Guiding a new strategic direction for an international charity

Background

Students Offering Support is a registered charity that originated in 2004 as a national network of campus clubs providing peer-to-peer tutoring on university of campuses, while raising funds to support education-based projects led by local partners in 20+ countries throughout Latin America. Traditionally this had been in the form of infrastructure-based projects, such as building or renovating new classrooms, playgrounds, sports courts, libraries, etc. The organization also facilitated cross-cultural service learning opportunities to provide opportunities for campus-based stakeholders to contribute to the projects in a hands-on manner.

Core Challenge

SOS had faced multiple years of declining revenue streams, due in part to a confluence of external environmental factors, as well as internal challenges stemming from the transition of the organizations’ founder and long-time Executive Director. Overall the organization was presented with challenges to its long-term viability and sustainability.


Response:

  • Utilized initial onboarding period to deeply understand diverse stakeholders’ perspectives on current operations, core organizational competencies, and challenges. This included designing and facilitating various participatory design thinking processes (eg. journey mapping exercises) to identify key opportunities and pain points of distinct stakeholder groups

  • Conducted strategic research to build a shared and in-depth understanding of the external context, and hosted multiple processes to define organizational core competencies, and refine organizational positioning, as well as to build awareness of sectoral best-practices and evidence-informed approaches

  • Developed a gradual, phased approach to support a shift in the organization’s strategic direction towards evidence-based approaches to global development, informed by best practices in the international development sector. The phased emphasized a prototyping process to validate the viability of new approaches and refine the concepts prior to scaling. 

  • Led grant writing, partnership building, public speaking, and business development to engage new partners in supporting the trajectory of the organization

  • Streamlined internal operations to free up staff bandwidth to focus on strategic growth, including adoption of electronic (paperless) approaches to financial management and a revamped IT platform for management of volunteers, e-commerce activities, and chapter operations

  • Developed engaging communication materials to build awareness and understanding of new organizational approaches among all stakeholders, including volunteers.

  

Key Results:

  • The Guatemala Groundswell project was successfully piloted and scaled, to form the new cornerstone for SOS’ global activities. A complete report of the project’s first year can be found here and includes evidence-based success across a range of indicators, including measureable improvements in school enrollments and attendance.

  • Secured proof of concept funding via Fund for Innovation and Transformation to support new approach to improving access to education utilizing e-learning interventions complemented by mentorship and peer tutoring. Based on results of ‘proof of concept’ pilot project, secured five-years worth of funding from Global Affairs Canada to enable the sustainability of the project, along with expansion to additional communities

  • Established new partnerships and strengthened existing relationships with post-secondary institutions to establish curriculum-linked global citizenship education offerings. Key partners included Durham College, Carleton University, University of Toronto, and Colleges and Institutes of Canada (CiCan). This included multi-year funding from CiCan to support expansion of programming with post-secondary institutional partners.

  • Successfully established a monthly donor program to support diversification and sustainability of revenue streams

Additional Information

Guiding an intersectoral consortium to improve sexual health programming

Challenge

The SHARE project represented Right To Play’s (RTP) first time leading a consortium initiative, and it was a significant one as it entailed collaboration with three additional organizations, involving nearly 100 project staff across seven countries, working together to execute a five-year, $36 million health project that is intended to support over 300,000 beneficiaries - while having to follow stringent donor requirements and utilize rigorous approaches to Results Based Management. Given the consortium structure, RTP’s standard organizational processes and structures often did not apply, requiring processes and systems to either be adapted or created from scratch at nearly every juncture.

Additionally, I joined the organization after the project was already mid-stream into its planning. My predecessor had left the role at a critical inflection point, leaving the SHARE team with only six weeks to finalize the Project Implementation Plan required by the donor for the five year life of the initiative.


Response:

  • Building strong relationships with project leads across organizations, with RTP colleagues in country, and with donor representatives. This meant focusing on understanding the motivations, competencies, challenges and contexts of each partner organization and each focal person

  • Coordinating three, week-long consortium visits to Ghana, Uganda, and Mozambique, supporting the project's start up phase; utilized participatory processes to establish relationships and integrate knowledge of +75 project staff as well as external stakeholders

  • Established project management information system (via Microsoft Teams) to enable centralized, asynchronous, and transparent communication

  • Continually monitoring and reviewing communication and meeting structures through formal and informal mechanisms, and adopting governance processes as required

  • Proactively identifying potential risks and where needed engaging senior leadership teams for resolution

  • Working with multiple departments within RTP and senior RTP leadership to create and define processes for internal management of consortium based initiatives

  • Establishing clear guidelines and templates to guide key planning review and reporting processes from consortium partners


Key Results

  • During the first year of project implementation, the project engaged 83,564 project participants/beneficiaries (42,999 female / 40,565 male)

  • All grant planning, reporting, and compliance documents were submitted on schedule and approved by the donor, including the life-of-project Project Implementation Plan (PIP)

  • My annual performance review (which included an anonymous survey among colleagues to collect 360 degree feedback) indicated a very strong performance across all categories of evaluation. Examples of anonymous responses available upon request

  • Lessons learned have been captured and disseminated to support other pending Right To Play projects focused on themes of sexual health and reproductive rights

Note: the project is still in progress. Mid-term results are expected in Fall 2024 and final results are expected in Spring 2026

Additional Information

See video interviews with a project stakeholder here

Digital Democracy at a University Campus

Challenge: The broad base of the 18,000 stakeholders of the Dalhousie Student Union had no clear means of shaping the priorities of the governance team or of tracking progress towards established goals. As a result there was a generalized lack of awareness and apathy towards the Union amongst its core stakeholders.

Response: By integrating a software called Soapbox into the organization’s website and social media profiles we enabled any student to suggest an idea, vote and comment on others’ suggestions, and track the Union’s responses and progress towards goals. Additionally, we developed policy to allow easy access to volunteer opportunities and ensured faculty councils were also increasing their responsiveness and representativeness.

Results:

  • involved over 1000 students directly in idea generation and prioritization

  • implemented over 25 student-generated ideas

  • this project was a cornerstone of our broader outreach efforts that led to a 250% 

  • increased social media reach by over 250% increase in social media reach, and 61% increase in voter turnout over the prior year

Research Assistant, Office of the Mayor

My work with Mavericks of Social Change had attracted the attention of the Mayor of Halifax who offered me a job as a Research Assistant. I decided to put my university education on pause for a year to take in the experience. 

My research was focused on capturing municipal best practices from across the country on youth engagement and retention, community outreach, and violence prevention. This included large-scale reviews of a recreation subsidy program, of Youth Cabinet and Council representation structures, and coordinating a large-scale youth sector consultation process called Make Your Mark. 

Additionally, I aided other policy research and analysis projects as needed, in areas as wide ranging as Ferry infrastructure investment in Atlantic Canada, business incentivization programs, community safety initiatives, internal procedural issues associated with municipal council communications, and preparatory work for the Mayor's involvement in the Canadian Association of Municipalities (Big City Mayors Caucus). 

This proved to be a wholly unique experience, providing me with an intimate window into the intricacies of decision making processes that underpin politics, government and the public sector.

Fostering a Vibrant Student Life through Large-Scale Campus Events

As I entered into the role of Vice President (Student Life) I focused on a mandate of building as vibrant, inclusive and as engaging a campus as possible. Rather than allow expectations of prior years' programming to pre-determine my own activities, I began with a blank slate to strive to create offerings suited to the current realities of the ever-changing student population. 

The result was significant changes to the traditional Orientation Week structure, as well as the introduction of a variety of new initiatives including the initiation and coordination of TEDx Nova Scotia/ TEDx Halifax events at Dalhousie University

This role also required me to steward the planning of large-scale events associated with annual events such as Dalhousie's Homecoming, Daloween, Winter 'Frost' Week, and many additional events. It also entailed a supporting role in a variety of Executive projects, including strengthening collaboration with international students association, and supporting revamping of the DSU Food services operation and sustainability offices.

My TEDx Talk

In June 2013 I was lucky enough to speak at the Toronto Zoo as part of TEDxRougeRiver - just a few minutes down the road from where I grew up.

This proved to be an incredible spark in my own learning, challenging me to synthesize many years of study and experimentation in promoting civic engagement through my experiences with the Mayor of Halifax, Mavericks of Social Change and playing leadership roles in the Dalhousie Student Union.

In the resulting talk I aimed to diagnose the underlying issues causing citizens to disconnect from traditional political structures, to articulate why I believed these issues matter critically, and offer views towards the future of what a more engaging democracy could look like.

A special thanks to all those who helped me in preparing the talk (Barry Kunitz, Scott Baker) and those who provided some of the inspiration for the content (Dave Meslin, Samara Canada, Mark Dance, Idil Burale, and many more)

 

 

Labs for Systems Change

One of the highlights of my experience doing a social innovation study fellowship at MaRS was the opportunity to contribute to the Labs for Systems Change global gathering put on the the Solutions Lab and Social Innovation Generation (SiG) Network.

In advance of the conference I prepared a research report on the world's leading labs, and during the event my role was to co-host a half day of Open Space programming among world-class lab practitioners. 

I had previously had exposure to these methodologies in applying lab-inspired approaches to the creation of Brains for Change and Make Your Mark, however, it was in contributing to this conference that I truly gained an appreciation for the depth, breadth, and importance of this 'labs' movement. Take a look at the research primer I prepared for the SiG Network to learn more.  

The concept of a 'lab' is simple enough in a scientific setting. It is a place where experiments take place; where hypothesis' are tested. Widely it is accepted that the nature of experimentation often involves 'failure'. Regularly, the experiments that take place in our scientific labs might simply confirm what doesn't work. However, every once in while there can be big breakthroughs that lead to entire paradigm shifts, whether in our healthcare, in our energy supply, or in our cosmic understandings. In the public consciousness, the necessity of lab environments for the advancement of science is well understood.

Yet, in the context of our governments, there is little room for public sector to 'take risks' when trying to solve social or policy issues. Citizens are skeptical of tax dollars being "wasted", journalists are keen to stir up a scandal, and politicians are fearful of being embarrassed. The result is an intense accountability towards immediate and measureable results.

On one level this makes sense: we expect our investments to yield results. Yet, increasingly it feels like our traditional methodologies of understanding and action in the public sector aren't quite keeping up with the complexity of challenges like climate change, income inequality so we can't simply keep using the same old approaches. 

That is where the Labs for Systems Change community comes in. This is a global community of public sector pioneers, creating zones of experimentation to lead to new approaches to policy development and service delivery.

DSU President

Click to see a compilation of additional projects that we completed during my term as President

Never had I particularly aspired to get involved in student politics, but as a result of my experiences with Brains for Change I began to see the potential of Student Unions to help birth new modes of democratic dialogue and decision making. This was a vision exciting enough to compel me to run (and be elected) as President of the Union.

I often tell people I may never have another role that was as challenging as this one. Our student union was made of up twenty full-time staff (including four other student executives), an additional hundred part-time staff, dozens of committees, and hundreds of informal volunteers and external partners - and most importantly, the 18,000 members who pay annual dues to work on their behalf. At the core, my role was to enable a shared vision among these moving pieces and steward communication and coordination among them. 

I had entered the role with a particular focus on trying to better engage the broad based membership in helping inform decision making rather than rely exclusively on traditional Executive and Governing council-based structures. 

Additionally, this work on internal leadership also had to be mirrored in external representation to media, University committees (eg. Board of Governors and Senate), as well as Provincial and Federal governments, as well as to the associated student associations.  

I am proud to say we were able to achieve the majority of the items we set out in the strategic plan shown below (with the most significant projects described in greater detail below). What I was most proud of however was being able to build a sense of trust and buy-in among our leadership team that allowed us to get these projects done without the petty conflicts that can often define student politics. 

 

FEATURED PROJECTS:

Brains for Change

Based on my experience building the the Mavericks of Social Change collective, I was contracted during my 3rd year at Dalhousie University to spearhead the creation of a new community leadership development program within the student union. 

The vision of the student union program was born out of a desire for the DSU to play a more active role in cultivating and connect student leadership networks, and enabling them to pursue bold system changing ideas on campus and in the community. The aim was to create a safe space for new leaders to step forward, find their allies, test out new ideas, and build consensus for campus priorities. 

With the support of one of the most inspired teams' I've ever worked with and widespread buy-in from across campus, we put forward a series of regularly hosted events, micro-grants, created a physical hub space (called "the Sandbox"), and provided 'ongoing network navigation' support.

The program continually evolved over the course of four years, Incubating dozens of independent student-led spinoffs and laying the foundation for many institutional-led initiatives to respond to priorities emerging from community. The program eventually grew to be supported by five student staff and dozens of committed volunteers. 

On a personal level it also led to some of the most profound learning and relationships of my university career, for which I feel very grateful.

Highlights:

  • Engaged over 300 students per year in early stage project ideation, networking and incubation leading to the creation of dozens of new projects
  • Built community of practice via bi-weekly idea-sharing circles
  • Established physical hub space ("the Sandbox") as a home for campus community builders
  • Increased overall leadership development support funding by$60,000+ through consensus building amongst DSU Executives and Council, and by leveraging relationships with Faculty Deans and Senior Administration and private partners
  • Established $5000 "Social Innovation Challenge" to incentivize innovation and continuity 
  • Drastically revised Society Policy to reduce red tape to society start-up process

Mavericks of Social Change

Throughout my teenage years I had engaged in a series of small-scale entrepreneurial ventures (eg. starting an Ebay-based sports apparel and memorabilia business). The learning I took from these experiences felt much more empowering and useful than what I had taken in my high school classrooms. So upon my own high school graduation I set out to create an organization to help support applied, real-world learning for young people who would be following in my footsteps. The result was a youth-led organization called Mavericks of Social Change, formed as part of the Classroom Connection Learning Foundation.

Our work was focused on embedding social entrepreneurship curriculum into grade 7-12 classrooms, working in association with the Halifax Regional School Board and the Nova Scotia Department of Education (and with Pathways to Education in Toronto). Over four years of existence we provided learning opportunities inspired by an educational pedagogy focused on learning through action. With efforts focused around two main programs: PeaceJamHFX and Co-op Connections, our approach combined service learning, intergenerational mentorship, events, and access to micro grants funding so youth could have the experience of starting and leading their own projects. 

In an effort to sustain and scale-up our impact, we decided to end direct program-delivery and instead channelled the energy of the networks through like-minded youth engagement initiatives such as Make Your Mark and Brains for Change

On a personal level I learned a tremendous amount about volunteer recruitment, coordination, strategy planning and leadership from the experience, as well as grantwriting and fundraising through experiences securing contributions from Youthscape HRM (via McConnell Foundation), United Way of Greater Halifax, Telus Mobility, Capital DIstrict Health Authority's Community Health Boards, and small private sector donors.

Studio Y Fellowship

Studio Y is a fellowship program based at the MaRS Discovery District for promising young social entrepreneurs under the age of 30. 

I was a member of the first cohort of the program. It was a timely opportunity as I just returned to Toronto after seven years in Halifax and was keen to connect into Ontario's innovation ecosystems and understand the landscape of civic innovation and public engagement in Central Canada.

Studio Y offered the opportunity to do just that, allowing me to contribute to many projects of MaRS and its partners, including: Labs for Systems Change, 100in1, GovMaker, and aiding design, planning and facilitation of 12 additional events and a variety of public talks (including a talk at TEDxRougeRiver)

It also created space for my own learning, sharing, and reflection, through participation in a variety of skill development programs in topics as wide ranging as project management, design thinking, anti-oppressive practice, systems thinking, arts-based facilitation, graphic facilitation, public speaking, etc. 

TEDx Halifax and TEDx Nova Scotia

Bringing together 25 speakers, +500 attendees, dozens of community partners and hundreds of volunteers to celebrate thought leadership in Atlantic Canada

Challenge: Halifax boasts an impressive education sector with 6 post-secondary institutions hosting over 30,000 students. Yet, the broader community is often disconnected from the research activity as well as economic and cultural contributions of these communities.

Response: Established partnerships with TEDxHalifax and TEDxNovaScotia to host events at Dalhousie that celebrated the thought leadership offered within Halifax. The events involved talks from community members, professors, and students alike, with an eclectic audience of over 500 people in attending and thousands more watching online.

Arooma: Shared Housing for a Global Generation

Through my experiences engaging with AirBnB I realized the difficulties incoming international students and those on working holiday visas face in trying to secure appropriate long-term housing in Toronto due to a lack of domestic credit and employment history, as well as requirement of one year leases. 

In response I created Arooma Canada as a micro-enterprise to cater to the housing needs of this audience. This is primary focused on establishing well-managed shared living spaces that provide furnished rooms on flexible leases. Additionally, as a small scale pilot project we began a spin-off service to provide personalized househunting support to make for an easy and comfortable arrival.

Additionally, Arooma has begun to convene networks to rethink how we approach shared living, by trying to create a regulatory and financing environment that is conducive to effective shared living.  

On a personal level this has been a tremendous learning experience in global business model design and utilizing technology to support operational scaleability.