Hello. My name is Charlie Ursell. Thank you to the honourable members of the committee for inviting Watershed Partners to appear today.
As you can probably tell from my accent, I'm not originally from here. I'm an immigrant and I'm genuinely excited to take part in the parliamentary process in my adopted home.
I'm a professional facilitator and a process designer at Watershed Partners. What that means is that I help clients have collaborative, generative conversations with people who have a variety of perspectives so they can create solutions to the biggest problems that they face.
Thank you to the committee for sending this invitation and also for the clarification that you're interested in learning more about a project that we delivered related to wealth and the problem of housing inequity across generations. It truly is an honour to share our work with you today.
As a brief overview, Watershed Partners is a collaborative design firm that designs and facilitates engagement across a wide range of people with a wide range of perspectives. The purpose of our work is to enable participants in our sessions to freely create their own solutions to the problems that they face. I believe that people love what they design and people own what they create.
Watershed creates the conditions for good conversations. Then we step back and ensure that the participants in the sessions own the outcomes of their own work. Our participants bring the content and we bring the process. The majority of our work is with private sector clients who are seeking to collaboratively work with their customers, with their investors and also with local partners. Many of these clients are in Canada's resource sector. We've also worked in the agriculture sector, with indigenous peoples, with investor groups, with hospitals and health care providers, not-for-profit groups and others.
When you think of what we do, we're what happens when event planners and professional facilitators meet.
We have little or no content knowledge about the subject matter that our participants are engaging in. This way of working ensures we don't suffer from cognitive bias known as the curse of knowledge or the curse of expertise. We view our neutrality on the topics at hand as a way of maintaining the trust and the confidence of our stakeholders. It ensures that we as facilitators and as process designers have no preconceived notions or interests. This allows us to be trusted third parties and honest brokers when we are invited into the complex problems that our clients and their partners face.
Twice in our organization's six-year history we've worked on projects related to housing. Both of these times were with Generation Squeeze. On both occasions, our role was as neutral third party facilitators and process designers. We held no subject matter expertise in the topics of engagement.
The second project, which was anchored and centred on housing inequity, intended to generate a series of policy solutions to intergenerational barriers to home ownership. Access to affordable housing is an acute problem in Canada, as many of the honourable members here today know from their own experience in their ridings.
We were honoured to work with Generation Squeeze on this project. We were approached by Gen Squeeze in June 2019 to see if we would be willing and able to provide facilitation services for a project that would enable participants to have open-ended conversations in order to generate potential solutions to high house prices.
Our role was to create a good process to enable those generative conversations amongst participants with lived experiences. As the neutral third party facilitator, our role also included capturing those solutions and insights that the participants have generated and helping them critically challenge and prioritize their own solutions.
As an outcome, we anticipated that our work would help participants create their own road map to scalable and implementable solutions. We facilitated two sessions as part of this project.
At the conclusion of the second session, Watershed Partnership and Gen Squeeze agreed that Watershed would no longer be providing services or be involved in this project. We did so because we agreed that Watershed wasn't the right partner for this project based on our business model where we are content absent. As a relationship, our work was formally dissolved during the week of November 9, 2020.
If the committee has any questions respecting how we support collaborative generative conversations amongst people with lived experience as part of this project, I will be more than happy to provide our insights.
As we're not subject matter expertise, I will do my very best to answer your questions, but if we're unable, I recommend that content questions are probably better suited to Gen Squeeze and CMHC to answer.
Once again, I would like to thank you for your kind invitation. I'm really excited to be here today. I would love to share more about the work we do and answer any questions you have.