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An Update on Our Strategic Priorities Over the Past Year
STRATEGIC PRIORITIES 2020-2023
An update on our strategic priorities over the past year
This piece was written by Rebecca Rubuliak, Senior Leader of Research and Social Innovation
Our strategic priorities are complex - but as events unfold and situations change, we continue to learn more about bringing them to life in meaningful ways and adapting them to meet our evolving needs. This past year, navigating the pandemic and keeping people safe has been the top priority for the Skills leadership team and its Board of Directors. Our strategic priorities have continued to guide our work, while at the same time we have had to adapt and evolve to ensure we’re focusing on what matters to our staff, our families and the people we serve. The lessons of the last year have not been easy but they have resulted in incredible opportunities for growth and change – influencing our work moving forward. In the section that follows, we’re sharing some of the highlights and activities undertaken within our strategic priorities and what we’re learning as we plan the next year.
To understand more about our priorities, see pages 14-15.
Emergent Priorities
Strategically Manage Our Work with People Labelled with Complex Needs
Our work to serve, support and advocate for people with complex needs continues to be an ongoing focus. Over this past year we have advanced this work through activities that include:
• Being part of and sharing learning with groups of service providers that are trying to improve ways of safely serving this community • Adopting a new app to support the safety of staff who serve people with complex needs • Beginning to establish and fund a social innovation lab to work with Inclusion Alberta, the Canada Mental Health
Association, and Scope Society to co-create pathways that can safely support and empower people with complex needs to live full lives in the community • Applying our holistic and person-centered approach to supporting people and advancing their place as full citizens in our community
Learning
Despite disruptions as a result of the pandemic, several people we serve have also reported being happier due to changes in everyday routines and having less external pressure to keep busy or engaged. Some people have found slowing down, expanding their learning and connecting through technology have been valuable experiences. This feedback has allowed us to reflect on our work and what we may or may not prioritize following the pandemic.
Increase Financial Management and Resiliency
• Participating in the Edmonton Community Foundation’s endowment sustainability training program to build our endowment as a continued ongoing and dependable financial source • Continuing to maintain and build relationships with local community funders • Developing new policies to lay the foundation to support safe, longer term sustainable growth of endowment and unrestricted funds • Exploring a strategy to increase our fund development capacity is underway. As part of this process, input was gathered from our Skills community and stakeholders to understand their perspectives. See pages 20-21 to learn more.
Get to the Next Level in Data and Evaluation
Evaluating our success in supporting engaged citizenship is a key priority for Skills so that we can learn, adapt and better serve people. We continue to test and iterate in this space through new data and evaluation processes, including:
• Surveys, focus groups and learning conversations with the people we support, their families and guardians and our employees. This feedback allows us to understand lived experience stories and gather meaningful data. • Evaluating our social innovation labs and monitoring progress on our strategic priorities to get real time feedback in order to be responsive to emergent and changing contexts • Tracking daily internal data associated with COVID-19 to support our response to the pandemic and ongoing communication with stakeholders • Adding a ‘Stories and Surveys’ feature to our
MyCompass Planning tool which will help with learning from the people we serve, centre stories they want to share with leadership and funders, and learn more about what supports good quality of life
Highlight
This past year we co-designed and created new MyCompass data features, led by our Executive Director and alongside key stakeholders and partners. These workshops led to Skills Society piloting one of the features called ‘Surveys and Stories’ which allows people to share a short story and/or picture of a highlight from the year. With permission, these stories will help organizational administrators influence positive change, offering a perspective ‘beyond the numbers’ into what people really care about. By centering on the voices of people we serve, we’re able to help organizational leaders and funders see the true strengths and needs of people.
“The pandemic has allowed people to slow down and pause for reflection. People are just enjoying life and not worrying about where they have to be next.”
Penny, Skills Society Leadership
“At the beginning the focus was on waiting until we could get back to pre-pandemic life. Now, people are acknowledging that things have changed, we have changed, and that’s okay. It’s nice to hear people talk about the new things they are looking forward to, and not focusing solely on getting back to what they were doing before the pandemic.”
Dawn Marie, Skills Society Leadership
Advance Sector Priorities
Through relationship building with people with disabilities, sector leaders, and government, we continue to seek creative collaborations to engage more allies in systems change.
• Our Executive Director and Board Chair sit on a number of sector-focused and provincial committees, including as active participants in the Edmonton Service Provider
Council. • We have engaged in sector-level advocacy efforts throughout the pandemic in order to centre the voices of those we serve and steward our community through this disruption. In doing so, we are able to shed light on the frailties in our system that can further isolate or marginalize people. • We updated the vision, mission and theory of change for MyCompass Planning to tackle larger social service systems change. This means humanizing disability service interactions and centering the voices of those we serve.
Be Ready to Adapt Our Organizational Models
• We elevated our understanding of different organizational models and our interconnected relationships by further engaging with the sector and through ongoing research into new social innovation models. • We continue to explore innovative housing and support models in partnership with Inclusion Alberta, Civida (formerly Capital Region Housing), and Homeward Trust.
Gratitude
Navigating the pandemic has demonstrated our team’s ability and capacity to move quickly and adopt new models when the situation required it. Thanks to the hard work and resilience of Skills leadership and the entire organization - including the people we serve, their families and Guardians, our employees and our Board - we adapted and restructured at the first sign of the pandemic in order to keep people safe. We deeply appreciate their support and encouragement.
Strengthen Our Capacity to Support Citizenship & Deep Belonging in the Lives of the People We Serve.
Growing community connections and deepening a sense of belonging has been challenging during the pandemic. Though safeguards are essential to protecting people, they can lead to further social isolation. We adapted by:
• Keeping the voices and wishes of those we serve at the centre of our COVID-19 planning and practices. We encouraged people to explore their own preferences, choices, and risk tolerance during COVID-19. • Working to achieve ‘balance’ as we reviewed and implemented COVID-19 procedures to ensure our safeguards supported individual choice, and the mental and physical wellbeing of people we serve. • Pivoting social innovation initiatives online, such as
CommuniTEA Infusion and the inclusive community art program offered at Melcor, in order to keep people safe and connected • Actively engaging in research that explores the patterns of belonging and dominant support practices we are noticing in our work – thanks to the doctoral research of Paige Reeves,
Skills’ Senior Leader of Research and Social Innovation. Having meaningful things to do, and sharing your gifts and talents with others is an important part of citizenship. Brittany is a creative and talented artist who works across a wide range of mediums including visual arts, singing, writing, and theatre. Despite the circumstances of COVID-19, over the last year Brittany has continued to work hard on her craft. Brittany performed in this year’s Rising Sun Theatre virtual production titled Threads, and also had a poem published that she co-wrote with another artist - an accomplishment that brings her joy and pride! Zorg 2020 tells the story of an alien cat who visits Earth. Brittany has been writing and performing since she was young and loves imagining characters and “getting into character with the character”. Brittany is currently writing a fantasy novel titled Mystical Forests. Her imagination inspires her to write and visually create monsters, aliens, and fantasy creatures, which she shares are her specialty!
An excerpt from Zorg 2020, a poem by Brittany Leitheiser and Breanna Barrington:
The only difference I could gather Didn’t really seem to matter. It’s just one thing; I’ll tell you what. Promise you’ll keep your lips shut. Our homes are alike, I must confess. It’s only a matter of dialect. Us alien cats from ZORG don’t “Meow” Instead we eek out a big “WOW.”
Zorg 2020 can be purchased through the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts
Learning
Through the Future of Home: Inclusive Housing Solutions Lab, teams engaged in ethnographic research to explore innovative housing and support models that promote the social inclusion of people with developmental disabilities. To discover what we’re understanding about home and the connection to social inclusion and belonging see page 36.
Brittany’s Story
CITIZENSHIP HIGHLIGHT - RELATIONSHIPS
Andrew & DJ’s Story
Sharing your life with others and having people in your life who care about you is an important part of citizenship. Andrew and DJ have been roommates for over 13 years and have formed a strong friendship. Both love music and have jam sessions, playing instruments together. Andrew and DJ also enjoy hanging out together in their backyard, soaking up the sun. This year, Andrew and DJ, together with their families, are planting vegetables in raised garden beds in their backyard. Andrew and DJ have plans to share their harvest with neighbours and their support team. By sharing with others, they hope to meet new neighbours and nurture connections with existing ones. Andrew and DJ’s story not only highlights a meaningful relationship between roommates and family, but also a creative way to build connections with neighbours!
Andrew and DJ next to their garden
Andrew tending the garden
Reinforce Innovation Culture & Capacity
• Over the last year, we continued to prioritize building a creative, curious culture by soliciting ideas from our stakeholders, learning from others, and encouraging creative thinking to support inclusion and connection during the pandemic. • The Skills leadership team participated in several learning workshops focused on embracing complexity, approaching problems differently, and leading in uncertain times. • We continued to steward and participate in social innovation labs, including Edmonton Shift Lab and the
Future of Home: Inclusive Housing Solutions Lab.
Highlight
The Missions App will be added as a feature for all MyCompass users in the coming months! The people we serve will soon be able to use the MyCompass Missions feature to explore and reflect on new experiences, discover more about themselves, and deepen their connections at home, with others, and with the community.
Continuous Improvement of Internal Organizational Processes
We continuously ask ourselves: Are we learning? Responding to feedback? Finding efficiencies? • Continuously improving our communication throughout the pandemic has been a significant area of focus for our team. Clear and ongoing dialogue with the people we serve, their families and Guardians, and our employees and stakeholders has been critical. • Adapted several of our resources, forms, and training to be accessible and available online. We have new, user-friendly human resources software that allows for tracking and completion of forms and training, and supports with hiring of new staff
Strive to Maintain a ‘Family Feel’
During COVID-19 it has been challenging to maintain a sense of connectedness amongst staff across a large organization like Skills, compounded with the closure of the Skills office and strict physical distancing guidelines. This has driven us to focus on supporting our employees’ mental wellbeing and morale through: • Offering mental wellness videos, team sessions and oneon-one coaching facilitated by a mental wellbeing coach to offer employees practical skills and ways to support their own and their team’s mental health and wellbeing • Hosting virtual employee gatherings to bring people together, share information and answer questions, and ultimately strengthen our connectedness further • Asking for ideas and acting on them from all levels of the organization, honoring people’s wisdom and expertise and including them in Skills projects. This led to the creation of a social committee who have been convening virtual social events during the pandemic. • Creating a virtual, video celebration of long-term employees, to recognize their commitment to Skills and show our gratitude for their many valued contributions Belonging - feeling valued, respected, and an important part of something bigger than yourself - is an important part of citizenship. For Ariel, volunteering in the community is an important part of being an engaged citizen: “I love to care for people and help them out as much as I can”. For over 15 years, Ariel has been volunteering with two fire halls in the City, offering his skills and time helping the fire crews out with a variety of jobs around the fire hall. What Ariel values most about volunteering at the fire halls are the relationships he’s built with the crews. Enjoying spending time or sharing a meal together and the opportunity to get to know one another: “just being there and being part of the family”. Though COVID-19 has put volunteering at the fire hall on pause, Ariel and the crew continue to stay connected, through phone calls and visiting outdoors. Ariel’s story is a great example of engaged citizenship and belonging - through volunteering, Ariel generously shares his gifts, talents and time with the community and in return is a valued part of the fire hall.
Highlight
Skills Society leveraged MyCompass to support employees to connect with each other and share resources. Through the MyCompass Employee Connection Corner, employees are invited to share and interact on the timeline, strengthening connection.
CITIZENSHIP HIGHLIGHT - BELONGING
Ariel’s Story
Ariel holding a Fire Station 1 sweatshirt
SKILLS SOCIETY SHOUT OUT WALL
Pictured above is the Shout Out Wall at the Skills Main Office displaying Shout-Outs and tokens of appreciation for others.
At Skills Society we are committed to highlighting the gratitude we share for one another and contributing to more meaningful relationships with those we work with. One way we do this is through the Shout Out Wall where we display and celebrate Shout-Outs for one another. Below are a few of the many stellar Skills employees who recognized and showed appreciation for others, and what engaged citizenship looks like to them:
Mary
Mattisen
Dinia Larry is an engaged citizen who participated as a core team member in the Future of Home: Inclusive Housing Solutions Lab digging deep into an emergent issue in our community - the right for people with developmental disabilities to have a place to call home. As Larry puts it, “it’s important to have a safe and stable home” and highlighted the importance of creating solutions with, not for, people: “Get their input from their experience through their lifetime. No two people are the same”. Larry was a valued member of the core team. He shared his experiences and ideas, voiced his concerns related to housing, and collaborated with others to design creative housing solutions. A kind and empathetic listener, when asked what he enjoyed most about participating in the lab he shared, “I enjoyed hearing everyone’s input about a variety of different subjects and learning from each other”. In the future Larry hopes to see more people having a safe and affordable home that brings them joy and is in a good community.
CITIZENSHIP HIGHLIGHT - RIGHTS
Larry’s Story
Larry and his fellow teammates at one of the Future of Home Lab workshops.
