Stephan Briones has kicked heroin addiction and a life of crime and now he wants to help others.

“When it comes to experience, I have 10,000 hours of addiction and unlawful activities,” says the 39-year-old high school drop-out who came to Canada from the Philippines as a baby.

“I have a non-profit in me, but I don’t have the tools to create it.”

The School for Social Entrepreneurs may be the tool box Birones is looking for.

The school, launching in Regent Park on Wednesday, aims to help people like Briones, as well as those with more formal training, start a non-profit, cooperative, ethical business or social venture to benefit their community.

All that is required is a good idea and the passion to see it through.

For Briones, who attended an information session about the school last week, a chance encounter with a piece of his past on the streetcar ride home to Parkdale sold him on the concept.

“There on the floor was this little package,” he says, pulling out part of a carefully folded lottery ticket, no bigger than a piece of chewing gum.The brown powder inside was heroin, worth about $40 on the street.

“It brought back fond memories of commerce,” says Briones, who used to deal heroin out of an upscale bookstore. “But it made me realize how far I’ve come and what I really need to do.”

The Toronto initiative is modeled on an acclaimed South London school founded in 1997 by U.K. social entrepreneur Michael Young. Young, who in 1958 coined the phrase “meritocracy,” believed it was dangerous to equate IQ and effort with merit because it fails to recognize people’s unequal access to good education and often misses hidden human talents. Today there are eight schools in the U.K. and five Australian franchises.

British graduates include a man who developed peer-led mentoring for people leaving prison. The SOS Gangs project reduced recidivism and saved the British government an estimated $8.3 million in conviction and incarceration costs.

The Ontario franchise — the first in North America — is a collaboration of Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District, Regent Park’s Centre for Community Learning and Development, micro-loan provider ACCESS Community Capital and Housing Services Corp., which is leading the initiative.

The Ontario Trillium Foundation is providing seed funding of $500,000 over three years.

If it is a success, affiliate schools in Windsor and Ottawa are planned for 2014, says Cynthia Ross, of Housing Services Corp, a provincial non-profit that provides programs, products and services to Ontario’s social housing sector.

“Something about this touched my soul,” says Ross, who first heard about the U.K. school at a 2008 MaRS conference.

She was particularly drawn by the school’s roots in the social housing community, where local leaders who wanted to make a difference, knew what was needed and had great ideas did not know how to move those ideas forward, she says.

“The school shows them how to do it,” she says. “It helps people improve their own communities at the same time as they move their idea and themselves forward,” she says.

Marwa Eldardiry, 25, who grew up in the downtown social housing community of Alexandra Park, is another prospective student.

She wants to use her university planning degree and experience sitting on several local boards and committees to become a consultant to help her neighbours help themselves.

“I want to help my community work together to create community-owned businesses,” she says. “I want to be the voice that mediates between decision-makers and community members on social, economic and environmental issues.”

The school’s nine-month fellowship program starts in September and is looking for 20 students who will learn from other entrepreneurs and each other during weekly day-long classes. About three-quarters of students will be from low-income or marginalized neighbourhoods. The school expects the rest to be people already established in careers looking for a change. Tuition is $1,500 and financial assistance is available.

Briones, who was arrested many times but “miraculously” was never sent to jail, credits the Centre for Mental Health and Addiction for helping him stay clean for almost five years. He wants to show others caught up in drugs and crime — or those about to fall into the lifestyle — the way out.

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Last week, as Briones stepped off the streetcar with the “package” of heroin he found, he happened to run into a friend and mentor.

“I showed him the package,” Briones says gesturing with his open hand. “I opened it and let the brown powder scatter onto the sidewalk.”

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