An Invitation to Remember Before We Begin Again

As Coralus prepares for its next chapter, we’ve been asking a simple question:

What has our work been trying to show us?

That question came into focus during a recent conversation with Sonia Strobel from SkipperOtto. When Sonia first came to Coralus, she wasn’t simply building a seafood business. She was carrying a possibility.

She wanted a future where her young son could choose to become a fisherman, following generations before him.

At the time, that future looked increasingly unlikely.

Fishing families were struggling. Fish caught off the coast of British Columbia were being shipped to China for processing and then shipped back to Canada to be eaten. It was called efficiency, but it came at the expense of communities, relationships and livelihoods.

Sonia’s vision excited the community and we were in!

Over the past decade, SkipperOtto has grown from 800 to more than 8,000 member households supporting local fishing families directly.

And this year, Sonia shared something beautiful. Her son has turned eighteen. And he is a fisherman. That possibility became reality.

It brought forth another perspective of what our work has been doing.

One thing we’ve learned over the years is that the stories we hold shape the experience we have.

You may have held a story that Coralus exists to fund women entrepreneurs overlooked by biased financial systems.

You may have held a story that we’re here to discover new ways of doing business that regenerate rather than extract.

You may have held a story that our purpose is to support social and environmental impact.

All of those stories have been true.

And, what if they are all expressions of something even larger.

What if, over the past ten years, we’ve been learning how to recognize people carrying possibilities that the world wasn’t yet ready to see?

What if we’ve been creating the conditions for those possibilities to take root?

What if we’ve been gathering around them with many forms of capital—financial, relational, intellectual, emotional and reputational?

And what if, together, we’ve been quietly changing what becomes possible?

Perhaps we weren’t simply funding ventures.

Perhaps we were learning to recognize the early signals of a different way of living, working, owning, governing, caring and contributing.

When you look through that lens, you begin to notice those signals everywhere.

• Children from fishing families once again imagining a future on the water because communities rebuilt relationships with the people who feed us. (SkipperOtto)
• Women who have experienced profound barriers discovering dignity, belonging and meaningful work because someone redesigned the conditions around them instead of asking them to fit the system. (GOGO Foundation)
• Plastic pollution becoming the foundation of local circular economies instead of an inevitable consequence of modern life. (Ocean Legacy & Better Packaging Co.)
• Prosperity becoming rooted in place, stewardship and long-term relationships rather than extraction. (Makhers Studio)

These are more than venture stories.

They’re examples of possibilities that first arrived as quiet whispers, were recognized through our collective intuition and, through the courage of extraordinary vision holders and the many forms of capital that flowed around them, became lived reality.

Each one challenged an assumption.

Each one expanded what we believed was possible.

Perhaps that’s what we’ve really been doing all along.

Now we’d like to discover what comes next—together.

Before we begin another capital process, we’d like to remember, collectively. To learn from what we’ve done, to share stories from our many different perspectives so we can reflect on what we’ve done together.

Over the coming weeks, we’d love you to gather in whatever way feels natural. With your Pod. Around a kitchen table. Online. Over coffee. On a walk.

Or simply with a few people you’ve shared this journey with.

Together, we’d love you to explore questions like:

• What possibilities have you seen emerge through Coralus?
• What once felt impossible that now simply exists?
• Which stories changed how you see the world?
• How were you changed by being in relationship with this work?
• Looking back across ten years, what do you think Coralus has been trying to show us?
• What patterns become visible when you step back and connect the dots?

We’re not looking for a report. We’re practicing something much more interesting. We’re strengthening our collective capacity to notice, remember, recognize and discern.

To become the kind of community that can see what wants to emerge before it becomes obvious.

In many ways, this is preparation. We’re preparing ourselves. We’re preparing the soil.

We’re strengthening the muscle we’ve been quietly developing for ten years: the ability to recognize possibilities that are ready to become reality.

Because later this year, we’ll begin another experiment.

We’ll invite the next generation of people who have moved beyond imagining a different possibility and are already demonstrating it in practice.

Some will be carrying the first quiet signals of a new way.

Others will already be demonstrating deep traction within their communities and ecosystems.

Together, we’ll ask: What conditions are ready to flourish next?

And together, we’ll decide how we can contribute the relationships, knowledge, visibility, governance and financial capital needed to help those conditions grow.

Because perhaps the most important thing we’ve learned over the past decade is this:

We don’t create the future by predicting it.

We create it by learning to recognize it together—while it’s still small enough to need a community willing to believe before the rest of the world can see it.