Dan Kershaw, CEO, The Furniture Bank is scheduled to provide the Opening Keynote Address at the 2nd Annual AI in Philanthropy SuperConference on April 23rd in Toronto.
Kershaw leads Furniture Bank’s social enterprise & tech-forward national mission to end furniture poverty. He has led an eclectic career spanning over two decades across a wide variety of industries and sectors. With a passion for digital innovation, and a focus on data-driven processes and decisions, Kershaw has led Toronto-based Furniture Bank since 2014.
In his role as Executive Director, Kershaw seeks to expand Furniture Bank’s integrated social employment, environmental and social enterprise model to end furniture poverty across Canada. In 2022, Kershaw pivoted Furniture Bank’s annual campaign to leverage new AI technology, shifting the charity away from “poverty porn” and establishing a new industry standard for using ethical, responsible images within the charity sector.
Kershaw has over 17 years of digital experience in which he led the management and growth of a variety of industries, business challenges, and product innovations from Internet Gambling, Telecommunications, Payment Processing, Web Hosting, Mobile Dating, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content Solutions, and a variety of eCommerce projects. It was these intensive years that motivated him to build things, analyze everything, and push the limits of conventional thinking and apply himself to a career with meaning.
Under Kershaw’s leadership, Furniture Bank has re-purposed over 400,000 items of furniture heading for landfill into ‘homing’ for over 21,300 families in the GTA. Not only does this support people emerging from poverty, turning empty housing into furnished homes, diverted materials representing nearly 26,000 tonnes of CO2. Collaborating with companies like IKEA Canada and Furniture Link on circular economy corporate pilots, Kershaw has continuously demonstrated that there are both significant social and environmental impacts associated with reuse and refurbishment charities like Furniture Bank. Kershaw is currently scaling the organization’s Toronto cloud platform to become available nationally, aiming to support a more vibrant impactful and sustainable network of independent Canadian furniture banks.
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