For years, Vanessa Richards has been a force at the heart of Social Venture Institute (SVI) at Hollyhock.
From left to right, top to bottom: Lystra Sam (Qmooniti), Julian Giocomelli (Heart of Impact), Fatima Kamenge (Social Ausum) Vanessa Richards, Lise Birikundavyi (BKR Capital), Jackee Kasandy (Kasandy Inc. & BEBC Society)
Vanessa Richards with Pamela Chaloult, Founder & CEO, Practical Feet and SVI Executive Producer from 2002 – 2025
Vanessa with Brenda Hansen, Klahoose Nation, with the first welcome pole carved in the Klahoose village of Toq (Squirrel Cove) since European contact.
A Vancouver-born transdisciplinary artist and culture shift facilitator, she works across communities, institutions, and generations—using arts-based practice to expand civic imagination in service of social change.
Since 2015, Vanessa has shaped the experience of hundreds of leaders as both producer and facilitator, bringing depth, care, and a clear commitment to equity. Working alongside social venture pioneer Pam Chalout—who founded SVI Women in the Bay Area—to help grow that program, as well as SVI Virtual, opening pathways toward a more just economy.
Her imprint on SVI is both structural and soulful: advancing equity efforts to increase participation from racialized leaders to 40%, grounding the program through engagement with the Klahoose Nation, and weaving the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action 92 into its fabric. Again and again, she invited participants into deeper inquiry around right livelihood.
Then there are the cultural threads: her finely tuned playlists, and the now-iconic “Love Swoosh”—a simple, powerful ritual of collective appreciation that has become part of SVI’s DNA.
This summer at Hollyhock, Vanessa took part in MOTH—More-Than-Human Rights: Pushing the Boundaries of Law, Science & Storytelling to Re-Animate the World. There, participants were invited into a kind of serious play: imagining a declaration for the rights of nature.
Her attention turned to migration—not only of plants, people, and animals, but of life itself. The quiet, radical transformations we undergo, and the right to do so, to move freely through borders, landscapes, seasons and life stages.
Inspired by the field-recording practices of Cosmo Sheldrake and Tarun Nayar, she began listening differently—recording the rhythmic swing of a gate at the Hollyhock lodge, layering it with a rough voice note as a song emerged, and filming dragonfly nymphs in their underwater world, before they leave for a life on land.
The Right to Migrate is an invitation to witness that threshold moment—to consider migration not only as movement across borders, but as a personal, necessary passage. A leaving. A becoming.
It is also, quietly, a marker of her own.
Vanessa is now wrapping up her work with the City of Vancouver’s Cultural Services, stewarding public investment in arts and culture. Next stop: a visit to London, UK, where she’ll collaborate with the MOTH Festival of Ideas—an initiative of Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) at NYU School of Law.
Vanessa doesn’t leave a community, she expands it. We send her off with a collective Love Swoosh, in gratitude for the rigour and radiance she brought to Hollyhock. The seeds she’s planted here will continue to bloom, even as her work sparks new fires wherever she goes next.
She remains woven into the SVI story, and we wish her a next chapter as bold and transformative as she is.
The Love Swoosh in action at an SVI Case Study Session.
