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All kidding aside, this is one way to describe the pilot project community leaders in Winnipeg launched three years ago. They had identified the same thing as the Canadian CED Network (CCEDNet) did when it surveyed community economic development (CED) organizations in 2002: many people active in CED feel that they lack many of the skills required to pull off all the projects that need doing.
This is why one of the pillars of the first National CED Policy Framework concerned building the capacity of communities.That is also why CCEDNet stipulated that a capacitybuilding component (if only $18 million over five years) was essential to the ill-fated federal Social Economy Initiative back in 2004.
To answer this need for capacity in Winnipeg, four groups simultaneously arrived at a series of diverse but related concepts.They ranged from the provision of mentoring and side-by-side training in proposal writing, budgeting, management, project development, and governance, all the way to direct engagement of technical professionals, after the example of the Community Design Centre in Pittsburgh.The provincial government, which was interested in funding to address this community need, asked the parties to go into a room together and not come out until they had agreed on one unified concept.
