SEF Canada

SEF Canada 📊Entrepreneurial Development Program
💚 We assist communities to grow
♻️Creating sustainable Futures

The key to helping others lies in knowing not what they need but what they passionately want. Its aim has been to foster economic diversity by transforming local ideas and talents into viable enterprises. About Suzette McFaul

In 1999, Suzette became the first Enterprise Facilitator in British Columbia, her mandate was to assist people in starting their own business and help existing businesses ex

pand within the City of New Westminster. She provided assistance ranging in size from small home based businesses to $12 million development projects. As an Enterprise Facilitator, she personally assisted over 105 new businesses with a success rate of over 90%. Today, those businesses are still going strong and she recalls the biggest rewards were helping entrepreneurs realize their dream. From there she turned to training others around the world on how to facilitate others. From the western chapters of the United States of America to England, Suzette then took her passion to ripple into other communities worldwide. From one community to five dozens it became about so much more than the small city she first began with; it became about uniting passion and business in every individual across the globe.

EMPOWERMENT PATHWAYSKindness doesn't ask who deserves it.At Empowerment Pathways, we bring entrepreneurial development i...
08/27/2026

EMPOWERMENT PATHWAYS

Kindness doesn't ask who deserves it.

At Empowerment Pathways, we bring entrepreneurial development into federal correctional institutions — because the capacity to build something, to dream past a sentence, doesn't disappear behind a wall.

When we sit with someone and believe in their idea before they believe in it themselves, something shifts. Not just in them — in us. Kindness offered without condition has a way of returning tenfold, in the form of purpose, dignity, and a second chance built on a person's own skill.

This is what person-centered work looks like in practice: not charity, but genuine belief in human potential, wherever we find it.

Proud to deliver this work in partnership with Three Sisters Consulting — two years success and counting.

08/14/2026

Boom, bust, or something better?

British Columbia is facing another mill closure — and with it, the familiar fear that ripples through a resource-dependent community: layoffs, families uprooted, local businesses gutted, a town left to absorb the shock.
It doesn't have to go this way.

The window before closure is the most valuable time we have. That's when a community can start building what comes next — not waiting for a new employer to arrive, but growing its own: entrepreneurs starting businesses, workers becoming employers, a local economy that doesn't rise and fall with a single industry.

At SEF Canada, this is exactly the work we do — entrepreneurial development that helps people turn a layoff into a launching point, and helps a community build an economy that can sustain itself long after the mine or mill is gone.
We don't have to keep repeating the boom-bust cycle. We can plan for it — before it happens.




Communities Coming Together: The Psychology We Build On Long before "social licence" was a line item in a mining feasibi...
08/06/2026

Communities Coming Together: The Psychology We Build On
Long before "social licence" was a line item in a mining feasibility study, psychologist Carl Rogers identified the three conditions that make any relationship trustworthy: empathy, acceptance, and the willingness to be met without judgment.
He was talking about therapy rooms. We've found the same conditions hold true in community halls, band offices, and kitchen tables across six continents.
Most companies enter a community with a project plan. We've learned to enter with a question instead — because the relationship has to come before the request.
That's the thinking behind everything we teach in our community engagement training, from the Kitchen Table Principle to Two-Eyed Seeing:

You don't earn trust by presenting. You earn it by listening first.

Acceptance isn't agreement — it's making room for a community's own priorities before introducing yours.

Empathy isn't a soft skill on the agenda. It's the only thing that makes the rest of the agenda land.
Rogers believed people have their own capacity for growth — that the work isn't to direct them, but to create the conditions where that growth happens on its own terms. Communities are no different. They don't need to be managed into agreement. They need to be met as partners with their own expertise about their own future.

We never go uninvited. And once invited, we show up the same way Rogers asked his clients to show up for each other — present, honest, and without conditions on who deserves to be heard.
That's not a community relations tactic. That's just how trust gets built.

The Psychology Behind Empowerment Pathways Every person we work with inside a correctional institution has already been ...
07/30/2026

The Psychology Behind Empowerment Pathways

Every person we work with inside a correctional institution has already been judged. By the system, by the headlines, often by themselves. What they haven't always had is someone sit across the table and ask: what do you want to build?
That question only works if it's asked without conditions attached.
So our training — for our team and for the institutions we partner with — spends real time on this, because it's not soft skills. It's the mechanism:
Acceptance before assessment
Empathy before strategy
Being met as a person before being treated as a case file
Rogers wrote that when someone discovers they're respected for who they are, not who they're pretending to be, they begin to believe they deserve that respect. That belief is where a business plan becomes possible. Where a release date becomes a start date instead of an ending.

We've watched it happen. A person who has spent years being defined by a sentence starts being defined by what they're building instead.
That's not a program outcome. That's a human one.

07/23/2026

Carl Rogers is the foundational for us! 🍃

A radical psychologist that actually believes that people should be the centre . Our CEO Suzette shares more about how our methodology is influenced by him.
Stay with us and learn more about our methodology and why it works 🌱🌱🌱

Community Pro When you walk into a room, the people in that room aren't difficult. They're being human. The brain is wir...
07/09/2026

Community Pro

When you walk into a room, the people in that room aren't difficult. They're being human. The brain is wired to be cautious around outsiders , it's a survival mechanism that kept our ancestors alive. You're not fighting resistance. You're fighting biology.

Check our slides to turn this around!

You are coming for a visit. You are a visitor to the land stakeholders. If you walk in as a stranger and expect trus...
06/30/2026

You are coming for a visit. You are a visitor to the land stakeholders. If you walk in as a stranger and expect trust, you've already failed, not because of anything you said, but because of what you *are*: An unknown visitor.

This is their home. Are you invited to come? Do you just show up in places that you weren’t invited to? How would you feel if someone walked into your space?

Simple questions that lead to interesting answers.

CommunityPro - SEF Canada

06/24/2026

June is a month that holds a lot of meaning for us at SEF and we want to take a moment to honour that.

June is National Indigenous History Month in Canada and also Pride Month, At SEF, we believe that inclusion isn't a checkbox.

Two important months . One shared value, that every person deserves to be seen, respected, and celebrated.

Community ProBefore you can engage "the community," you have to ask whether that word even belongs to them.It sounds lik...
06/18/2026

Community Pro

Before you can engage "the community," you have to ask whether that word even belongs to them.

It sounds like a small detail. It isn't.

Language is one of the clearest signals of belonging. When you use the words people use for themselves, you're telling them you see them. When you use the words you've assigned them, you've already created distance and most of the time, you won't even know it happened.

One question, asked early, changes the entire trajectory of an engagement strategy.

Not a formality. The foundation everything else gets built on.

Swipe through to see why this one question changes the trajectory of engagement work.

Today we recognize the women who go underground so the world above can keep moving. Women in mining are engineers, geolo...
06/16/2026

Today we recognize the women who go underground so the world above can keep moving. Women in mining are engineers, geologists, environmental specialists, equipment operators, safety officers, and leaders often doing extraordinary work in environments not built with them in mind.

On International Women in Mining Day, we celebrate their resilience, amplify their expertise, and recommit to doing the work that makes this industry truly inclusive.

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Vancouver, BC
V6B1E6

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