Flourishing Business Community Speakers Series: Stories from the Field #32
Building Flourishing Entrepreneurs: A Public High School Teacher’s Story with Allen Gunderson
| Date: Tuesday, June 9, 2026 |
| Time: 15h00 UTC – 08h00 PST, 11h00 EST, 16h00 BST, 17h00 CET, 00h00 + 1 day JST. To convert UTC to your timezone, click here |
| Duration: 1 hour |
| Registration: Required via Eventbrite at bit.ly/SFF32-Register |
For our thirty second monthly flourishing business community speaker series: stories from the field, the community is delighted to welcome Allen Gunderson from Greater Victoria School District’s Spectrum Community School in British Columbia, Canada.
Allen Gunderson is a sustainability focused business and social studies teacher and Department Head at Spectrum Community School, where he leads the Business, Computers, Digital Media, and Design department. He has a background in systems thinking and entrepreneurship education. In his teaching he brings real-world frameworks into the public high school classroom to help students see business as a force for positive change.
Spectrum Community School is a public high school within the Greater Victoria School District #61 in British Columbia, Canada, serving approximately 1,200 students.It is one of the largest and most diverse schools in the district.
Allen was introduced to the Flourishing Business Canvas through attending an r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience and Regeneration) workshop where community members Ondine Hogeboom and Antony Upward introduced the Canvas, the Flourishing Business Community, and the Flourishing Startup Method. This sparked his curiosity to learn more, so first he attended the free Flourishing Startup Method webinar (offered monthly – register here). The webinar fueled his desire to learn even more, so he then took the Flourishing Business Design Course (register here), which he completed in 2025. Allen found the course “a truly inspiring experience that fundamentally shifted how I approached entrepreneurship with my business classes this school year”.
Allen observed: “I’ve tried a variety of business model canvases over the years, but none offered a comprehensive approach to guiding students through developing sustainability business knowledge while learning entrepreneurial practices.”
Inspired by that experience”, for his fall 2025 semester’s Grade 11-12 entrepreneurship course, Allen designed two units around the Flourishing Business Canvas. Students first applied the Canvas to a publicly traded company, where they examined its product through a life cycle assessment and building a system dynamics model, and later applied the same skills evaluating their own venture ideas.
For his spring 2026 semester Grade 9-10 entrepreneurship course, he had students apply the Canvas to help them explore the business model of a local B Corp, and then mapped it against the UN SDGs. The students then went on to use both the Canvas and the Flourishing Startup Method to explore their own original business concepts.
Allen states that “for both classes and future ones, the Flourishing Business Canvas is the center piece of learning and guidepost where everything else resonates.”
In his presentation, Allen will discuss:
- What he hopes to contribute back to this community
- How completing the Flourishing Business Model Design course led to bringing the canvas into a public high school classroom
- His student’s experience:
- Using the Flourishing Business Canvas to analyze real companies and apply it to their own business ideas
- Integrating the canvas with life cycle assessment, system dynamics modeling, and the UN SDGs
- The core challenges of helping teenagers genuinely think beyond profit and focus on embedded sustainability
- What it looks like when high school students apply the Flourishing Startup Method method to their own original business concepts
- Reflections on what this framework reveals about entrepreneurship education and why it matters at the secondary / high-school level
- His hopes and plans for future canvas applications:
- Using it in combination with the Korda Institute Method to tackle real, complex problems facing local companies.
- At his school and school district’s future use of the canvas (and beyond)!
- What has the Flourishing Enterprise Co-lab, and the Flourishing Business Community it convenes, done well in supporting his journey so far, what needs to be done better, to support his hopes and plans, and what would he would like to see in the future:
- What he has already gained from his participation in this community, and the benefits he hopes to realize from his future participation
At the end of his talk, Allen will take questions from members of the community.After the event, a video of the talk plus slides will be shared in the “Speaker Series” space of the Flourishing Business Community. Please join other flourishing business leaders and become a full member to access.