Hi, I’m Steve…

Steve Hardy

Hi, I’m Steve Hardy. Some call me Shardy. This is my personal website.

I grew up in Red Deer, went to university in Calgary, lived in beautiful Montreal for nearly 13 years, and even worked in NYC for a stint in 2011. I’m now based in the countryside, near Slocan in BC’s beautiful Kootenays.

My career has meandered wonderfully through advertising, magazine publishing (Maisonneuve), mobile content production (Family Guy, MAXIM, NHL), consumer electronics (Cinemin), startup/scaleup/nonprofit advisory and grant-writing (Warm Ventures), and other miscellany. If you’re interested in my resume, it’s here on LinkedIn.

Most recently, I’ve contributed my tech, systems, and social innovation lenses to a variety of mental health projects – establishing product operations at workforce resilience upskilling scaleup headversity, helping CMHA Calgary‘s Centre for Excellence in Recovery & Peer Support to scale up/out their tremendously successful Welcome Centre / Recovery College / School of Peer Support pilot, helping students build the RESILIEN Wellness Wayfinder, and sitting on Mayor Nenshi’s Calgary Community Action on Mental Health & Addiction stewardship group and systems mapping sub-committee.

Before this I led RallyEngine, the social enterprise spin-off of a purposeful program for the Missing Children Society of Canada called CodeSearch. RallyEngine was a powerful and nimble way to alert groups, rally teams, and inform communities, and it later grew to encompass work-alone check-in, volunteer task management, and confidential harassment reporting.

Nowadays, my wife and I are gradually building out a premium, permaculture-guided “tiny homesteads” community for remote/digital workers, located in an inland temperate rainforest in the Slocan Valley. We call it Big Calm.

And I’m (very) slowly working on a book: The Herd of Cats: How Entrepreneurs, Improvisers, and Disaster Managers Approach an Uncertain World – the thesis of which I’ve presented to the World Conference on Disaster Management, the Conference Board of Canada, and several other events.

Back in 2002 I started Creative Generalist – first as a blog and later as a (now-shuttered) “society” with over 500 members worldwide. I’ve published a few pieces, and presented at conferences like Interesting, on the topic of generalism. However, I’m not so active in this anymore.

Other involvements and side-projects include: Getting to Maybe (2017 social innovation residency cohort), Field Innovation Team (member), 100 Resilient Cities (subject matter advisor), Warms / Whenabouts (now defunct), NudgeMail, StandingAbout, freelance WordPress and Shopify site setup, and some random ideas that I may blog about here from time to time. Eclectic curiosity!

I enjoy such hobbies as mountain biking, basketball, improv comedy, street art, sustainable building, travel, tasting, reading, gardening, woodworking, and more. Always happy to connect with people on these and other interests.