UPDATE ON OUR STRATEGIC PRIORITIES

In the section that follows, we’re sharing a few highlights and activities undertaken within our strategic priorities as we plan for their review and re-imagining this fall. As we look ahead to imagining better futures, we also reflect on the past three years to help inform what comes next - what have we learned, what promising signals do we want to amplify, and what progress has been made towards our vision?

Balancing our commitment to serving people with complex needs with the safety and needs of staff and the people we currently serve.

Our work to serve, support and advocate for people labeled with complex service needs continues to be an ongoing focus. Over the past three years we have advanced this work through activities that include:

• Being part of and sharing learning with groups of service providers that are trying to improve ways of safely serving this community.

• Adopting a new app to support the safety of staff who serve people with complex service needs.

• Applying our holistic and person-centered approach to supporting people and advancing their place as full citizens in our community.

• Advocating for a social innovation lab that would, together with key stakeholders, build systemic capacity to support people labeled with complex service needs to live inclusively in their communities in a way that is empowering, rights-based, and balances safety. Learn more on page 50.

Increase

Anticipate, monitor and adapt to changes in funding models while continuing to develop new revenue streams.

• Continuing to maintain and build relationships with local community funders.

• Developing new policies to lay the foundation to support safe, longer term sustainable growth of endowment and unrestricted funds.

• Implementing a new growth strategy for our Action Lab social enterprise to increase rentals and hiring of Action Lab for workshops and social innovation explorations.

• Developing a sustainable, multi-year fund development plan and creating a new Senior Manager of Fund Development and Engagement position to help grow the fund development program. Learn more on page 29.

Strengthen our organizational and measurement systems to respond to needs, help improve performance and demonstrate our value.

Evaluating our success in supporting engaged citizenship is a key priority for Skills so that we can learn, adapt and better serve people. We continue to test and iterate in this space through new data and evaluation processes, including:

• Surveys, focus groups and learning conversations with the people we support, their families and guardians, and our employees. This feedback allows us to understand lived experience stories and gather meaningful data.

• Evaluating our social innovation labs and monitoring progress on our strategic priorities to get real time feedback in order to be responsive to emergent and changing contexts.

• Launching the Surveys and Stories feature on our MyCompass Planning tool for the people we serve to reflect and share feedback with leaders at Skills. Learn more on page 47.

Be sector leaders, spearheading and participating in system level change processes that show promise of enhancing the lives of people with disabilities.

2020-2023 Highlights

• Through relationship building with people with disabilities, sector leaders, and government, we continue to seek creative collaborations to engage more allies in systems change.

• Our Executive Director and Board Chair sit on a number of sector-focused and provincial committees, including as active participants in the Alberta Council of Disability Services Government Relations Committee and the Edmonton Service Provider Council.

• Throughout the pandemic, engaging in sector-level advocacy efforts to centre the voices of those we serve. In doing so, we were able to shed light on the frailties in our system that can further isolate or marginalize people.

• We updated the vision, mission and theory of change for MyCompass Planning to tackle larger social service systems change. This means humanizing disability service interactions and centering the voices of those we serve.

• In collaboration with members of the original 1995 Rights We Want! group, allies, and self-advocates from within Skills Society developed a mini-documentary to capture and share the history of the document and disability rights.

• Amplifying Alberta Disability Workers Association (ADWA) campaigns and collaborating with Government and colleagues in Disability Services around addressing challenges faced by our sector and ensuring proper funding to sustain essential, safe and dignified services.

Develop an understanding of the different organizational models available and develop the relationships and capacity to move quickly to adopt new models if the situation requires it.

2020-2023 Highlights

• Elevating our understanding of different organizational models and our interconnected relationships by further engaging with the sector and through ongoing research into new social innovation models.

• Navigating the pandemic demonstrated our ability and capacity to move quickly to adopt new models if the situation requires it.

• In partnership with a local developer, piloting an innovative housing and support model that emerged from our Future of Home: Inclusive Housing Solutions Lab. Learn more on page 49.

Strengthen Our Capacity to Support Citizenship & Deep Belonging in the Lives of the People we Serve. Supporting people to not just be “in” community but to be “of” community with a sense of reciprocal participation and belonging.

Strengthening our capacity to support citizenship and deep belonging in the lives of the people we serve is at the heart of our work, and therefore work undertaken by the organization in all our strategic priorities is centred around this value.

• Keeping the voices and wishes of those we serve at the centre of our COVID-19 planning and practices, and pivoting social innovation initiatives and gatherings online, such as CommuniTEA Infusion and the inclusive art program offered at Melcor, to help keep people connected.

• Actively engaging in research that explores the patterns of belonging and dominant support practices we are noticing in our work. The Belonging Project, an inclusive research project and partnership between Skills Society and researchers at the University of Alberta and Dalhousie University is yielding important insights around supporting belonging. Read more on page 50.

• Launching the MyCompass Missions Module for the people we serve to explore and reflect on new experiences, discover more about themselves, and deepen their connections at home, with others and the community. Read more on page 46.

Continue to foster a culture of creativity and innovation that values learning and experimentation

• Continuing to prioritize building a creative, curious culture by soliciting ideas from our stakeholders, learning from others, and encouraging creative thinking to support inclusion and connection during the pandemic.

• The Skills leadership team participated in several learning workshops and training focused on embracing complexity, approaches to problem solving, and creativity and innovation.

• We continued to steward and participate in social innovation labs, including Edmonton Shift Lab and the Future of Home: Inclusive Housing Solutions Lab.

• Co-creating projects aimed at providing resources, tools and learning around supporting a healthy organizational culture (one that includes creativity and innovation), what our values look like in practice, and how we might bring that to life with the people we support and in teams. One project in particular is the forthcoming Leadership Workbook, you can learn more about it on page 47.

• Worked with Naheyawin to further our learning journey around reconciliation and the creation of symbols, processes, and narratives that Skills Society can ethically utilize to foster healthy, everyday treaty relationships. This led to the creation of a unique ceremony and Treaty Renewal Reflection Space in the Action Lab. Several artifacts and symbols have also been added to the Skills Society Office and Action Lab spaces and communications.

Continue to streamline internal processes to make them more effective, efficient, and user friendly

2020-2023 Highlights

We continuously ask ourselves: Are we learning? Responding to feedback? Finding efficiencies?

• Continuously improving our communication has been a significant area of focus for our team. Clear and ongoing dialogue with the people we serve, their families and Guardians, and our employees and stakeholders was critical over the pandemic.

• Adapted several of our resources, forms, and training to be accessible and available online. We have new, user-friendly human resources software that allows for tracking and completion of forms and training, and supports with hiring of new staff.

• Co-creating projects that put to paper leadership and management practices and learning (what we all feel are the qualities and behaviours of stellar leadership at Skills) and a new organizational meeting framework. These create built in time and resources for learning, reflection and development of team members around Skills mission, vision and values and how to bring these to life in the lives of the people we serve.

Strive to Maintain a ‘Family Feel’

Maintain the ‘family feel’ amongst staff amidst growth and change

2020-2023 Highlights

• During COVID-19 it was challenging to maintain a sense of connectedness amongst staff across a large organization like Skills, compounded with the closure of the office and strict physical distancing guidelines. This drove us to focus on supporting our employees’ mental wellbeing and morale in a variety of ways, including mental wellbeing coaching and hosting virtual employee gatherings, to name a few.

• Our Skills Society community is quite diverse. Something that is important to us is continuously working to recognize and celebrate this diversity as well as our collective journey towards reconciliation. In 2022, building off the work started back in 2010, we created an Equity Diversity and Inclusion committee made up of diverse perspectives within Skills Society to steward learning throughout the organization, including the development of an organizational anti-discrimination statement that our whole Skills community - people we serve, families, Guardians and employees - reflects on and recommits to annually.

• Events and recognition moments throughout the year that strengthen our community including the annual general meeting, long term employee appreciation, Black History month, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Team Leader gatherings, and Skills Society picnic.

Strive to Maintain a ‘Family Feel’ Maintain the ‘family feel’ amongst staff amidst growth and change

2020-2023 Highlights

Officers of the Board

• Debbie Royer, Chair

• Kate Gunn, Vice Chair

• Carmen Norris, Secretary

• Rochelle Mitchell, Treasurer

Returning as Directors

• Darcy McDonald

• Dianne McConnell

• During COVID-19 it was challenging to maintain a sense of connectedness amongst staff across a large organization like Skills, compounded with the closure of the office and strict physical distancing guidelines. This drove us to focus on supporting our employees’ mental wellbeing and morale in a variety of ways, including mental wellbeing coaching and hosting virtual employee gatherings, to name a few.

• Nancy Spencer

• Robert Philp

The Slate of Directors to be Ratified for a Second Term

• Dianne McConnell

• Kate Gunn

• Our Skills Society community is quite diverse. Something that is important to us is continuously working to recognize and celebrate this diversity as well as our collective journey towards reconciliation. In 2022, building off the work started back in 2010, we created an Equity Diversity and Inclusion committee made up of diverse perspectives within Skills Society to steward learning throughout the organization, including the development of an organizational anti-discrimination statement that our whole Skills community - people we serve, families, Guardians and employees - reflects on and recommits to yearly.

• Events and recognition moments throughout the year that strengthen our community including the annual general meeting, long term employee appreciation, Black History month, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Team Leader gatherings, and Skills Society picnic.