2007/08

Using Your Voice to Deliver Your Message

Bonnie Gross, President, SpeechScience Inc.
Remember the last time you ‘listened’ to a public speaker with your head bent over your BlackBerry? You managed to get some work done, but imagine how the speaker felt! Don’t let that happen to you! Learn to use your voice to captivate your audience and deliver your message effectively. Bonnie Gross will lead this interactive session, offering tips and tools to ensure that your next presentation won’t be delivered to a sea of bowed heads. Bonnie is a speech language pathologist and a professional trainer focusing on fearless public speaking, voice, language training and communication skills.

Turning Around Your Organization

Paul Davidson, Executive Director, World University Service of Canada
How can you work with your board, donors, staff and other stakeholders to introduce significant change without alienating long-term supporters? How can you shift from seemingly endless consultative processes towards action and results? How do you ensure that new visions for your organization honour the past, but are not constrained by it? For example, in the corporate world, turnarounds are often achieved by hiring a new leader, firing staff, and changing the board. Here are the five good ideas that can help social purpose organizations take practical action to achieve meaningful organizational change. Paul Davidson has held leadership positions in the public, private and voluntary sectors. He shares his experience and lessons learned from leading turnarounds in each sphere.

Hiring the Right Person

Suzie Addison-Toor, Engage Consulting
Finding the right person for your team is incredibly important. The success of a non-profit organization, or any organization for that matter, depends upon the strengths and talents of its employees. They are the thinkers, the creators, and the innovators that drive an organization. They deliver the services, build relationships with stakeholders and become the organization’s link to the community. Hiring the right person requires a careful investment of time and effort – a tall order when you are pressured by a lack of time and resources. A successful hire opens up the potential to promote and enrich your organizational culture and enables innovation and growth. On the other hand, a mistake in hiring is costly and exhausting for an organization in the long run. In an environment where our budgets are stretched and our HR resources are scare, a creative and intentional look at how we are hiring our people could be just the ticket!

Building Networks

Rahul Bhardwaj, President & CEO, Toronto Community Foundation
In today’s world, collaboration, partnership and ‘adding value’ are important to any recipe for success of a non-profit organization. But you can’t do it alone. In order to achieve results and impact, organizations and their leadership must expand beyond their traditional partners and stakeholder groups in order to create synergistic and innovative relationships that energize, excite and lead to change. By developing broad based networks, leaders of organizations can increase their influence, relationships and ability to deliver on their organization’s mission. Building a network can be daunting for many. This presentation will help you to develop a framework for building your own network, and in doing so you will see that building a network is not the same thing as networking, that it really is better to give than to receive , and how two “no’s” do, in fact, make a “yes”.

Building a Movement

Mary W. Rowe, Vice President, Urban Programs, blue moon fund
Building a movement for social change takes passion, energy and resources. Social movements have a life cycle: they are created, they grow, they achieve successes or failures and eventually dissolve and cease to exist. In this session Mary Rowe will highlight this lifecycle by examining a variety of tools to encourage innovative, holistic approaches to building a movement. Mary’s long and productive career has focused on facilitating solutions to complex problems in the public realm. In particular she played an instrumental role in advocating for a new deal for cities in Canada as Director of Ideas that Matter and currently works with a US philanthropic initiative fostering self-organization in urban communities.

Reaching Out in a Web 2.0 World

Jason Mogus, CEO, Communicopia
Do you know what is meant by ‘Web 2.0′? And, more importantly, are you ready to live it? Many people mistakenly believe that the web is simply about reaching more people, publishing more information and targeting a wider audience. In truth, this is only a tiny part of how the web is helping change society for the better. Traditional institutions are becoming weaker; consumers are more informed; people have higher expectations of services, charities and governments. Jason Mogus understands that the internet now reflects this change and represents a culture shift impacting upon us all. He reveals how and why Web 2.0 can help organizations working in social change interact more with their audience, listen and learn, share stories and develop greater transparency.

Institutional Change: Turning a Ship… it takes time!

Alok Mukherjee, Chair, Toronto Police Services Board
Everyone’s heard the refrain: ‘Institutional change takes time. Be patient.’ This notion is perhaps one of the greatest sources of conflict and mistrust between organizations and seekers of change. While it is true that real, lasting change is time-consuming, there is no formula or model to quantify or predict the time required for an institutional change process. At the same, the issue of time and patience poses a challenge for volunteer boards that typically have a limited period of office and are anxious not to be dismissed as ineffectual or irrelevant. Alok Mukherjee identifies and explores concrete ways in which a volunteer board committed to genuine institutional change can achieve significant results within its finite term of office.