In this colourful conversation Salimah, the co-founder of Artery, shares some unique experiences founding a 6 million member youth-led environmental network, working as a journalist in Africa, the Middle East (pre-Arab Spring),the US and more - all apparently leading towards co-founding her new company called Artery - a unique digital platform changing the way creative experiences are accessed, shared and supported globally.

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Qasim Virjee 0:08

back once again in the Start wall studio. At start, well, King west or main campus in downtown Toronto, it's Qasim Virjee. I'm joined this time around for our sixth episode in the studio with Selena Ibrahim, one of our partners. The company's name is artery Singh company sounds wrong. The movement I don't know the the thing that is artery is what occupies her. She'll be telling us a little bit about artery itself, but I'm really interested in hearing the backstory and some context around why it exists. So we'll waft in Wayne and provide your ears with all sorts of goodness in a second. Salima, I'll let you introduce yourself and let's take it from there.

Salimah Ebrahim 0:52

Thanks, Qasim. Yeah, um, company movement community, really, that's what we're building. As Qasim said, I'm the co founder of artery. But before artery, I was a journalist and I worked around the world mostly in the Middle East and Africa, and even covered some US presidential politics. And before that, I found it environmental movement. And so I've been either building but

Qasim Virjee 1:17

I have to stop you there. I founded an environmental movement.

Salimah Ebrahim 1:21

It's true. It's true. Have you heard of the Spirit their castle? No, the spirit by really well, we've we've done our job mildly successfully. The Spirit bear was, is actually a white bear. It's Canada's panda that lives on the central coast of British Columbia. Wow. And on this one island on the central coast in the Great Bear Rainforest, very small island, about a quarter of a million hectares. One in every 10 black bears gives birth to a white cup. And when they discover this, the in the early sort of 20th century, they thought it was a misplaced polar bear, or maybe even albino, but they actually found out that it was a double recessive gene. And it was a subspecies of a black bear. And so the spirit bear when I was 1415 years old, we heard I heard about the spirit bear from a friend of mine, Simon Jackson. And we ended up creating an organization called the Spirit bear youth coalition, wow, in his basement over burgers and chocolate cake. And it started out as a letter writing campaign to bring awareness to encourage government to create a wilderness conservancy around protecting this bear because to save the spirit bear with to save the habitat and to secure the gene pool. And so it started out as a small letter writing campaign. And then over the course of the next decade, it turned into a global movement of we grew to 6 million people in 64 countries. And then we, we did save the spirit there. And so it was my first lesson at the power of giving people you know, a tool or a cause to self organize around and how you can really unleash that. So

Qasim Virjee 3:07

yeah, that's a fantastic, you know, little sojourn into your history is a segue from the bio, but a while and you were a teenager when this all happened? Yeah,

Salimah Ebrahim 3:18

it was started. You know, like I said, when I was like 14, we really got going on about 15. And over that next decade through university, and even overlapping when I was a journalist in the Middle East, I would be by that point, by the time I was in my 20s, we had gone from a letter writing campaign that was like, very, very grassroots, like we were in every school in Canada and every high school and then later on in the US. But by that point, we had, you