Unusual childhood inspired the setting of unique goals

By Lori Culbert, Vancouver Sun

August 7, 2010

It is July 1, a day when most business people are not at their desks. But instead of celebrating his new Canadian citizenship, Joel Solomon is working inside his funky, renovated Downtown Eastside office.

The 55-year-old sprints to the door to open it, brandishing a wide grin and a welcoming wave. His dress is casual, his demeanour more so.

So this is the deep-pocketed, U.S.-born mover and shaker intent on bringing "systemic social change" to Vancouver?

In an extensive, wide-ranging series of interviews, Solomon credited his unusual childhood with inspiring him to set unique goals and pursue them with vigour despite the critics and naysayers.

Solomon was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his Jewish, Democratic family was on the fringes of society in the deep American South of the 1950s and '60s.

The Solomons held interracial parties. His mother worked as a recruiter for the state department at African-American colleges.

His father worked in Jimmy Carter's administration. The businessman, who could not break into traditional business circles in Chattanooga because of his religion, pursued what he thought might become a trend: building shopping malls on the outskirts of U.S. cities.

Solomon caught the political bug from his father and worked for the failed election campaign of Al Gore Sr. while in high school and the successful election campaign of Jimmy Carter while studying at Vassar College in New York.

Then, in his early 20s, Solomon learned he had inherited a chronic kidney disease that had also afflicted his father. His doctor's message was ominous: You might die in two years or live to be an old man.

Facing the prospect of a shortened life, Solomon rejected taking over his father's prosperous shopping mall empire and instead studied organic gardening in California, where he met some people starting a community on Cortes Island. In 1980 he moved to Cortes, just west of Quadra Island near Campbell River, and a short time later took a near monk-like volunteer job on the unpopulated Hanson Island, west of Alert Bay, to be the caretaker of a pod of orca whales.

A few years later, he received a $50,000 inheritance, but Solomon, who was living off the land, thought the shopping mall money should be recycled into something different. He gave half of it to a new educational retreat, called Hollyhock, which opened on Cortes in 1982.

That Hollyhock connection would eventually save Solomon's life. When his kidney started to shut down a few years ago, he sent out a plea to good friends for possible donors. The best match came from Hollyhock co-founder Shivon Robinsong, and the transplant has surely saved the life of Solomon, 55, who now appears to have boundless energy.

The other $25,000 from the inheritance he gave to a little-known New Hampshire farmer named Gary Hirshberg, who was making organic yogurt. That resulted in Solomon becoming an early shareholder in and board member of the massively successful Stonyfield Farms.

Then, in 1984, Solomon's father died and the 30-year-old was an over-night millionaire. Solomon moved back to Tennessee but sought out the Threshold Foundation, an organization to help people adjust to inheriting a fortune. Solomon acknowledges there is little public sympathy for the "burden" of being responsible for a bucket of money, but argued learning how to handle new-found wealth can be overwhelming.

Through Threshold, Solomon met the young heiress of the Rubbermaid fortune. Carol Newell wanted to anonymously give her money to good causes, but needed someone with a business background to help her. Solomon investigated Capers, the first organic food company that had been recommended to Newell, which at the time had a West Vancouver store and was planning to expand into Kitsilano.

Capers founder Russell Precious remembers being told an investor might be interested in his company, but she had to check with her financial adviser in, of all places, Tennessee.

"I said to myself, 'What is some guy in Nashville, Tennessee going to think about investing in a startup health food store in B.C.?'" chuckled Precious during a telephone interview from his home in Nelson.

But it turns out Precious, who had owned the Quadra Island supermarket in the 1980s, had met Solomon while he was working as a "Gypsy gardener" on Cortes Island.

The investment deal with Precious would be the first of many for Solomon and Newell.

While Solomon invested part of his inheritance in a real estate company and some businesses in the U.S., he returned to Vancouver to establish and operate the venture capital fund Renewal Partners with Newell. The fund eventually invested in 75 companies in B.C. and elsewhere in North America, including some well-known brands (Seventh Generation cleaning products), some emerging brands (Jorg&Olif, "The Slow Life Company"), and some successful service organizations (Stratcom).

Bob Penner, the founder of Vancouver-and Toronto-based Stratcom, which provides research and fundraising services for non-profits, advocacy groups and political candidates, said Renewal Partners didn't necessarily create the social change movement in B.C., but helped to foster it.

"Some of these things existed or coexisted with or before Joel and Carol, but Joel and Carol have been very helpful in helping these organizations and individuals advance more effectively, more quickly and more decisively," Penner said in an e-mail exchange.

Renewal Partners has averaged a 12 per cent annual rate of return, Solomon said, but has now invested all the $10 million Newell provided to the fund. Several years ago, Solomon started looking for outside investors to create Renewal2, a second venture capital fund to continue the same types of investments.

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