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For his part, Brian Thompson, president of Summerside, PEI-based Vector Aerospace Services – Atlantic Inc., sees his company’s extensive corporate giving program as a strategic investment, not a handout. The firm, which specializes in aviation repair and overhaul, provides hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to hospitals, schools, post-secondary institutes and arts festivals in the province. “It comes from very sincere roots,” Thompson says. “We are a part of this community. So we have a real practical interest in helping to keep it vibrant, healthy and well-educated.”
He adds: “We look at several areas. Health and education are both key things we think are necessary. These are the building blocks of a community. Arts and culture are also very important. There is also a little bit of another kind of self-interest in that we attract people from outside of the province to work for us. So, anything we can do to enhance the liveability of our communities is naturally in our own best interest.”
To Barbara Stegemann, the real world ramification of her venture is nothing short of a better, more just, more humane planet. She says the idea for her perfume, Afghanistan Orange Blossom, stemmed partly from one of the thesis points in a book she wrote not long ago entitled The 7 Virtues of a Philosopher Queen, a personal treatise on living well and doing good. “In the book, I talk about the fact that women in North America own the buying power,” she says. “Every advertiser knows this. And yet one in five children live in poverty. We have war, we have genocide. We have to fix these things. I can’t expect others to do what I talk about in my book unless I’m practicing what I preach.”
In fact, it has taken her an astonishingly brief period of time (barely eight months) to move from concept to product sales. Now, she says the orders are flooding in, and Afghan suppliers are standing by to supply her with more oil at prices sufficient to make the switch from poppies worth their while. “I really started absolutely nowhere,” she laughs. “But as I always say, your network is your net worth. And we’re making networks half a world away. Now that I’m at the banquet, so to speak, I feel I have to bust the doors wide open for others.”
None of this may be welfare, as she insists it isn’t. Nevertheless, there is a giving heart at work. And like so many other business people in the Atlantic region these days, she’s deftly managed to enlist commerce as charity’s able ally.
