I'll go back to the principles of collective impact. I could have gone into it in a lot of detail, but this is probably not the time and place. I do encourage you to maybe google “collective impact” and learn a little more about it, because there are principles in there that can be applied to many of the issues that we face not only as a city but also as a province and a country.
I'll highlight two areas.
Part of collective impact is the common agenda. As I stated earlier, it's not easy to get all these passionate people—and I should also mention that all these people at the table are partners within our Living SJ network—to reach consensus on an agenda. We were able to really focus on four pillars that are crucial to being able to create change.
Another piece of that is the measurement. The way we do that is to start first with a conversation about whether we are evaluating what we're doing. Wendy spoke about this as well in terms of how the United Way, as one of our partners, was able to change its thinking and even its funding model by asking the applicants to come up with outcomes. That process of really thinking about how we're actually going to measure and evaluate is very important.
We're also doing a project with Shilo at the Y, in which we're also measuring outcomes. When we get our collective impact teams, which fall under these four pillars together, evaluation measurement is always part of the conversation. We're also trying to do it in similar ways. I'm also fortunate to have a team member who has a background in statistics, evaluation, and measurement. Sometimes it's through surveys, but we are measuring in different ways. We can't manage and change what we can't measure, so that's really a fundamental principle of what we're doing.