by Mandana Attar Zadeh, Community Engagement and Empowerment Specialist
It was a busy winter afternoon at work in early 2020 when I received an email from our community development officer at the City of Toronto. I browsed over the e-mail, as I usually did for the things that weren’t directly related to my day to day work and the many projects that I had on hand. But this time, the moment I opened the attachment my eyes started to shine and I was captivated, right there and then.
The email was about UpSocial Canada looking for a partner to explore innovative ideas on creating a “Caring Community” and to foster a sense of belonging at a neighbourhood level. I have been working in community development and health promotion for 15years and I had never seen something like this before. As someone who comes from a public health/health promotion background and is familiar with the famous approach of “Thinking globally, Acting locally”, I was stunned by how beautifully the “Caring Communities Challenge” project brought these two concepts together. Responding to the global need for belonging and community building, the project allowed for a tailored response with a local plan of action guided by resident input. It provided an opportunity to have the best of both worlds; to learn from worldwide experience from the rich directory of UpSocial’s global project, while still carefully incorporating the elements of local wisdom into that global perspective.
I had been leading a neighbourhood improvement and community development project for almost 10 years in the Bathurst-Finch neighbourhood. Over the years, we had successfully built a strong foundation of resident leadership to support dozens of resident-led groups, projects and neighbourhood partnerships. I was fascinated by the UpSocial Canada approach to joint community development and innovation work and the possibilities that it brought to our residents to move them to the next level.
I started talking to my managers right away to get their permission to apply for the partnership. Initially, they were reluctant about getting involved in a complex, long and vague process. However, after a few rounds of conversation, they trusted I would figure out how to deal with those challenges.. We submitted the application and were soon selected as the official partner. Our journey with UpSocial Canada began.
Little did we know back then that we were about to face a worldwide shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis would drastically change many things, including our approach to community development. We also had no clue about other challenges we had to face during this journey.
Today, however, I’m proud to say that despite all the ups and downs, we managed to go through the process successfully. We formed a vibrant cohort of stakeholders and partners, searched for, selected and tested “belonging” innovations successfully. We even took steps to find and secure scaling partners. Yes! And now I’m even more excited to tell you that we are going to share this journey with you! Geraldine Cahill, Director of UpSocial Canada and myself, with support from Ontario Trillium Foundation, have co-authored a series of four article to share our learning.
Who should read this?
If you have innovative ideas for tackling complex issues in your community or neighbourhood, but are concerned about ambiguity and the challenges of resourcing the project; if you are curious about how to create effective partnership tables of residents, community organizations and subject matter experts, then this series of articles is for you. The articles will help you by providing insights, helpful tips and strategies to tackle those challenges.
There is often a lot of enthusiasm for including residents in the design and implementation of programs and initiatives, however, it’s hard to sell the long road of experimental processes to nonprofit funders and management. In this series we focus on how to create a collaborative space for residents, community service agencies and innovation professionals to work together effectively – a combination that is often desired but usually feels outside of the comfort zone of many non-profit and government organizations. Agencies often don’t feel equipped to work with the grassroots and bring them to the decision making table. Our experience shows that these processes are less risky than they appear, and deliver very valuable and positive partnership and network outcomes far in excess of the main objectives.
In our first article, “Setting the Table for Collaboration” we share our process for bringing diverse stakeholders together to work on a complex social issue with a focus on creating a vibrant and generative grassroots and agency mix.
Our second Article, “Holding Space in Challenging Times” will tell you the story of challenges we faced during the process, from Covid-19 to losing a critical funder in the middle of the project. We share insights on surmounting the hurdles and making the best of the situation.
The third article, “Destination Unknown” takes a deep dive into the uncertainty that is inherent to community development and innovation work and how we worked around that with strategies like building trust and leaning on partners’ and resident wisdom.
Our final article, “Fostering Partnership to Get to Scale” provides helpful insights and strategies for scaling a successful pilot of a community development innovation project featuring the UpSocial methodology’s attention to partnership engagement.
The articles are short and sweet! They are written in a format that summarizes the process and our learning in a way we hope you find engaging and useful.
Learn more about the project here.
UpSocial Canada uses a social lab approach to facilitate the identification and scaling of transformative social innovations with communities. UpSocial Canada is a project of MakeWay.
