning and sustainable development.
More than ten years have passed since CoLab was created and it has become a leading organization in Atlantic Canada, and it also has supported and carried out projects in Latin America and Europe. It has a core team of five social entrepreneurs as well as regular collaborators and partners, and it offers services such as social innovation and labs, leadership training and development, developmental evaluation, and stakeholder engagement.
Even though entrepreneurship can be a difficult path, the risks that Sophia took have paid off. CoLab has engaged around 15,000 people in its collaborative projects and events, and it has partnered with several public, private, non-profit, social, educational, and cooperative organisations. Some of its most recent projects include prototyping the ‘Participatory city’ model in Canada, in partnership with the Participatory City Foundation (UK) and the McConnell Foundation, and doing the public engagement for the new art gallery of Nova Scotia.
CoLab has also facilitated the RBC Sustainability Leadership Certificate at Dalhousie for the last six years, providing students with tools to lead change and address social, environmental and economic sustainability challenges.
Sophia, who is the director of CoLab, has come a long way to build a strong professional profile and extensive knowledge on strategic planning, sustainability, community development and project design. She says that one of the keys of her journey has been juggling the ‘balls of life’: “One is your contribution in life, the second one is your livelihood, and the third is your learning journey. We often sacrifice one ball for the other, (…) but we need to hold up a powerful question all the time and keep juggling the three balls.”
Her experience has equipped her to guide those students who feel unsure about their future professional path. She advises them to trust themselves and have meaningful conversations with people that inspire them. “You can’t always see what is in front of you. So much of the path is discovered as you walk it and you don't know where it is going to lead, but when you look back, all of the dots connect,” Sophia says.