Five Good Ideas Podcast Maytree Foundation

This session provides a guide to participating in nonprofit boards, drawing on the expert knowledge of Rick Powers, a governance and board leadership specialist at Rotman School of Management.
Topics include the importance of understanding fiduciary duty and duty of care, addressing the "information chasm" between board members and management, the significance of financial literacy, CEO succession planning, board memberships and recruiting, and dealing with conflicts of interest.
Rick places emphasis on the necessity for passion about the cause, as well as clarity of role expectations for effective board membership.
For Rick's full bio, resources, and the session transcript, visit the Five Good Ideas website.

Your non-profit organization does good work and has an important story to tell.
Media coverage can be a great way to establish credibility, build cachet, and reach a larger audience.
But journalists are not necessarily short on stories or sources.
So what are the Five Good Ideas for getting a journalist to call you back?
Denise Balkissoon, Ontario bureau chief of The Narwhal, joins Maytree president Elizabeth McIsaac to explain how she identifies stories and sources.
For Denise's ideas, resources, and full bio, visit the Five Good Ideas session page.

It can be hard sustaining a collaboration because tackling community issues together creates challenges to partnership and momentum. But you can set up a collaboration for success. Focus on four areas—people, resources, process, and impact—and the factors that determine their quality, like leadership, funding, community engagement, and the ability to influence policy and systems that lead to collective change. When things do get hard (and they will), the collaboration’s resilience will be proven by its overall health and well-being, as well as its ability to adapt, shift, and change. 
 
In this session, recorded live on May 8, 2023, Liz Weaver and Mike Des Jardins of the Tamarack Institute share stories and provide helpful ideas about how to make a collaboration more sustainable, resilient, and impactful. They discuss how collaborations can develop a sustainable approach during the early phases of their work. They also pose the question: What really needs to be sustained and how might this work? 
 
[5:50] 1. Define what is a sustainable collaboration  [11:32 2. Focus on people, process, resources, and impact [16:42] 3. Centre equity in the design of sustainability [20:03] 4. Adapt to changing communities / collaboration [24:05] 5. Include funders in the process [27:05] Q & A 
 
Download the session handout. Follow along with the transcript. 
 
Presenter bios:  
 
Liz Weaver is co-CEO at the Tamarack Institute. 
Liz leads the Tamarack Learning Centre providing strategic direction for the design and development of learning activities. The focus of the Tamarack Le

Silence around questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the workplace has started to sound more like complicity. Now people can’t talk enough about EDI. But how do you put all you’ve read and learned into action?
In this session, recorded live on March 31, 2023, Dr. Tanya (Toni) De Mello, Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion, Toronto Metropolitan University, shared the ways in which feeling like you belong, knowing you’ll be included, and seeing your work community as “your” community matters. She provided some advice on how you can achieve this sense of community and belonging at your organization and shed some light on what you may be doing to hinder it.
1. Reflect on who’s in your group [6:05] 2. Belonging is more than salary and job location [12:33] 3. Representation is a major part of systemic change [19:22]  4. You need to do the performative and substantive work [22:51] 5. If this work is done meaningfully, then it’s messy [28:14]
Q & A [35:21 ]
Download the session handout. Follow along with the transcript.
Presenter bio: Toni is Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion, Toronto Metropolitan University.
With a background comprising finance, management consulting, and law, Tanya (who we call “Toni”) De Mello has spent much of her career focusing on, and researching, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). She is a human rights lawyer and a certified coach and mediator. She has taught at University of Toronto and University, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and several Colleges. She worked at TMU as the Director of Human Rights and then Lincoln Alexander School of Law, which is Canada’s newest law school the in 2019. She is currently the Vice President, Equity and Community Inclusion. She has worked with over 100 organizations in training, consulting, and supporting them in the EDI journey.
In addition to founding two NGOs, Toni has served in the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the World Food Programme in Geneva (Switzerland), Senegal (West Africa), and Columbia (South America). Toni holds a dual Bachelor of Economics and Political Science from the University of Waterloo; a double Master in Public Policy and Urban and Regional Planning from Princeton University; and a dual law degree from McGill University and a Master of Counselling and Psychotherapy from the University of Toronto. She also completed her doctors at the University of Toronto, where she was looking at bias in hiring in Canada.

“We couldn’t do it without you!” “Without strong partners, this couldn’t be done.” We use these phrases because they are at the heart of how we work for social change. Social change does not happen in a vacuum. 
In this session, recorded live on February 23, Agapi Gessesse, Executive Director, CEE Centre for Black Young Professionals, shared her five good ideas on how community organizations, governments, and corporations can create ecosystems where everyone benefits from each other’s work, and advances the social change that we all want to see.
[3:58] 1. Build relationships (strategically) [10:39] 2. Make sure everyone is benefitting mutually through the relationships[15:01] 3. Directions must have an ESG plan (ESG stands for “environmental, social, and (corporate) governance”) [20:05] 4. Non-profit organizations should have a government relations plan [31:35] 5. Determine from the onset what success could look like and how long it will take[36:07 ] Q & A 
Download the session handout. Follow along with the transcript. 
Presenter bio: Agapi is Executive Director of CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals, an organization dedicated to addressing economic issues affecting Black youth. She is passionate about CEE’s mission-driven and evidence-based work. 
Agapi also served as Executive Director of POV 3rd Street, an organization that helps marginalized youth break into the media industry through training, mentorship, job placement, and professional development opportunities. Through prior work as a fundraising professional, social enterprise manager, and coordinator of youth leadership programs, Agapi has established a record of accomplishment in operations management, program implementation and evaluation, financial stewardship, partner development, and community engagement. Her experience includes positions with United Way of Greater Toronto and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation.

How can you advance your non-profit’s values through the use of technology?
 
In this session, recorded live on January 23, Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN and author of The Tech That Comes Next¸ and Katie Gibson, Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience, presented their answers to this question.
 
[5:38] 1. Never put technology ahead of people.
[10:23] 2. Create diverse tech committees to support decisions, testing, and feedback.
[15:01] 3. Only collect data you can protect. And give it back to its owner.
[19:52] 4. Make your values the foundation for technology adoption and investment.
[27:41] 5. Make your voice heard in the technology policy-making process.
[34:13 ] Q & A
 
Download the session handout. Follow along with the transcript.
 
Presenter bios:
 
Amy Sample Ward believes that technology should be accessible and accountable to everyone, especially communities historically and systemically excluded from the digital world. They are the CEO of NTEN, a non-profit creating a world where missions and movements are more successful through the skillful and equitable use of technology. Amy’s second book, Social Change Anytime Everywhere, was a Terry McAdam Book Award finalist. Their most recent book is The Tech That Comes Next, with Afua Bruce.
 
Katie Gibson is a lawyer by training and an activist at heart. She is passionate about using entrepreneurial tools for social impact. Katie led strategy and partnerships at the CIO (Chief Information Officer) Strategy Council, a nonprofit focused on Canada’s digital transformation. In this role, she cofounded the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience, where she is now Executive Director. She also leads work on sustainable IT and responsible AI (Artificial Intelligence). You may also have crossed paths with Katie in her previous roles as general counsel in a national youth charity, as director of Social Enterprise for the Ontario government, or in her work at the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing.