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Stop Talking – Start Engaging
Stop Talking at Your Community. It’s Time Actually to Engage You’ve seen it. The glossy brochure, the slick presentation, the town hall meeting that’s more of a monologue than a dialogue. Organisations waltz into communities, convinced they have all the answers, and then act surprised when their brilliant plans are met with apathy, suspicion, or…
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Empowering the Facilitators
Empowering the Facilitators: Building Staff Capacity for Effective Tenant Participation When we talk about tenant participation, the conversation often revolves around “fixing” tenants—providing them with training, tools, and opportunities to engage. While tenant empowerment is undeniably important, there’s a glaring blind spot in this narrative. The real bottleneck lies not in the tenants’ willingness to…
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Tenant Participation vs. Placemaking
Tenant Participation vs. Placemaking: Untangling the Web of Community Buzzwords When discussing thriving communities and social impact, specific terms such as “tenant participation,” “community engagement,” “community development,” and “placemaking” are everywhere. But what do these mean? More importantly—where do people keep getting them mixed up? In this blog, we’ll clearly define these concepts using insights…
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When Collaboration Crumbles
Before we go any further, I must be brutally honest. While our Waterloo community was still raw and grieving after, yet another welfare check that ended in a wholly preventable death, I found myself stuck in a “collaborative” meeting that should have driven change. Instead, I was refereeing dysfunction—watching bright, passionate people tangle themselves into…
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When Your Boss Won’t Manage (or Do Much of Anything)
There’s no gentle way to say this: a non-managing boss in a non-profit—or worse, one who flat-out does nothing—can feel like an anchor dragging your ship to the bottom. In NGOs, where passion and purpose drive every team member, a leader who takes “fake it till you make it” to Olympic levels is more than…