BCBusiness

May 2021 - Women of the Year

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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24 BCBUSINESS MAY 2021 W I N N E R SANDRA PHILLIPS F O U N D E R + C E O , M O V M I S H A R E D T R A N S P O R T A T I O N S E R V I C E S IT SOUNDS LIKE hyperbole to say that Sandra Phillips got in on the ground floor of Canada's smart transportation movement, but it really isn't. The Switzerland native hadn't been in Vancouver very long when she got a job as Car2Go's first local employee (she was the company's seventh North American staff member). Her mission was to find out if the German car share service could work in her new hometown. Along the way, her role changed a few times (being able to speak German meant she was something of a natural Canadian liaison to head office), but her passion for connecting people and vehicles in new ways never waned. "My heart was in launching new services, partly because I grew up in a small town of 10,000 people where I could get from anywhere up to the mountains without having a car," Phillips says of Villmer- gen, which is about 20 minutes outside Zurich. "It was all seamlessly connected, whether CHANGE MAKER R U N N E R - U P EMMA GILCHRIST E D I T O R - I N - C H I E F + E X E C U T I V E D I R E C T O R , T H E N A R W H A L A MEDIA ORGANIZATION that has grown exponentially in both staff and readership since its inception three years ago, with a model that lets patrons read for free if they wish? That would be Victoria-based The Narwhal, a nonprofit and ad-free online publication that seeks to uncover stories about Western and Northern Canada's natural environment and the people who make their livelihoods from it. The site was founded in 2018 by Emma Gilchrist and Carol Linnitt as an offshoot of their previous project, DeSmog Canada. Originally, they were the only two employees and had an audience of about 200 who paid to help fund their journalism. Today, The Narwhal has 11 staff and 2,600 paying mem- bers, who give an average of about $14 a month. "We really see ourselves as bridge builders and make a very conscious effort not to further polarize issues that are quite polar- izing," says Gilchrist, who grew up in an oil-and-gas town in Alberta. "We try to feature the voices of all sorts of people who are impacted by changes to the natural world. That might be Indigenous Peoples or fishermen or loggers. Or even coal miners who are losing their jobs in a coal transition." The outlet is probably best known in this prov- ince for breaking the news that senior government officials knew the Site C dam was over budget and behind schedule about a year before they publicly stated it. But it's also done highly regarded work on pollution in the Elk Valley and land-based salmon farming, among many other topics. "Those are the type of stories I'm personally proudest of," Gilchrist says. "Stories that really complicate the narrative about what an energy transition looks like and what someone who cares about the natural world looks like." –N.C. it was a gondola or a ferry, a train or a bus, all connected through one fare card." In 2014, Phillips founded Movmi, a mobility consultant that works with public sector clients (TransLink and various municipalities) and organiza- tions like Evo Car Share, Van- couver Bike Share (Mobi) and BCAA to help them build out their transportation infrastructure. "When we launched Car2Go, I would go to parties and tell people what I did and get blank stares, people going, What are you talking about?" she recalls. "Eventually, people started coming to those parties in Car2Gos. That shift can happen if you create reliable supply and reliable services." Vancouver-based Movmi often serves as a go-between for those public entities and the car, bike or scooter share outfits in a bid to create that reliability and seamless trans- port for the consumer. "It's the classic Swiss joke, but we're essentially the neutral party in between," Phillips laughs. On a more serious note, she argues that, with all the new technologies that are becoming available in the transportation space, there are some know- ledge gaps in how to properly apply those innovations. "A lot of traditional transportation engineers and urban planners don't know what to do with all of this," she maintains. "How do you tackle it and use it in a way that's beneficial to the community? So apart from last year, we've had work for the last seven years." COVID-19 saw Phillips shrink her workforce as things dried up temporarily, but Movmi is now up to four full-time and two part-time staff from its pre-pandemic count of 10. "We have to continue to make the ecosystem more reliable, and bring in the latest and great- est when it makes common sense," she says. "Kick scooters aren't really a solution when you don't have a safe bike lane to ride in." BOTTOM RIGHT: TAYLOR ROADES

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