Who Are We
The Conscious Collective is a social advocacy organization that was born from years of trying to make ethical corporate gifting easier for large organizations. Our mission is to create a trusted online community that introduces corporate gift buyers to local, unique, diversely-led, sustainable and ethical makers. We celebrate our clients who "Gift on purpose" and instill meaning into their client and employee gifting experience.
Our Growing Community
Small and minority led businesses are representative of our communities. Strengthening these voices are good for our democracy. Larger corporations have the budgets and ESG mandates to diversify their supply chains and support small and minority-led businesses; but procurement and compliance departments don’t make it easy. We want to make it easy for big corps to source their employee and client gifts from small local makers. It’s a great start to economic equality.
The Conscious Collective is an Upside Foundation Pledge Member and donates 1% of profit to social and environmental impact charities.
Meet Melissa, Our Founder
I grew up in a very diverse part of Toronto. Along with the likes of Maestro Fresh Wes, Mike Myers, The Weeknd and Fefe Dobson (to name a few), Scarborough was my happy place until I went to university. And although I’ve never had the pleasure of speaking with any of these celebrities (with the exception of Wes a few times), I’m confident they’d agree, that it was an awesome place to grow up.
As a white female (with Portuguese immigrant parents), I had the privilege of growing up in an environment that was culturally, racially and socio-economically diverse. Whether my peers were Caribbean, Armenian, Filipino, Chinese or Indian; bringing all kinds of different norms and behaviours; the thread that tied us all together was the experience of the immigrant family.
With the exception of only a few families, I was surrounded by kids who were either immigrants or, like me, children of immigrants. These good people, not unlike the small business leaders we are looking to support, were hard at work building a better future for their families and fulfilling their dreams. In retrospect, this community was the epitome of the Mosaic that Canada was aiming for and I'm so grateful to have been, and continue to be, a part of it.
This background, paired with my 20 years in corporate marketing, sales and service roles with the likes of Salesforce, Oracle and TD Bank, has led me to believe that we CAN make the world a better place by being conscious about where we spend our time and money. If we support primarily ethical and diversely-led small companies, it will have a ripple effect.
Then, as I did sales and tech consulting for a small corporate gifting company, I fell in love. Gifts are such a powerful communication medium and is a big enough industry to make an important impact; not only in socio economic and environmental realms, but also to improve brand messaging and employee rentention.
But buying from small makers is a challenge for large corporations. The Conscious Collective aims to be a trusted source and make it EASY.
I'm SO excited about making this community a reality. I would love to hear from you if you are interested in joining the movement to evolve corporate gifting. Let's be the change and make some dreams come true.
