This is Part 2 of a 4-part series. Click here to read the first in this series.

Building the Base

By mid-1988 I was in a position to take more time to extend our networking. Connections and work relationships with people like Dal, Nancy and Bill became the base from which the Centre for Community Enterprise (CCE) began to seek guidance around what it should give priority to, what might help nourish the seed that was slowly germinating. Dal was then involved with the Economic Council of Canada on a very important project to document successes and learning in the field of community based approaches to regional development. Nancy was the General Manager of RÉSO, the successor to the Programme Économique de Pointe St.-Charles (PEP), Quebec’s first Community Economic Development Corporation and Bill was central to the Victoriaville CDC as well as becoming a key researcher and network builder in Quebec.

One of the first things CCE did (it had received a small endowment in 1987) was give a small grant to document the experience of PEP. This was published and distributed widely. We started going to conferences to deepen and broaden our relationships. A notable one was a conference in Lennoxville, Quebec put on by the Canadian Adult Education Association. CED was one stream on their agenda. Here I was first introduced to the Learning Enrichment Foundation out of North York (now Toronto). We used this venue to announce our efforts to build a CED database and the first on-line network of CED practitioners using web technology.

The rhythm of the next decade was one of organizing, networking, learning, communicating and leveraging and then consolidating small gains. A key part of this was to make as many of the paying projects of Westcoast Development Group (CCE’s consulting arm), align with the core mission of CCE. We had no interest in dipping into endowment unless absolutely strategic. We were largely successful in this. Many of our early books, training guides and research products came out of a series of contracts that the Federal government funded, most often in conjunction with First Nations. We became known for quality publications that were accessible and engaging, a reputation that was sealed by the ruthlessness of Don McNair as an editor and the incredible talent he has as an illustrator.

Over the years, kind of off to the side of our desks, Laird Hunter and I periodically and profitably employed the capital reserves of CCE to finance a number of initiatives. For example, we invested $160,000 of high-risk equity in a low-income housing project which, in turn, leveraged the $1 million need for land assembly. We provided $35,000 in bridge financing for working capital to a soft drink production workers co-op in Cape Breton. We provided $25,000 as the initial loan guarantee fund, first to the Mennonites and then to the Edmonton Community Loan Fund.  We also made a few no interest loans and even some grants. One of the funnier ones is our contribution to the Manitoba Federation of Labour of $5,000 to help seed the work necessary to establish the Crocus Fund, a multi-multi-million dollar investment fund in Manitoba that, unfortunately, no longer exists. When American Sherman Kreiner became the CEO, a process in part facilitated through Laird Hunter’s referral, we got the $5,000 back – without interest! Another example of an attempt to leverage the resources for strategic objectives was a grant of $20,000 to IFDÉC, a Montreal-based CED training and technical assistance organization. We thought their survival, which at the time was in question, was critical to the long-term work of building and strengthening CED in Canada.

The next big breakthrough came in 1988. Nancy Neamtan mobilized a massive effort through IFDÉC to organize a major international conference on local development. It was a brilliant move which brought 800 people from Europe, Canada and the US together in December 1988. Nancy and her team, in one fell swoop, advanced CED in Quebec a colossal step. CCE helped organize the US participation. In exchange Nancy arranged for a suite in the conference hotel where at least 3 Westcoast Development Group staff worked to continuously organize conference participants into discussions about how CCE should focus its priorities as part of a collective effort to grow CED in Canada. At least 40 or 50 people, Canadians and Americans, participated in these discussions.

Several months later, at the invitation of colleagues at the National Economic Development and Law Centre, the CCE organized 20 practitioners from across Canada to meet in early July 1989, in Chicago, at their national conference. The theme was focused to critically reflect on the 25 years that had passed since the beginning of the US War on Poverty, a hook that helped me get people to come.  The chair of New Dawn at the time, Oro McManus, and Stewart Perry, then Executive Director of the Centre for Community Economic Development, were those who came from furthest east (Cape Breton), while from the west, several people in our organization, two First Nations people from remote parts of BC, and Coro Strandberg, a long time activist in Vancity Credit Union, represented the most western contingent. People from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec made up the balance.  For three days we talked and debated issues related to how we might collectively focus our energy to advance CED in Canada.

These discussions were the birthplace of Making Waves. In October of 1989, the first edition was published, a four-page delight, filled with Don McNair’s incredible cartoons and CCE staff reporting on the results of the Chicago discussions. It was a modest start, a first step in constructing a device for communicating about what we were learning and what we needed to give priority to. 

The Chicago conflab built on the Montreal discussions and helped CCE decide on what its initial priorities should be.

1. To build a stable of training materials and publications that could begin to describe the values, strategies and tools of the field in ways that people could use more broadly.
2. To market and deliver training across the country.

In retrospect, the Chicago participants demonstrated great foresight. Training and publications become natural networking devices that allowed CCE to contribute strategically to the early networking and organizing efforts.

Armed with this direction, over the next several years we designed and wrote a wide range of books and training curricula, created a means of marketing and distributing them, continued the work of evolving Making Waves into a vehicle for practitioners to learn from each other and got involved in training hundreds of people across the country.

Read Part 3 of Mike Lewis’ Notes by an Aging Co-Founder

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Mike Lewis is well known in Canada and internationally as a practitioner, author, educator, and leader in the field of CED and the social economy. His experience cuts across the full range of functions connected to community renewal and development. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal and is a founding member of the Canadian CED Network. Mike is also the co-author (with Pat Conaty) of The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-state Economy.

Read other stories gathered to celebrate CCEDNet’s 15th anniversary >>

What is set out below are personal notes extracted from a much longer reflection on the 25^th anniversary of the founding of the Centre for Community Enterprise (which later became the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal) mostly written in 2002. While only snippets are included here, they do set out threads of the pre-history of the Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) that few people know. I thought they might be of interest as part of the reflections on CCEDNet’s 15^th anniversary and a warm though inadequate response to the invitation of Michael Toye to share some stories. If I had more time I would write a mini-book on this, but you are thankfully spared.   

Best,
Michael Lewis   

1981 The Seed of an Idea: A National Network Someday????

In 1981, I discovered a resource that inspired my efforts for years. I was teaching a one month course in Fort Chipewyan, a First Nations community in northern Alberta that, today, is at the heart of the fight to slow down the pace of development of the tar sands. There, lying on a coffee room table of the Band office, I picked up the newsletter of the National Economic Development and Law Centre out of Berkeley California, a national intermediary in the US working with community development corporations across America. This particular edition was focused on Native American CED.

I became very excited with the mix of practical on the ground results they were reporting, the guidance it provided practitioners, both conceptually and practically, and the articulate policy changes it advocated. I was also impressed that there was a national network, an infrastructure that provided technical assistance and development guidance to “CED” organizations doing the work in the trenches across the United States. This was the first time I remember hearing the term CED. It connected – it spoke to my values, it seemed to be a strategic approach to the challenges I saw in the communities I worked, and there were tools and techniques being employed that were achieving real results, for real people, in real communities.

Not long thereafter, I discovered David Pell and Susan Wismer through the first Canadian book I know of that began illustrating the stories of CED in a variety of locations across Canada (Interestingly, the book, “Community Profit” was funded by Stewart Perry, a long time associate of the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal, while he was working with the Institute for New Enterprise Development in the U.S.). What a rush.  From that time on, I knew that someday we would have to have a national network. However, I had no idea what it would look like, who would give leadership to bringing it together or how it could ever happen.

1985:  The Potential for Germinating the Seed Arrives 

In 1985, two Ottawa based people who I had never heard of, and whose names I no longer remember, convened a meeting of 25 “CED Experts” from across the country to discuss CED in Canada. With the egotistical allure that accompanied the designation of “expert” and the potential networking opportunity, I took the red-eye special, about a 12-hour marathon from Port Alberni to the capital of the nation.

Once there, I soon realized that the underlying objective of these mysterious Ottawa based conveners was to engineer our collective blessing for them to lead us into establishing a national organization. While they had some pre-organized support for their aims helping lead the charge, at least half of us resisted vociferously. We got mad, then laughed about it and then forgot about it. It was a good idea but an inadequate process. Besides, the level of activity across the country was still very much in the formative stages. There was not a sufficient critical mass of activity and experience to sustain the effort required to launch a national project.

Nevertheless, I am forever grateful to these two anonymous characters. At their ill-conceived meeting, I met Nancy Neamtan and Bill Ninacs, both from Quebec. Nancy, community organizer, activist and then manager of Programme Économique de Pointe St.-Charles (PEP), Quebec’s first CDC-like organization, and Bill, ex-chartered accountant and one of the founders of a coalition of community organizations in Victoriaville that linked social and economic development, combined the values, knowledge, perseverance and creativity that was at the heart of the kinds of leadership I felt was desperately needed in so many struggling communities. The conversation was wildly exciting and animated among us (including Dal Brodhead, who I cannot remember meeting – it seems like we have known each other forever). And, perhaps most important, I had found fellow travellers who felt that somehow, someway, at some point in the future, we had to find a way of creating a means for people across the country to learn from and help each other.

Read Part 2 of Mike Lewis’ Notes by an Aging Co-Founder

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Mike Lewis is well known in Canada and internationally as a practitioner, author, educator, and leader in the field of CED and the social economy. His experience cuts across the full range of functions connected to community renewal and development. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal and is a founding member of the Canadian CED Network. Mike is also the co-author (with Pat Conaty) of The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-state Economy.

Read other stories gathered to celebrate CCEDNet’s 15th anniversary >>

You work for a community development organization that’s facing a somewhat technical problem but with limited budget. You really need that new logo/HR advice/strategic plan. What do you do?

Well, if you live here in Winnipeg, you contact Spark, where we work with you to find the right professional looking to volunteer their expertise, or pro bono consultant, as we like to call them. Another opportunity would be to take part in a Timeraiser event.

Timeraiser events happen once a year in various cities across Canada, and Spark has been at their past three events in Winnipeg. Over the course of the evening, potential volunteers wander through booths set up by participating organizations, getting to know the mission of the organization and some of the challenges they face. Volunteers then pledge a certain number of volunteer hours in an effort to out-bid other volunteers, with an aim to winning artwork. Over the next year, the volunteers earn their artwork by completing their promised hours. These events have a definite community economic development flavour: in every city that hosts a Timeraiser event, Timeraiser hires local people to organize the event, local social enterprises to cater the food, and the art is purchased at full price from local artists.

But back to your problem. You still need that volunteer work done. How do you make sure you’re ready to take on that commitment? While the volunteer provides their expertise, someone from your organization – maybe even you! – knows your organization the best, so getting the work done will take some effort on your part.

Spark can help you with that, too. Learn more about how Spark helps organizations get ready for pro bono help in this guest blog Geoff wrote: Getting an Organization Ready for Their Pro Bono Match.

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Whether you work for a community development/community economic development organization in Winnipeg, or you’re a Winnipeg professional looking to give back to the community in a short-term, project specific volunteer opportunity, contact Spark today!

 

Last week, CCEDNet members gathered in Winnipeg and on line to participate in the annual general meeting. 

This year’s AGM included several notable firsts. 

On the technological side, following our shift to the new Canadian Non-profit Corporations Act last year, members participating virtually were legally able to vote and be counted towards quorum.  This was a big change from the old law, under which virtual meetings and participation was not allowed.  So we were pleased to have members participating in person, in an English webinar and teleconference, and in a French webinar and teleconference, with simultaneous interpretation. 

The AGM also launched CCEDNet’s first virtual annual report, making good use of the videos produced over the last year, and many photos collected through our ‘What is CED?’ photo contest. 

It is also worth noting that the membership approved a special resolution to ask the Canadian government and all parties in the House of Commons to affirm the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples concerning the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ and ‘terra nullius’, and negotiate on an equal basis with Aboriginal peoples. 

Finally, this was the first AGM led by our President, Diana Jedig, who got us through the agenda in record time!

The AGM was preceded by a very interesting CCEDNet-Manitoba spring members meeting, reviewing the last year’s accomplishments and setting next priorities. 

Members welcomed Derek Pachal to the Board, and expressed gratitude to outgoing Board member Victoria Morris for her many years of tireless support. 

Many thanks to the members who participated, the staff who organized the logistics, and to CCEDNet’s Board members who guide the Network throughout the year. 

Cliquez sur l’image ci-dessous et lisez notre Rapport annuel 2013 aujourd’hui !

 

Click on the image below and read our 2013 Annual Report today!