Earlier this year, CharityVillage reported on progress that nonprofits in Nova Scotia are making with the provincial government on the creation of a new sector council. You can read the full article here.
In June and July, the advisory committee charged with moving the file forward with the provincial government met for a series of meetings to finalize their plan and give the green light to its main proposal-writer and consultant to submit their plan with the government.
“We’re thrilled with the reception we’ve had from the sector. Thrilled by the energy that came out of the meetings in June and July. We’re also really pleased at the opportunity ahead of us as part of this process,” Maggy Burns, director of labour market programs with Phoenix Youth Programs said in a recent interview.
Working out the nonprofit bugs
After much wrangling and productive discussion over the last few months with their sector peers, Burns said she believes all that’s left to do is submit the proposal to the government.
“We asked the [meeting] participants what they’d like to see out of a new sector council. We checked in again on what we’d heard…that organizations were comfortable with creating an incubator for the work. We talked about the vision the advisory committee has for this [new body],” she said. “We’ve seen considerable momentum on this project since we began. We’re reluctant to step away as the [lead] on this initiative now that we’re close to completing this consultation phase and report submission.”
However, Burns noted her organization is eager to step back from the leadership role so it can once again concentrate fully on its own work and clientele. “Our work is not this work; it’s working with young people. We will transition out and the new governance body will be an organization that’s owned by the sector for the sector.”
This is where the special consultant on this project, Lynne Toupin, steps in.
Earlier this month, Toupin, former executive director for the HR Council for the Nonprofit Sector and current advisory committee member at the Mount Royal University Institute for Nonprofit Studies, began crafting her report and eventual submission to the Nova Scotia government on how the province’s new nonprofit sector council would like to move forward.
Toupin told CharityVillage that there was a lot of information to synthesize for the government; but she believes the new council would be in place by early 2013.
Working on the new sector project since February – Toupin was hired by Phoenix to be its lead consultant – she said the time was ripe for Nova Scotia’s nonprofit sector to put a sector council in place.
“There’s a collaboration agreement between the government and the sector that dates back to 2008,” she said. “In 2010 Marilyn More [MLA for Dartmouth South-Portland Valley] was named the new minister responsible for the voluntary sector. This is someone who worked in the sector. She knows it and believes in it. In 2011, the provincial government gave upwards of $800,000 to support sector organizations and put out an open call to sector organizations to increase capacity and development in the sector, with a focus on human resources management.”
In 2011, the Nova Scotia government also provided Phoenix and its then-partner the Federation of Community Organizations (FOCO) resources – who have since undergone restructuring and have bowed out of the process – to go about a two-step consultation process: to study models of engagement between the sector and government all across the nation and to consult with the province’s own nonprofits.
The latter consultation process posed three main questions: whether the Nova Scotia nonprofit sector wanted a governmental mechanism; what were they interested in doing in terms of shared services; and lastly, how could capacity be built more broadly in the sector.
The result was the At the Same Table: Developing the nonprofit sector in Nova Scotia report that was published in January this year.
It was in late 2011 that the government of Nova Scotia decided it would make funds available for the creation of a sector council that would need to prioritize human resources development and support for training and capacity building, but also to enable the sector to “communicate with itself and pull itself together.” That’s when Phoenix saw an opportunity, Toupin said.
While the province’s guidelines for creation of this new body didn’t address everything the sector wanted, it was a start. And the sector knew it had to take advantage of this government’s willingness to deal in order to move forward on a number of key issues, she added.
Toupin said in her preparations for the submission, she talked to more than 100 sector umbrella organizations across the province about the government’s offer, and the overwhelming response from those questioned was “it’s not perfect, but let’s get on with it.”
Toupin and Burns spoke to about 50 of the representatives of Nova Scotia’s nonprofit sector on June 1 and then the advisory committee on July 4 and hammered out the strategic priorities in four main areas going forward for a proposal to the government:
- Human resources planning for attraction, retention and training
- Setting priorities for the sector
- Ensuring province-wide communication and engagement within the broader nonprofit sector in N.S. and move away from the Halifax-centric mindset
- Settling on governance model moving forward
While it’s uncertain whether her proposal will be accepted by the province, Toupin said the government was “making all the right noises” and that there was a “good chance” the submission would be accepted.
She said that by this autumn, if all went well, the new sector council could be ready to go.
Burns said she expects the proposal to be handed in by early August.
In the interim, the project advisory committee will continue to guide the project before it is replaced by a new governance model – Burns expects that model to be in place by the fall – when and if this project gets the green light from the province.
The advisory committee is comprised of 14 people representing the N.S. sector, they are: Hilary R. Amit, executive director of the Highland Community Residential Services; Susan King, executive director for the Atlantic Coastal Action Program; Charles Gaudet, interim general director of La Fédération acadienne de la Nouvelle-Ecosse (FANE); Mark Austin, executive director of the Coastal Communities Network; Ishbel Munro, program director for the Tatamagouche Centre; Janice Ainsworth, executive director of the TEAM Work Cooperative; Kristin Williams, executive director for the Nova Scotia SPCA; Wendy Robichaud, community relations coordinator for the Colchester East Hants Public Library; Chris Pelham, acting executive director for the Acadia Centre for Social and Business Entrepreneurship; Bill Travis, executive director at Peopleworx Society; Tim Crooks, executive director of Phoenix Youth Programs; Maggy Burns; and Anne Perigo, director of Nova Scotia’s Department of Volunteerism and the Nonprofit Sector, Labour and Advanced Education.
Asked if she could share some of the proposal with CharityVillage, Toupin said one example was an acknowledgement by the sector that it needed to “move from knowledge to action.”
“It’s not about creating more tools and templates. That stuff is out there already. It’s answering the question of how we get those tools to the organizations so they can use them,” she said. “We’ve got to mobilize people to action. That’s a common theme throughout.”
Another theme is the creation of working groups and the use of technology to disseminate information sub-sectorally, she said. And the government knows that a new sector council would engage in this work in addition to its primary mandate to promote the government’s prioritized human resources plan.
The nonprofit files
While the exact mechanics of how this new sector council will be governed and work in Nova Scotia, assuming the province says yes to the proposal, what’s certain is nonprofits in in the province are about to receive a roadmap on how best to organize themselves to achieve better results for capacity building and implement a more comprehensive intra-organizational communications platform.
This is good news for communities and individuals who rely on the sector for a myriad of reasons.
At the moment, the province’s Department of Labour and Advanced Education, which is in charge of the nonprofit sector, says it’s still too early to comment on how Burns and Toupin’s work may or may not be perceived.
That said, as reported in CharityVillage’s previous story on this subject, in February, Marilyn More, Minister for the department, announced the province had set aside $2 million a year for the next three years to help nascent sector councils address “skills development and HR issues in their industries.”
“We have tremendous opportunities for our workforce at the same time that we have a demographic challenge,” More said in a February 2 statement. “There’s never been a more critical time for us to build stronger partnerships with groups that can help Nova Scotia industry and businesses overcome those challenges and take advantage of the great opportunities ahead.”
More returns from the legislature’s summer break in early August and it’s expected she’ll give considerable thought to the Phoenix initiative. Stay tuned.
Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.
Photos (from top) via iStockphoto. All photos used with permission.
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