The Organization:
A collaboration between McMaster University and the United Way of Halton and Hamilton, leveraging the support and expertise of a broad partner network.
The Assignment:
Supported by a $332k Futures Skills Centre grant to develop an innovative community engagement model where nonprofit managers and undergraduate students jointly learn and apply skills to the nonprofits’ challenges, Lynn was engaged to support a stakeholder co-design process, Theory of Change development, identifying impact measures, and evaluating the pilot, to create a comprehensive framework and recommendations for continuous improvement.
Overall Outcomes:
Like so many of Lynn’s consulting engagements, with her guidance, the team gained a deeper understanding of the issue they aimed to address and the barriers to success. They committed to delivering a specific, measurable, stretch-goal social impact and developed the stakeholder-validated plan necessary to direct and communicate their work. Overall, they gained impact-focused strategic clarity and alignment to make a meaningful difference.
Outcome #1:
As with many new initiatives, the initial challenge was to take a big idea and align diverse views on the objective and scope of the work, and then design an approach to achieving it. To work through this, Lynn supported development of a Theory of Change. The team gained clarity on the two-fold objective of developing an experiential course in Innovation for Social Impact, to provide learning to both interested nonprofit managers and undergraduate students, and using this course to create a mutually beneficial model for engaging the community (nonprofits) in experiential learning on campus. The open-source course and engagement model were then to be piloted with three sets of university-United way partners, with the aim to eventually roll it out across Canada.
Outcome #2
Five key stakeholder groups—universities, community intermediaries, instructors, nonprofits, and students – were engaged through a co-design approach to inform development of both the mutually beneficial course, and the engagement model. The team was pleasantly surprised to discover that the nonprofit participants shaping the course were interested in attending not just selected topics of interest, but fully participating in the 12-class, full term course in Social Innovation, as learners alongside students.
Outcome #3
In piloting the course, the context and delivery varied with each of the five instances of the course being delivered across three universities, highlighting opportunities beyond the course content for impacting how mutually beneficial nonprofit participants saw the course, including whether conducted virtually or in-person, the time of day, ease of parking, level of student engagement, access to the learning portal and course materials, and communication with the university and prof. This supported the continued focus on dual efforts in their Theory of Change, building community relationships to encourage ongoing nonprofit participation, and developing the course framework, while identifying opportunities for continuous improvement in both.
Find Out More:
This engagement model, intentionally designed to benefit nonprofit managers and undergrad students, is set to expand nationwide through partnerships between post-secondary institutions and United Ways and other intermediaries, along with the Open Source Innovation for Social Impact course it was piloted with.
Read more about this new skills training model at FSC’s Shock-proofing skills for the not-for-profit sector and McMaster’s announcement on Shock-proofing for non-profit managers.