OP-ED - Wild Things meets good impact: How stories change Canada’s social finance future

When Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are in 1963, he revealed a simple but profound truth: imagination helps us make sense of the world, gain agency, and chart new paths. Max, the mischievous boy who sails to the land of the Wild Things, doesn’t conquer them with force or logic—he earns their respect through presence, creativity, and story. 

He makes meaning out of chaos and returns home with a deeper sense of belonging and purpose.

In many ways, Canada’s bold experiment with the Social Finance Fund feels like a Max moment for our sector. 

Here is a collective, layered initiative that dares to imagine a different way of financing social change. 

Like Max, we’re invited to tame the Wild Things—not with raw power, but with the shared language of story, a tool that makes our work memorable, equitable, transportable, and enduring.

Why Stories Matter More Than Data Alone

Neuroscience tells us that stories stick. Research from Stanford, including work by Professor Jennifer Aaker, shows that people are up to 22 times more likely to remember a story than a fact alone. 

Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University, found that stories with strong emotional content trigger the release of oxytocin in the brain—making us more likely to trust, care, and take action. In other words, data may inform, but story transforms.

Max knew this instinctively. His world was shaped by emotions—frustration, imagination, longing—and only through creating a narrative of kingship and return did he process them. 

Similarly, when organizations capture impact through storytelling, they give their work a life beyond numbers. The context, the voice, and the agency of the community endure.

From One to Many: Why Stories Scale Impact

If data is a point, story is the path. For social impact leaders, stories are how practices and lessons travel from one organization to another, across geographies and generations. 

They allow methods that work in one context to be reinterpreted in another while keeping humanity intact. This is exactly how sustainable progress has always happened—through shared narratives.

Think of Max again. Alone in his room, his imagination might have remained a private escape. But by giving it form—sailing away, becoming king, and returning—he created a journey that readers across sixty years and countless cultures still recognize as their own. The story carries his agency outward, making it communal.

That’s why storytelling is not an accessory to the Social Finance Fund—it’s the missing infrastructure. 

Money is necessary, yes. But if we don’t capture and share the stories of what worked, who led, and why communities thrived, the fund risks building islands instead of bridges.

The Social Finance Fund as a Collective Wild Thing

Canada deserves enormous credit for its commitment to investing in social impact at scale. The Social Finance Fund is not a single intervention but a multi-layered ecosystem, designed to bring capital, innovation, and inclusion together.

It’s a collective Wild Thing: big, unruly, and full of potential.

To truly tame it, we need the kind of narrative glue that Common Approach is building. By creating inclusive, community-rooted impact measurement standards, 

Common Approach ensures that the stories organizations tell are not only rigorous but also interoperable. It’s the difference between a thousand disconnected bedtime stories and an epic saga that shapes culture.

This is how we avoid the trap of sterile reporting that no one reads and instead build a living library of social impact wisdom that endures. 

Where every Max who ventures into the wild returns home with lessons the whole village can use.

Technology as a Companion on the Journey

At threshold.world, we’ve built b.world, an AI-powered platform for program design, measurement, and storytelling. 

It aligns with the Common Impact Data Standard, helping organizations not only collect data but transform it into stories that travel—stories that can mentor others, inspire funders, and empower communities.

When I see leading Canadian social purpose organizations leveraging tools like b.world, I’m reminded again of Max. He didn’t erase the Wild Things or pretend they weren’t scary; he learned to dance with them. 

Technology doesn’t erase the complexity of impact—it brings it into step with it, with clarity and confidence.

Coming Home with Supper Waiting

The brilliance of Where the Wild Things Are is not just the adventure—it’s the return. Max comes home to a warm meal, a reminder that our imaginative journeys matter because they root us deeper in community. 

For Canada’s social finance movement, storytelling is that return. It grounds bold experiments in shared understanding and ensures that no community’s wisdom, or voice, is lost.

To all the Canadian leaders embracing this moment: your work is inspiring. The Social Finance Fund is a global beacon, Common Approach is solving a massive challenge in an inclusive way, and your willingness to experiment with accessible, modern technology positions you as mentors to others. Keep telling your stories. 

They’re the map for the rest of us.

Because in the end, the Wild Things aren’t tamed by force. They’re tamed by story.

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