building social infrastructure - centraide of greater montreal

Centraide of Greater Montreal’s experience and approach with

Montreal’s neighbourhood round tables

Centraide of Greater Montreal and its

community engagement strategy

Centraide’s Greater Montreal territory

Diverse social realities

Disparities within the region

Montreal’s 29

neighbourhood

round tables

What do neighbourhood

round tables do?

Areas of intervention

OPA neighbourhood walk

– Cooperative process by the stakeholders and citizens of a local community.

• Improve human development outcomes• Improve overall living conditions• Acting from a global vision for change• Comprehensive and integrated approach

Networks for local social development

How they work

BOARD OR STEER ING

COMMIT TEE

Working groups:

Food security

Housing

School success

Employment

Three key roles that round tables invest in:

• Facilitate ongoing communication and dialogue

• Invest in building the capacity of their member groups

• Reach out to and engage residents

What role for community agencies?

Achieving results : Living

conditionsPlaces L'Acadie et Henri-Bourassa Before After

Achieving results : Service coordination

A meeting of “bottom-up” practices…

Drivers behind the round table model:

18 boroughs 12 local health and

social service centres

The Montreal Initiative for Local

Social Development

29 round tables

Drivers behind the round table

model:…and top-down influences

Centraide : additional top-up and project funding to round tables

30%

18%18%

34%

Types of funding

Coordination support Neighbourhood planningResident mobilization Specific projects

A distinct capacity-building

approach

• The importance of the multisector approach

• Work to make local contexts conducive to collaboration

• Develop collaborative leadership

• Attend to inclusive and democratic governance

What we’ve learned about conditions for

success…

Align

Plan

Mobilize

Engage

Act

It takes time…

Influence

Evaluate, learn, adjust

Leverage resources

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Centraide of Greater Montreal’s experience and approach with Montreal’s neighbourhood round tables

In Montreal, Centraide has chosen to invest in a network approach to local community development. A particularly good example of this network approach can be found in Montreal’s neighbourhood round tables. Since 2000, Centraide has progressively implemented a shift towards an integrated community engagement strategy. The vision underlying this shift:

• A dynamic and engaged community is a community that works together – that calls upon all of its stakeholders to work together – in order to develop and act upon a vision for itself as a better place to live, work, and learn…. for all of its residents.

• For Centraide, more particularly, it is a community that recognizes the need to put in place strategies that will help to reduce poverty and allow its most vulnerable residents to be fully included.

• It is a community in which community agencies play a leadership role in convening and working with other stakeholders in order to implement coordinated actions and solutions ; one in which the culture of collaboration encourages innovation, and one in which progress is made and can be measured.

Centraide’s support for neighbourhood round tables is a key part of this strategy.

An overview of Centraide’s Greater Montreal territory:

1) Three different administrative regions:

• Montreal (island) – population 1 886 485 (1,9 M) • Laval (island) – population 401 555 (0,4 M) • Part of Montérégie (vast area that encompasses the urban south shore of Montreal,

suburban municipalities, rural zones that range all the way between the St. Lawrence River to the U.S. border) -‐ population 1,4 M

• Centraide’s territory doesn’t cover this entire administrative region (0,8 M or 57% of the entire population of Montérégie)

There are different municipal realities within each region:

• Montreal island has the amalgamated City of Montreal, and 15 municipalities that opted to remain independent

• Laval is one city • Centraide’s part of Montérégie has 6 urban municipalities and 41 smaller communities

located within 5 rural or semi-‐rural counties

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2) Social development planning happens in different ways in each of these regions, i.e. responsibilities are distributed and taken up differently within each one. By and large, though, it’s safe to say that there is no one central social planning authority in any of the 3 regions… I’m going to be focusing the rest of my presentation on Montreal and on its 29 round tables. I’m choosing this focus today because these round tables have some key common features and a longer collective track record – and they lend themselves to a cohesive demonstration. But before I go on I do want to mention that Centraide also provides funding support to a handful of similar “round table” entities in the Greater Montreal area. These are indicated on the map by stars…

Montreal and its neighbourhoods… … span diverse social realities, ranging from high and concentrated poverty/disadvantage to more hidden and dispersed poverty/disadvantage Overall, Montreal Island has a median after-‐tax household income of just under 40 000$ (39 897$). It has a relatively diverse population: 1/3 born outside Canada, over 8% are newcomers who arrived in the country after 2005. As with any city, the averages hide disparities… This map (slide #5) shows the distribution of material disadvantage (an index devised using statistics on income, employment rates and educational levels). In the dark orange sections, 60% to 100% of the population is in the lowest quintile of material disadvantage…. These disparities also show up in terms of life expectancy. Here, people who live in the orange-‐shaded parts have a significantly lower life expectancy than the regional average. The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies on the island is 11 years. Centraide supports 29 neighbourhood round tables within the city of Montreal. These 29 “neighbourhoods” are quite diverse:

- They cover the older neighbourhoods of Montreal’s dense urban core, as a well as a number of communities with more suburban characteristics.

- They range in size from 10 000 to 100 000 residents. What is the social development planning landscape in Montreal? To give an overview:

- In the public sector – and most particularly the City of Montreal and Public Health which reports to the Ministry of Health and Social Services – there are complex, multi-‐layered, and overlapping responsibilities and mandates (that play out at both the regional level and within local jurisdictions)

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- There is a strong civil society presence with deep roots (I don’t have an accurate number at my fingertips, but according to a government portal, over 1000 agencies on the island of Montreal qualify for some kind of government funding)

- There is currently a lack of a regional planning and coordinating body, although Montreal’s Social Development Forum is in the process of re-‐emergence.

- Centraide is an important player within this arena, as both a funder (to 360 agencies and initiatives in Greater Montreal) and a regional partner in planning initiatives.

Within this complicated landscape, what do the round tables do? They convene and mobilize stakeholders at the neighbourhood level (I’ll give examples in a moment of who these stakeholders are), in order to achieve :

- integrated social development planning, - strategic coordination of action on locally determined priorities in order to

achieve collective impact; … and to design and manage joint projects that are part of the collective impact effort. Areas of intervention can include:

- access to services/adapting services and infrastructure, - prevention and promotion strategies (e.g. early childhood, families), - employment and economic development, - housing and food, - urban development

Networks for local social development The round tables act as the hubs of a network that comes together to improve conditions for the residents of a community – and especially its most vulnerable residents. This last piece is always a core concern – it is central to the round tables’ understanding of their mission. Does this correspond to the network of care model that you folks are thinking about? I believe that it does… But I believe that it goes even further. For us in Montreal, the round tables are carrying out local social development mandates: Local social development is a cooperative process that is conceived and carried out by the stakeholders and citizens of a local community.

- It seeks to improve human development outcomes at an individual and collective level, and to improve overall living conditions with regards to their social, cultural, economic and environmental aspects.

- This development process requires acting from a global vision for change, and relies on a comprehensive and integrated approach that recognizes that all these dimensions of development are interrelated, and that we must seek complementarity in our actions to address them.

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How they work: All of the round tables are themselves incorporated nonprofits, but they do not function like classic social service agencies. Their role is to bring together and leverage the collective capacity of local stakeholders for the betterment of the neighbourhood. There is a diversity of models, but…. a typical neighbourhood round table might be structured like this:

- A membership that seeks to bring together a broad cross-‐representation of local stakeholders (community agencies, institutions such as schools, local health & social services and borough government, residents, even local businesses);

- A board of directors or steering committee that is representative of this diversity - Working groups which may be made of members and other collaborators that have

expertise or resources to contribute; their role is to develop and carry out action on specific development priorities that have been collectively identified (e.g.’s to use: healthy food access, housing, employment, school success). Like the board, the working groups are answerable to the membership. Other neighbourhoods might choose to organize their working groups according to populations: children and youth, seniors, newcomers…

In order to achieve this kind of capacity for collective action, there are 3 key roles that the round tables need to invest in: 1 – It is critical that they work to facilitate ongoing communication and dialogue amongst neighbourhood players. Thus, outside of the periodic planning exercises (every 3 to 5 years), they convene ongoing forum spaces with members and partners where information is shared, issues and ideas are discussed, follow-‐ups are decided upon, progress is reported upon and monitored. This generally takes two forms:

a) -‐ The convening of regular assemblies or forums: ranging from monthly to several times a year, open to members or to the broader community

For those of you who have read any of the collective impact articles popularized by Kania, Kramer & Fay Hanleybrowne of FSG, the round tables function like collective impact “backbone organizations”. These backbone organizations perform 6 essential functions: • Guide vision and strategy • Support aligned activities • Manage data collection and analysis (establish shared measurement practices) • Coordinate community outreach & handle communications • Promote change in policy and institutional practices at the local and regional levels • Mobilize funding

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-‐ Their purpose is to share information about programs and projects, discuss issues as they emerge and involve and impact residents and service providers, track the progress of joint initiatives… -‐ These assemblies or forums usually have decision-‐making or direction-‐setting powers. b) -‐ The development of ongoing communication tools to facilitate one-‐way or multi-‐directional information-‐sharing amongst round tables members and partners, and residents -‐ At the very least, this means producing electronic newsletters on a monthly or quarterly basis; but more and more round tables now curate websites that serve as community information clearinghouses; they model transparency by having all of their own diagnostics, planning documents and reports freely available on the site….

2 – They very often need to invest in building the capacity of their member groups to engage in the network and to contribute to action on neighbourhood priorities. Two examples of this:

1. In the neighbourhood of Montreal-‐North, housing was identified as a priority area of intervention; however, there were very few resources offering services in the area. The round table there led a process with member groups to collectively prioritize that new funding to the neighbourhood should flow to the small and struggling agency that provides assistance to tenants living in poor housing conditions.

2. At one point in the St-‐Michel neighbourhood, the family resource centre was experiencing serious management difficulties to the point that Centraide’s continued funding was called into question; this was an agency located in an isolated and high-‐needs part of the neighbourhood. The round table convened its family support working group to devise an assistance plan for this agency in overcoming its difficulties. When the problems proved to be too great and Centraide announced that it was going to have to terminate its funding, this working group then decided, collectively, which agencies would be best positioned to fill the gaps in services in this sector, and they helped Centraide to identify the two agencies that we would redirect our funding towards.

In both of these cases, the round table recognized that the neighbourhood needed to have solid agencies capable of providing services in key areas (referring both to geographical sectors, and to areas of intervention). 3 – They need to develop the means to reach out to and engage residents. In any given neighbourhood, the nonprofit and public stakeholders that are part of a round table are all working in their own way to improve the lives of some or all of the neighbourhood’s residents. Some agencies might be thinking more in terms of “clients” or “service users”, government services or elected officials might be thinking in terms of “citizens”, “voters” or even “taxpayers”, but everyone has some sort of stake in serving and/or working with the resident population. Given this, it only makes sense to reach out to residents themselves and to include them in the processes that involve identifying priority needs and planning and carrying out actions to

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address them. Over the past 10 year, this has become part of the DNA of most round tables’ practices. This takes a variety of forms:

• Many of the “neighbourhood” units that we are talking about here are geographically quite large – remember that the largest have a population of 100 000, and so the round tables will often work in subsectors (voisinages), door-‐knocking, holding informal “urban cafés” on different themes that speak to day-‐to-‐day concerns that residents may have, such as neighbourhood safety, transportation and transit issues, access to day care, etc…

• As the next slide illustrates, member agencies also play a key role here in mobilizing their own user/participant base;

• A number of round tables include residents in their governance structures, including the Board (they deal with issues of representation in different ways…);

• Following some round tables’ neighbourhood forums, some of them support action committees that are citizen-‐led and citizen-‐driven.

What role do community agencies play within the neighbourhood round tables?

In any given neighbourhood, Centraide funds between 4 and 10 agencies as well as the round table. Centraide expects these agencies to work together and to contribute to the accomplish of the neighbourhood plan according to what they are best equipped to do; we communicate the expectation that they approach their mission with a “wide-‐angle lens” – a focus on the change they aim to contribute to as opposed to a more narrow focus on programs and services. 1 -‐ Agencies contribute their expertise according to their mission and the issues that they engage with (e.g. a newcomer settlement agency would bring its knowledge of its clientele and the particular issues they are confronted with). 2-‐ They “mobilize” their client base, ensure that their voice is represented (this becomes especially critical when agencies are working with the most vulnerable segments of the population, whose perspectives might not otherwise be heard…. 3 -‐ They become lead agencies for neighbourhood initiatives, whether this be as en extension of their existing programming, or whether it involve developing new activities. As an example, a community centre in the St-‐Michel neighbourhood took on a new mandate to develop a housing information and tenant assistance service, because it was a collectively identified and prioritized need.

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Examples of what neighbourhood round tables can accomplish

A. Improving living conditions 1. Collective empowerment & impact in the face of a critical housing situation (Places

l’Acadie/Henri-‐Bourassa)

Places l’Acadie/Henri-‐Bourassa (PAHB) was a 780-‐dwelling high-‐rise complex that originally housed almost 2000 vulnerable residents (82% below LICO in 2008, almost 90% immigrants and 60% newcomers, 42 different languages spoken). By the early 2000s the dwellings had fallen into a state of serious disrepair… situation which only got worse over the following 8-‐9 years: broken plumbing and heating systems, vermin, mould, serious structural damage. The landlord refused to carry out building repairs despite multiple inspections and multiple fines from the City. The residents were particularly vulnerable and isolated, and in no position to organize themselves to have their basic rights as tenants respected. PAHB had gained a bad social reputation, as well; the police was regularly called in to intervene in conflicts. The round table of the Bordeaux-‐Cartierville neighbourhood, where these high rises were located, initiated an eight-‐year collective intervention, which sought to empower the residents of PAHB and to obtain improvements to their housing situation. It was a collective intervention because it brought together 25 partners (community groups, residents and local institutions including schools, the police, the borough, health and social services). The partners worked with the residents to build a sense of community within the complex, bringing in a variety of services and activities (information, counseling and referral, homework help for school-‐age kids, second language training, youth programming… ). This collective approach yielded results: the residents developed a stronger voice together, and together with the other partners mobilized around this project, they were able to exert a stronger pressure on the City to purchase the land and have the site redeveloped in a way that responded to a number of the community’s wishes (by 2008, the buildings were too deteriorated to be renovated and so the site was entirely redeveloped). Through this initiative, neighbourhood agencies learned about adapting their services to specific realities and needs within their community, and learned how to work together to offer coordinated services in one high-‐needs pocket of the larger neighbourhood. 2. Bringing healthy eating opportunities to a food desert In 2006, the round table for the Rosemont neighbourhood (total population 83 500) organized a social forum in which residents, community groups and local institutions came together to decide on neighbourhood development priorities and to launch an action plan to move things forward. One of the issues identified was that the eastern part of the neighbourhood was “devitalized” – services and businesses tended to be concentrated in the western part of the neighbourhood, and yet there were several pockets in the east where low income and other forms of social disadvantage were concentrated. Along with these problems, the sector was identified as a “food desert”; according to a mapping exercise carried out by Montreal’s Public Health Department, there were no vendors of fresh foods within an easy access radius.

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A Food Access Action Group was created, which in 2011-‐12 counted 7 organizations and 4 residents. Alongside a number of shorter-‐term and more partial measures (such as bringing seasonal farmers’ markets to this sector), they worked to create a more permanent solution to the problem. In 2012, a new greengrocer social enterprise (Le Petit Marché de l’Est) opened its doors in the eastern sector of the neighbourhood. Its primary aim is of course to improve fresh food access at reasonable prices to the people living in this sector, but it also aims to help stimulate commercial development within this sector, to help make the eastern sector a better place to live. It brings the social part of its mission to life by acting as a fruit and vegetable distribution centre for local groups and institutions, and by offering programming to the public that promotes healthy eating habits. This initiative was singled out for an award last year by a well-‐known institute in Quebec (l’Institut du Nouveau Monde) that runs an annual social entrepreneurship contest.

B. Service coordination 3. Working together to “move the needle” on school dropout rates

Montreal’s Southwest borough’s deindustrialization in the 1970’s and 80’s left behind a working-‐class population with a low education level and very few job prospects. Thirty years later, a number of things have changed, but a number of those baseline demographics – and the social problems that go along with them – are still there. High school dropout rates are among the highest in Montreal: 68% in one high school in the district, 48% in the other. In the mid-‐2000’s, the 4 neighbourhood round tables of this borough got together and decided to try to do something different about this problem. They started from a premise that school success is everybody’s business, and set about trying to mobilize all of the stakeholders who could have a role to play: community groups, parents and youth, schools, local public services, even businesses. The Southwest Action Committee on School Perseverance (CAPSSOM) pursued 3 goals:

1. Collaboration and coordination amongst stakeholders capable of having an impact on school perseverance in the Southwest borough;

2. Support and recognition for the key role that parents have to play in their children’s school perseverance;

3. Development, consolidation and promotion of coordinated school perseverance programming in the Southwest.

The mobilization phase – the period of reaching out, of gathering data to better understand the problem, of building a common understanding and will to act together on the problem – lasted for several years before a phase of tighter coordination and action planning began beginning in 2009-‐10. This was an ambitious endeavour when, in Montreal and in these neighbourhoods in particular, schools traditionally do not have a culture of working with community partners on school success issues. Both of the school boards present in the Southwest had developed their own action plan on their own, and getting them to link up with the players in the community proved to be a challenge. But, at the present time, the CAPSSOM has become recognized as the umbrella that brings all of these players together and that sketches out the areas of complementarity between the different roles that all can play.

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The CAPSSOM is working with 4 major funders (including Centraide, and including one of the school boards), and getting each of them to sign on to support parts of its action plan in complementary ways. Each of the 4 participating neighborhoods has established its own action plan and is successfully coordinating activities according to jointly established priorities. Last year, Centraide alone helped to support 13 programs within this overall action plan, each carried out by different agencies. These range from school liaison officers who help newcomer parents to link to the school system that their children are a part of, to kindergarten readiness programming for preschoolers, to a program that gets local employers who hire high school students to agree to provide hours and conditions that are conducive to school success. A first review of the overall strategy and of the joined-‐up effects of the different coordinated programs and activities is taking place this year. 4. Integrated service provision in a high-‐needs sector (use St-‐Simon example) The Ahuntsic neighbourhood projects a comfortable, middle-‐class image, but the statistical averages hide the fact that there are several sectors of high poverty and disadvantage within the neighbourhood. A little over a decade ago, the Ahuntsic neighbourhood round table chose to focus its attention on these sectors, and inaugurated something that it called “integrated approaches” for each one of these sectors, bringing together residents, community agencies, local institutions and elected officials in order to devise coordinated strategies for addressing needs in the sector. One of these, the Saint-‐Simon sector, is a former textile manufacturing hub that has become devitalized; it is isolated from the rest of the neighbourhood by geographical barriers. Many of its residents are newcomer families with young children. Because of the isolation of this sector, the “integrated approach” strategy was geared towards opening up a modest community centre where residents could interact and get to know each other – and where they decided on the programming -‐ and where existing neighbourhood agencies would come and offer their services once or twice a week. Six agencies are involved in this way, including family resource and parental support agencies, a community food centre, and a newcomer settlement agency.

C. Equitable development and overall quality of life Increasingly, the round tables are rolling up their sleeves and seeking to influence the future development of the neighbourhoods that they have been working for years to improve. 5.. Influencing urban development to ensure affordable housing, community services and facilities

The Point St. Charles neighbourhood is located in the Southwest borough, which we already encountered a couple of slides ago. A vast, disused, now privately-‐owned former railyard occupies one-‐quarter of the neighbourhood’s land surface – it’s a coveted space in a borough undergoing significant post-‐industrial gentrification. At stake for the community was its ability

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to influence sustainable and inclusive development outcomes within this larger transformation process. Several years before any developers came along and submitted a proposal to the City, in 2007 the neighbourhood round table acted on this issue and led a Citizens’ Land Use Planning Operation (or OPA by its French acronym), enlisting residents to sketch out a neighbourhood vision and concrete proposals for the redevelopment of the CN yards. The round table leveraged expertise (university urban planning departments, a renowned firm of green architects) to support and accompany the process, translating the resident-‐generated proposals into the language and form of urban planning. These proposals picked up quite a bit of traction over the intervening years. One key moment was when, influenced by this prospective neighbourhood-‐level work, the Montreal Public Consultation Board stepped in and held its first-‐ever public consultation process upstream of a developer’s proposal, and issued prospective recommendations for the site’s redevelopment. In the hands of the round table and eventually the borough as well, over the next few years these recommendations were used as a tool to leverage a development agreement for the site, which incorporates many elements of the neighbourhood’s original vision (including nonprofit and cooperative housing, community spaces, mixed commercial development with attention to the kinds of businesses that would meet residents’ needs, green spaces including spaces for urban agriculture…). 6. Improving urban transit Public transit access is an issue for quite a few Montreal neighbourhoods. In the case of the Saint-‐Michel neighbourhood, bus and metro lines connected residents to downtown but not to the other side of their own neighbourhood, meaning that young people living in a certain sector had to take 3 buses in the morning just to get to school. It took many years of work by the transportation working group of the local round table, but in 2011 their efforts were rewarded and a new bus line was inaugurated that fixed the problem. In the last few years, several other neighbourhood round tables have also achieved similar gains for their residents.

How did the round tables model come to be in Montreal? We can describe the round tables model as being the result of a meeting of “bottom-‐up” and “top-‐down” approaches and goals. Bottom-‐up: Many of the round tables have been around for 20, 30 years (the oldest community council is 70 years old!) – so in some cases long before Centraide and other funders became interested in what they were doing and what they could do… A number of others were founded in the 7-‐8 years following municipal amalgamation in 2001.

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But, young or old, the important thing to note is that the round tables emerged locally, as a result of local stakeholders’ desire to give themselves a new tool to act together to improve their neighbourhood. Top-‐down influences: You might be wondering how all the different actors that I mentioned earlier who also have social development mandates position themselves with regards to the round tables. This is where the “top-‐down” influences come-‐in… The Montreal Initiative for Local Social Development co-‐funding partnership has played a key role in “standardizing” the model (ensuring that it responds to key criteria in each neighbourhood) and in developing institutional recognition for the role of the round tables. What it is: a collaborative partnership (funders, round tables, local institutions) that aims to:

• Provide stable core funding (was at 40 000$ in 2005-‐2006, currently 100 000$ per RT) • Leverage institutional support, at local and regional levels • Promote a development model • Create and share knowledge

The partnership includes:

• 3 funders (currently 51% contribution from Centraide, 32% from the City, 17% from the Public Health Department)

• 29 round tables • 18 boroughs

12 health and social service centres as well as the regional federation of round tables – acts as a social development interlocutor at the regional level

It’s a model that has interested other regions in Quebec, and even across the pond in France (last year a ministerial committee on urban governance recommended that the round table model be implemented in French cities). How this partnership evolved is an interesting story in itself. The City of Montreal was actually the original convener. Its interest in this kind of approach started with its participation in the Healthy Cities movement in the early 1990s. A number of round tables emerged during this same period, inspired by this movement. Discussions started with the other funders in 1992 or 1993. At this point, Centraide had already gained experience with the network approach – it was deploying neighbourhood initiatives in Montreal inspired by the Success by Six program… So we didn’t need any convincing that it would be a good idea to support round tables that were working on a broader social development mandate. The first iteration of the joint funding program began in 1997; at this point there were already 20 round tables within the former (pre-‐amalgamation) City’s boundaries.

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Each of the 3 funders had different but convergent motivators for supporting the round table model:

• Centraide: inspired by McKnight, community-‐building approach (influenced the vision of Building Caring Communities and Supporting their Ability to Act strategic orientation document, 2000)

• Public Health: fits with prevention and promotion model (acting on social determinants of health), support for community development named as strategy to combat health inequalities (2001)

• City: 1st financial support dates back to 1994, with rogressive increase in the City’s own social development mandate after 2000/2001 (year of merger)

Other trends & currents in the water supply… It’s important to mention that over the years there have been other currents and trends “in the water supply” that have helped to reinforce the network approach to local social development :

• The CED (community economic development) movement in Québec (& elsewhere); • The emergence of the CDC (community development corporation) model in Québec; • Funding for RUI (integrated urban revitalization) strategies in Montreal from 2003

onwards; the comprehensive community revitalization movement (RQRI) has sprung up throughout Québec since this time;

• The Vibrant Communities pan-‐Canadian initiative : Centraide was instrumental in leveraging St-‐Michel’s inclusion in the first cohort, and singled out the St-‐Michel round table for special investment in the development of its “backbone” capacities.

• The most recent provincial poverty reduction strategy (2010) identifies Approche territoriale intégrée (Integrated Area Development) approaches as a core part of its strategy; this has provided funding possibilities for the rollout of a network approach to local development in other regions of Quebec.

In addition to the Montreal Initiative for Local Social Development, Centraide provides support to the neighbourhood round tables in a few other ways.

A. Separate top-‐up and project funding to round tables:

1) Coordination team support for high-‐performing round tables (approx 2,2 M$ since 2001) 2) One-‐time support for neighbourhood planning exercises (neighbourhood social forums

– approx 1,4 M $ since 2001) 3) Staff positions dedicated to resident mobilization strategies (approx 1,4 M$ since 2001) 4) Specific projects – development or implementation stage (approx 2,5 M$ since 2001)

B. A distinct capacity-‐building approach through Dynamo (an organization nurtured and launched by Centraide specifically to provide support & training to community mobilization processes such as the round tables):

1) Our Community Leadership development program (35 Montreal round table coordinators, staff members and board members have participated since the launch of the program)

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2) The Point de bascule (Tipping Point) consultancy and accompaniment services (11 Montreal round tables receiving accompaniment since the launch of the program in 2012)

C. The next capacity-‐building frontier is evaluation… Evaluating the results and outcomes of a community change initiative involving multiple stakeholders of is a more complex endeavour than evaluating the results of a social service agency’s programs. Over the past couple of years a colleague and I have been working with the round tables and another capacity-‐building training provider to learn together how we can better support the round tables in implementing evaluation practices that are adapted to this kind of complexity.

What we’ve learned about conditions for success:

1. It is important that the round tables be truly multisector, either in form or in function: The capacity to leverage real and lasting change comes when you bring together and build collaboration amongst stakeholders who don’t normally work together.

2. Understand the local context and work to make it conducive to collaboration

The local context has a huge influence on how difficult or how easy it is to achieve agreement and to build synergy amongst stakeholders:

- Is there a history of cooperation vs competition between stakeholders? - What role do institutions play in local development? How do they see the role

of others? - How open are local institutions and government to acknowledging and working

with civil society organizations? Are they willing to follow the convening lead of others?

- Are regional players prepared to recognize and support locally-‐determined plans and priorities?

3. Develop collaborative leadership : The skills and qualities of those who assume leadership roles in the round tables – whether they be coordinators, staff or EDs of lead agencies – are truly critical to the capacity of a round table to mobilize a diversity of stakeholders and to sustain their mobilization.

The demands of the job are complex; the tasks of building and sustaining collective buy-‐in and commitment to an endeavour that cannot succeed without the many call on different qualities and abilities than the “heroic” leader that our culture has idealized….

So alongside some of the more classic traits and abilities that we would look for in the leadership of any organization, including: – the capacity to communicate a compelling vision for what is possible, - practical management skills, - succession planning,

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- energy, commitment and perseverance…

We also have characteristics that mirror the complex systems that these leaders operate in:

- strong embeddedness in the networks of their community, - Ability to support shared decision-‐making, - Ability to navigate open systems (engaging and bridging with knowledge, skills

and resources outside the community)

4. Attend to inclusive and democratic governance… Governance of a round table – or any network organization, for that matter -‐ does not work in quite the same ways as governance of a classic nonprofit. In addition to having the responsibilities of a classic Board, round table Board or steering committee members must be elected or nominated to represent a particular sector or constituency of the local community. But they are not there simply to represent the interests of that constituency, they are there as ambassadors of the greater good, to actively work to build bridges with other sectors. And all board members are accountable to the entire membership.

5. It takes time to build trust, common vision, collective capacity.

It takes a longer time to achieve results than agency programs one by one, but the potential for impact is much greater. The “ladder” image here illustrates the “rungs” in the process towards collective impact. Each one is essential – you’ll note that there is a lot of upstream investment in developing the capacity for collective action.

The spaces between the rungs are “stages” in the process, but it is important to say that is not a linear process, it could also be represented as a cycle, even a spiral with iterative loops. The important thing to retain is that you are never “done” with one stage once and for all. • Mobilize: reach out, convene • Engage: communicate, facilitate interaction • Align: governance and management “rules” • Plan: analyze the situation, develop a vision and a strategy for change • Act: test, implement, coordinate • Influence – for very often the ambitious change goals that round tables pursue

require influencing larger institutional practices or public planning processes, so that they take local concerns and priorities into account.

The last three stages generally require concurrent efforts to leverage resources that can be channelled towards the change efforts…

Finally, learning and evaluation are not a “stage” in themselves, they need to be purposefully embedded in each of the other stages – as this is what allows adjustments to happen over the entire life cycle of collective action.

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This kind of upstream investment has important implications for funders: we are talking about longer funding horizons, “patient” capital… How long does each stage usually take?

It very much depends on local conditions, and on the existing culture of collaboration or of competition. Even in the best conditions, it usually takes a few years to build up levels of trust and common will to a point where actors are willing to “risk” giving up some of their own control and autonomy in the interest of achieving collective impact. At the same time, planning and acting together can be a powerful means to forge bonds based on trust and respect for each player’s respective strengths and contributions. The more ambitious planning and action cycles can themselves span 5 to 10 years.

Some ongoing challenges that we have encountered:

- Developing and maintaining sufficient “core” funding (round tables can fairly

rapidly leverage resources for projects, but funding for core backbone operations is critical)

- Demonstrating impact: requires moving away from traditional linear models, and developing and implementing evaluation approaches that are adapted to complex interventions

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