10:00am to 11:00am Eastern Time

Andrew Delmonte highlights a case study of a small business that converted to employee ownership with the assistance of the SBDC at SUNY Buffalo State. The founder and owner of Rose Garden Early Childhood Center, a 9-year old childcare business in Buffalo, NY, sold the business to her employees last December. We will look at the steps the business took to complete this conversion, the specialized technical assistance, training, and financing that was needed, and some lessons learned in the process.

Register for Case Study with an SBDC Advisor

Pathways to Ownership is a no cost, five section webinar series that will give you the practical information you need to understand employee ownership options, so you can start-up or convert an existing business into one of many employee ownership models!

10:00am to 11:00am Eastern Time

Frank Cetera will speak to his hands-on experience working with cooperatives and the various network and resource organizations that exist to support them plus give a summary of legislation recently passed or in process for facilitating employee ownership development in NY State. Frank will provide lessons learned as an advisor to help you better prepare for the conversations and issues involved in advising on this topic.

Register for Employee Ownership Ecosystem

Pathways to Ownership is a no cost, five section webinar series that will give you the practical information you need to understand employee ownership options, so you can start-up or convert an existing business into one of many employee ownership models!

9:00am to 4:00pm
Dante Club
330 London Road

To deepen community is to find opportunities for ongoing connection. Community is not something some people have and others do not. We all have community in our lives. As living organisms, we gravitate toward one another. Something deep inside us knows that together we are more. To deepen community is to find joy together.

When we develop deep community, we can overcome our loneliness and challenge our fear; we can come together to make sense of the destruction around us; we can reach out together and actually do something about it. When we develop deep community we can move toward Collective Impact.

Register for Deepening Community for Collective Impact 

In this one day workshop learn how to engage and deepen your community in order to build a common agenda for large scale change. Paul Born will share not only the fundamental principles of Collective Impact, he will provide key insights as one of North America’s top Community Engagement leaders on how Deepening Community can sustain us as leaders and produce the outcomes we so desire. He will move these insights into practical tools for hosting large-scale conversations in your community - conversations that truly engage people toward a common agenda and a collective impact.

Learn to:

• Reconnect with your love for your community and discover its importance for social transformation
• Understand the four key acts that deepen community: Sharing our story, Enjoying one another by spending time together, Caring for one another, and Working together to build a better world
• Deepen community in the lives of your clients and strengthen their engagement in social change
• Understand the five key elements of Collective Impact: Common Agenda, Shared Measurement, Mutually Reinforcing Activities, Continuous Communication, and The Backbone Role
• Create a large scale common agenda and form multi-sector leadership teams for your collaborative efforts
• Harness the latest techniques for community engagement
• Involve those who will benefit most from the change you hope to see

12:00pm to 1:00pm Eastern Time

In this webinar, Peter Block will speak to the concept of a neighbourly economy. This would include building ‘Abundant Community’ in neighbourhoods, as a viable alternative to the consumer-driven economic system that currently exists, as we strive to attain positive health outcomes, better distributed wealth, and engage children, seniors and neighbours in creating an educating neighbourhood. To do this, we must address social development and economic development as one and the same issue, rather than in silos. Join us as Peter offers insights on how we can create self-sustaining structures in our local communities - that reveal and mobilize existing gifts - to create more supportive social and economic fabric for prosperity.

Register for Creating Abundant Community in Neighbourhoods

Speaker

Peter Block is an author and citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a partner in Designed Learning, a training company that offers workshops designed to build the skills outlined in his books. He is the author of Flawless Consulting, Stewardship, The Answer to How Is Yes, Community, and co-author of The Abundant Community, and An Other Kingdom. Peter is part of the Economics of Compassion Initiative of Greater Cincinnati and is a member of his local neighbourhood council. He serves on the boards of Elementz, an urban arts centre, and LivePerson, a provider of online engagement solutions. His work is in the restoration of the common good and creating a world that reclaims our humanity from the onslaught of modernism.

Day 1: 8:00am to 5:00pm
Day 2: 9:00am to 12:30pm
John Paul II Polish Cultural Centre
4300 Cawthra Road

Cities are working together in an unprecedented way to develop place-based approaches to ending poverty. Today, more than 175 cities in Canada have, or are developing, community plans that engage governments, businesses, not for profits, and citizens with lived/living experience of poverty to work together to implement new approaches. We are at a unique moment in history in which cities, provinces and our federal government are all converging with independent, yet interrelated, poverty reduction strategies. 

Register for Cities Innovating to Reduce Poverty

As cities harness the assets of their communities, they are finding new ways to end poverty. Increasingly, they are seeing poverty as a comprehensive issue, are advancing their understanding of critical issues across sectors, and are considering the systemic changes that must occur in order to eliminate it.

Cities are recognizing the value of linking private sector and community sector solutions, and are addressing the impacts of poverty on Indigenous people, visible minorities, lone parent families, and other marginalized populations. They are working directly with local businesses, and are meaningfully engaging people with lived/living experience in leadership roles and decision making opportunities to move their work forward.

Learn more about Cities Innovating to Reduce Poverty