Sandra Hamilton

Sandra is a UK/Canadian, and Canada’s first Social MBA. Holding an Executive MBA in Social Enterprise Leadership, Sandra designed Canada’s first municipal social procurement frameworks. She is a social entrepreneur with over 30 years’ experience operating a social impact consultancy business. In 2003, while working on the bid for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, the first Olympics in history to advance the sustainability agenda, Sandra encountered the idea of leveraging procurement to improve lives, sparking a passion for challenging and transforming how value is defined in all public sector contracts. 

In 2019, Sandra returned to the UK, to research the public management response to mandatory social value procurement policies, joining The Manchester Institute of Innovation Research. Her research finds that how social value is interpreted strongly influences public management practice, and that social economy actors continue to face significant barriers. While the most transformative actors interpret social value as an organisational or system mindset, requiring a paradigm shift in valuation practice, transitioning actors understand social value as an additionality to the procurement function. In the UK, Sandra has become a leading voice in advocating for the VCSE sector to be placed at the heart of the social value system intelligence. For more on this, see this open letter to the Local Government Association.

Sandra Hamilton is an expert advisor to: the British Standards Institute (BSI) Committee on Construction Procurement (CB/500); Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s Steering Committee on the Real Living Wage City Region; and to Canadian Business for Social Responsibility (CBSR). Building upon her extensive work advising and delivering demonstration projects with the Ontario Public Buyers Association (OPBA), trailblazing municipal governments, construction associations, and community benefit networks, across British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario, Sandra has joined Stone King to support UK local authorities, public managers and commissioners in challenging established norms and developing new ways of working.

Recognised as an industry expert and developer of Canada’s first municipal social procurement frameworks, in 2017, Sandra was invited by Global Affairs Canada to present her work highlighting ‘The Importance of People, in a People, Planet, Profit approach to Sustainability’ at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Symposium on Sustainable Government Procurement in Geneva. In 2021, she presented at the WTO 2021 Public Forum, and at the Circular Procurement Summit in Toronto, an official side event of the 2021 World Circular Economy Forum.

More information about her work is available at the links below:

• Research paper: ‘Public Procurement: Price-Taker or Market Shaper?’ (Hamilton, 2022) 
  Winner of the 2023 Emerald Literati Award for most outstanding paper published in Critical Perspectives on International Business
• Priceless Procurement (Hamilton, 2022) – Valuing Non-Financial Outcomes in Public Procurement 
  Chapter 15, ‘Vitalising Purpose, the power of the social enterprise difference in the delivery of public services’.
• Priceless Procurement – Achieving Wider Wellbeing Through Public Procurement University of Oxford 2022 Government Social Outcomes Conference 
  10-minute summary of Sandra Hamilton’s research findings into the public management response to mandatory social value procurement policies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRbwMd7t6SE
• Policy@Manchester: ‘Rise to the Top: Socially Responsible Public Procurement’
• Sandra Hamilton, University of Manchester, UK
  Alliance Manchester Business School Video playlist
• Sustainable Health Systems, University of Toronto, Ontario
  ‘People, Prosperity and Planet: The role of G7 Countries in Buying the Future We Want. Leveraging Public Procurement to #BuildBackBetter’
• COP28: ‘Trade Transition – Sandra Hamilton gives a summary of key themes at COP28’