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• 2014 ED of the Year Award Nomination Form
• 2014 National Youth Panel Nomination Form
• NIEEF Scholarship Award Application

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Slow internet stinks. It kills business growth, hinders education, impedes health care services, and generally just makes life a little less enjoyable. But what can you do? Aren’t we all just stuck with the service we’ve got?

On the next CommunityMatters® conference call, Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Billy Ray of Glasgow Electric Power Board will join us to talk about Community Broadband Networks, publicly-owned providers of high-speed internet.

You’ll learn about the benefits of community broadband along with tips for getting started with a network in your city or town.

Read more on our blog

Register now

Featuring:

• Christopher Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance
• Billy Ray, Glasgow Electric Plant Board

Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and host of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast will share more about why our communities need broadband, and how community-owned networks can offer a viable service.

We'll also hear from Billy Ray of Glasgow Electric Plant Board in Glasgow, Kentucky. Billy will share how he helped spearhead efforts to create the first municipal broadband network in the country.

CONTACT:
info@communitymatters.org

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Do you fund projects or organizations in the local food sector in British Columbia? Do you find it challenging to evaluate and communicate the impact of your work and the work of your funded organizations?

It's time for a new, refreshing approach to impact evaluation and reporting - one that builds capacity and engagement on both sides of the funding relationship.

Garth Yule of Junxion Strategy is offering this full-day, hands-on workshop to introduce local food funders and their funded organizations to the Demonstrating Value framework. Junxion Strategy is offering workshops like this one to serve the specific and evolving reporting needs of social sector innovators.

Shorter versions of this workshop were delivered at Social Venture Institute Hollyhock in 2012 (where it earned the highest participant rating) and at the Social Enterprise World Forum in Calgary in 2013, where the room was packed to capacity.

Register now

How Demonstrating Value Works

Potluck Cafe used the Demonstrating Value framework to show Vancity Community Foundation (and other important stakeholders) how their business was supporting people with barriers to employment, feeding nutritious meals to people in the neighbourhood, purchasing and sourcing from other local social enterprises, and still covering a very significant proportion of their expenses with earned revenue. Other forms of grant reporting had failed to capture all these dimensions of Potluck's value and made them simply look like a nonprofit with a not-quite-profitable catering business.

What Will Happen at the Workshop

In the workshop Garth will lead participants through a simplified version of the process that Potluck Cafe (and dozens of other social enterprises and nonprofits) have followed to create a "performance snapshot". Participants will leave with a draft snapshot design for their enterprise, a comprehensive list of related metrics and indicators, a detailed plan for developing evaluation and data collection systems (including rough costs and timeline) to support ongoing use and updates of their snapshot, and referrals to resources for data visualization, performance management, impact evaluation and more.

We assume that workshop participants either manage or are closely involved in a non-profit or enterprise that will be the subject of the "enterprise snapshots" we will create together. While Demonstrating Value can provide benefits to a standalone social enterprise or nonprofit organization, it adds the most value in the context of a funding relationship. To get the most from the workshop, we encourage funders to reach out to one or more of their funded groups (or vice versa) and register to attend the workshop together.

Getting Foodies Together for a Feast of Ideas

Communicating impact is a relevant topic for any kind of mission-driven organization. By focusing on one sector, group discussions in the workshop can go more in-depth on food system issues without losing relevance for other participants in the room. Throughout the workshop Garth will choose illustrative cases and examples from food-related organizations and enterprises. Even within the local food sector there is a huge diversity in organizations and roles, and workshops like this are a first step towards developing shared evaluation platforms for collective impact projects (although that level of organizing is outside the scope of this workshop).

How Funders Use Demonstrating Value

Bryn Sadownik, Manager of Evaluation and Community Impact at Vancity Community Foundation (VCF) will speak about how the framework was developed and applied in VCF's Social Enterprise Portfolio, how it supports their strategic funding objectives, and why they prefer it to other available options for grant reporting. Bryn is the primary creator of Demonstrating Value and will share expert knowledge about how it relates to other emerging impact evaluation tools and frameworks.

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CPS-019 is the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) policy for determining whether a charity is carrying on an acceptable business (a "related" one) or an unacceptable business (an "unrelated" one).  This webinar will present the key elements of CPS-019 and will examine:

• How to identify what a business is
• The term "carrying on" a business
• The difference between related and unrelated business by using a decision-tree

Register now

For more information, read Policy Statement CPS-019, What is a Related Business? from the CRA.

To watch past webinars, go to Recorded webinars.

For more information, go to Questions and answers about webinars.

Charities Directorate Information Webinars

There is a limit of 1,000 connections per webinar. Once this limit has been reached, registration will close. Once you have registered for a webinar, please log in, using your email address, a few minutes before the webinar starts.

To participate in our webinars, your system must:

• have a sound card with speakers or a headset;
• not have a network firewall that blocks media streaming; and
• have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or greater.

Immediately upon registration, you will receive a web page confirmation. Then, two days before and the morning of the webinar, you will receive an email reminder with the login address.

Test your connection now.

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How can you help your organization develop a comprehensive evaluation strategy?

Are you interested in learning how to assess the impact of your organization's efforts to address complex problems? Are you looking for a way to use evaluation as a tool for strategic learning? Are you concerned that your current evaluation efforts are ad hoc, not aligned to strategy, underfunded, and underused? Join us for Connecting Strategy, Evaluation, and Learning in Your Organization, a one-hour webinar that will help your organization find out how to take a more strategic approach to evaluation and learning, and provide you with a deeper understanding of what it means to develop a comprehensive strategy for evaluation through the development of a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System.

We will help you ensure that your organization's investments in evaluation and learning are contributing to your ability to achieve greater impact.

Register today!

Medina Haeri Lanz, Programme Associate at Oak Foundation, Rebekah Levin, Director of Evaluation and Learning for the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, and Brenda Solórzano, Chief Program Director at Blue Shield of California Foundation, will join FSG’s Hallie Preskill and Katelyn Mack for a lively webinar discussion focused on:

• Conditions that support an integrated approach to strategy, evaluation, and learning
• Common challenges to designing and implementing a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System
• How organizations are using a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System to achieve their goals

About FSG:

FSG is a nonprofit consulting firm specializing in research, strategy, and evaluation, founded in 2000 as Foundation Strategy Group. Today, FSG works across all sectors in every region of the globe – partnering with foundations, corporations, nonprofits, and governments – to develop more effective solutions to the world's most challenging issues. FSG helps organizations, individually and collectively, achieve social impact by discovering better ways to solve social problems. For more information on FSG, visit us online at www.fsg.org