"Every business could be a social enterprise if they wanted it badly enough." – Lauren Edwards

Lauren Edwards has spent her career helping businesses stop treating "doing good" as an afterthought, and start building it into the core of how they operate.

As Executive Director of SeaChange and owner of NextStep Business Consulting, Lauren works with entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and corporations to prove that profit and purpose don’t have to be in tension.

In this conversation, we dig into what social enterprise actually means (and why the label matters less than the intention), why nonprofits and for-profits are both constrained by broken systems, and how trust (and the lack of it) shapes everything from wage gaps to public policy.

We also cover:

• What defines a social enterprise (and what doesn’t)

• How profit and impact collide, and how to navigate those moments honestly

• Practical models for values-led businesses (B Corps, benefit corporations, worker ownership, revenue sharing, and more)

• Why "shop social" can matter as much as shop local

• What it looks like to show up ethically when no one is watching

This episode was a beautiful reminder to us that how we structure our business is one of the loudest ways we can show up in the world.

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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a messaging co-op that gives a flying duck. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long-term strategy: if you want your brand, offers, and experience to tell the same story, we can help.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

• (00:00:00) - Flying The Coop: Lauren Edwards
• (00:01:03) - What's a Social Enterprise?
• (00:03:25) - Double-Bottom Line
• (00:05:26) - Social Entrepreneurs: Profit and Purpose
• (00:08:13) - The Case for Social Enterprise
• (00:11:47) - The Fight for Higher Taxes
• (00:17:35) - Shop Social: How to Support Social Enterprise Companies
• (00:20:18) - The Importance of Choosing Your Own Money
• (00:23:08) - The role of individuals in fighting climate change
• (00:26:31) - Give More to Nonprofits: We Need a Business Model
• (00:30:30) - Five Ways to Do Good While Starting a Business
• (00:36:44) - Local Businesses to Support
• (00:37:19) - The role of trust in our society
• (00:42:15) - The Value of Communication
• (00:44:43) - SeaChange: Celebrating Social Enterprise's 10th Anniversary
• (00:46:25) - Flipping The Coop

“Capitalism is all about squeezing every last bit of value you can… and what we are trying to do is explore a model that allows us to exist within a capitalist hellscape, but takes care of us as a fundamental driving mechanism instead.” - Janel Torkington

In this end-of-year episode of Flying the Coop, we’re looking back on what it’s actually been like building Strange Birds (and the podcast!) in 2025.

We talk about:

• What it really means to move toward becoming a worker-owned co-op

• How open books and shared decision-making have reshaped our relationship to business

• Why we define full-time work as 25 hours

• The systems and “containers” we’ve built to handle big feelings, hard conversations, and real life

• Our “Bird Brain Summit,” where we mapped how our very different brains, speeds, and working styles actually complement each other (curious? here are the question prompts we used for this)

• Why showing up consistently sometimes means showing up for ourselves before the business

This episode is part retrospective, part behind-the-scenes, and part planting our flag for building a business that’s for-real human first... especially in a year that basically tried to eat us alive.

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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a messaging co-op that gives a flying duck. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long-term strategy: if you want your brand, offers, and experience to tell the same story, we can help.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

• (00:00:00) - Flipping the Coop: Year One
• (00:03:17) - Janel on Going Co-op
• (00:05:04) - Taking a Step Back: Becoming a Co-op
• (00:06:37) - Dear Strange Birds: When Will I Be an Employee?
• (00:08:15) - Drinking Vermouth
• (00:09:01) - What Makes a Coop So Fun?
• (00:12:45) - Show Up Consistently For Your Job
• (00:17:00) - The Bird Brain Summit
• (00:22:46) - The Way We Approach Time
• (00:27:22) - A Year in the Life of the Podcast
• (00:28:29) - What Have You Learned From The Co-op Podcast?
• (00:30:09) - What Are You Hoping For In 2019?
• (00:32:12) - Flying the Coop: Brand Marketing

“What’s the ROI of creativity? That's like asking, what’s the ROI of electricity?” - Noah Scalin

Noah Scalin is a multidisciplinary artist, author, and co-founder of Another Limited Rebellion, where he helps individuals and organizations unlock their creative capacity through practice, play, and a wildly approachable philosophy: that creativity is a universal human skill you can train.

We talk about why creativity is a muscle, how limitations can actually expand what’s possible (get back in the box!), and what happens to organizations when they treat creativity as infrastructure instead of decoration. We also get into the age of AI, the difference between human expression and machine output, and why doing creative work for yourself might be the secret to showing up better everywhere else.

Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a messaging co-op that gives a flying duck. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long-term strategy: if you want your brand, offers, and experience to tell the same story, we can help.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

• (00:00:13) - Flying the Coop: Noah Scalin
• (00:01:23) - How Do You Define Creativity?
• (00:02:47) - How Creativity Affects Your Work
• (00:04:37) - In the Elevator: Creativity and Innovation
• (00:06:54) - On the Future of Creativity
• (00:12:01) - The ROI of Creativity
• (00:15:16) - Is AI Bad for Creativity?
• (00:19:03) - AI and the Question of Creativity
• (00:24:07) - Unlock the Creative Capacity of Your Employees
• (00:29:42) - Honorizing the Hustle
• (00:29:59) - Skull A Day
• (00:30:37) - How to Get Out of the Box
• (00:35:57) - Oh, We Need Some Skulls
• (00:36:48) - Leagues of Space Pirates Are Back
• (00:41:06) - Strategic Messaging