Tuesday, November 13th, 2012
Congratulations to recent Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal recipients who were honoured for their dedication and leadership in home and community care.
Recipients include Foundation grantees and collaborators: Lucy Barylak, CSSS Cavendish; Vickie Cammack, Tyze Personal Networks; Bonnie Schroeder, VON Canada; Nora Spinks, The Vanier Institute of the Family; and Sherri Torjman, Caledon Institute, among others.
Wednesday, October 24th, 2012
A recent report on Vibrant Communities (VC)—a national poverty reduction initiative led by the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement in partnership with the Caledon Institute of Social Policy and the Foundation—focuses on the essential role that national supports played in the success of the initiative.
Inspired Learning: An Evaluation of Vibrant Communities’ National Supports, with a foreword from Foundation President Stephen Huddart, evaluates the design of the learning and networking features provided with national supports to local VC initiatives (also referred to as a hub or backbone organization). The report highlights the specific impact of providing national supports to such a large and complex pan-Canadian initiative. Inspired Learning is a companion report to the earlier Evaluating Vibrant Communities: 2002-2010, which evaluated the key results VC generated for thousands of low-income households across Canada.
Friday, July 29th, 2011
The Caledon Institute’s Anne Makhoul recently documented the lessons learned from the Canadian Caregiver Coalition’s (CCC) successful effort to bring the issues of family caregivers to the attention of Canadian politicians and policy makers.
The report, Effecting Policy Change: Lessons from the Canadian Caregiver Coalition, produced with the Foundation’s support, focuses on the CCC’s use of Strategic Inquiry (SI) to achieve its long- and short-term public policy goals. SI helps organizations use appropriate methods and tailored messages to engage with policy-makers. The SI approach was developed and contributed by Sean Moore of the Advocacy School.
As Makhoul explains, “Neither mysterious nor manipulative, SI is about putting the asker into a government mindset. By understanding politicians’ and bureaucrats’ top-of-mind issues, pressures; likely policy developments and the players involved, the inquirer is able to shape the needs of their audience into messages that government can ‘hear’.”
Download Effecting Policy Change: Lessons from the Canadian Caregiver Coalition
Monday, November 1st, 2010
Social innovation is the theme of the current issue of The Philanthropist, a quarterly journal for practitioners, scholars, supporters, and others engaged in the nonprofit sector in Canada. 
Foundation staff, as well as many friends of the Foundation, contributed articles.
The Foundation’s COO, Stephen Huddart, authored one of the journal’s overview articles, entitled Patterns, Principles, and Practices in Social Innovation, which explores various dimensions of the field of social innovation.
Friday, October 1st, 2010
Yesterday, national sponsors of Vibrant Communities Canada released a report of a nine-year experiment that demonstrates the positive impacts of an innovative and collaborative approach to fighting poverty that is driving individual benefits, neighborhood changes and large scale community poverty reductions.
The report, Vibrant Communities Canada 2002-2010 Evaluation Report, highlights key results and offers deeper understanding of the critical success factors, effectiveness and patterns identified through the Vibrant Communities experiment.
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