CCEDNet has partnered with the Centre de la francophonie des Amériques to promote community economic development (CED) and the social and solidarity economy (SSE) to francophones in the Americas.
There are over 33 million people who either speak or have a knowledge of French in the Americas.
The Centre de la francophonie des Amériques, whose mandate is to support francophone communities, recognizes the value and potential of CED and the SSE to support economic development in communities where French is a minority language.
Centre de la francophonie des Amériques Executive Director Denis Desgagné and CCEDNet Executive Director Mike Toye meet in Québec City earlier this week to finalize the partnership
The prospect of working and living in French, in particular outside of majority French-speaking regions such as Québec and some francophone Caribbean regions, is a daily challenge.
CCEDNet will provide news, information and resources to the Centre de la francophonie des Amériques for promotion to the Centre’s contacts, and share information about the Centre’s programs and activities that support the economic vitality of francophone communities.
Last week marked a very successful step for the hard work of child care advocates in Manitoba. The Province of Manitoba has committed to a substantial 5-year plan for child care, including investing in 5,000 newly funded spaces, $25M for child-care centre capital projects, higher wages for Early Childhood Educators, and the creation of an Early Learning and Child Care Commission.
As outlined in a previous blog post, child care is a corner stone of complete communities and community economic development. Investments in child care and high quality learning services is one of the most effective means of reducing poverty and promoting economic growth in our communities. For every $1 invested in child care in Manitoba, $1.58 returns to rural and northern economies and $1.38 returns to the Winnipeg economy. Every child care job created leads to 2.15 jobs being created or sustained, and an estimated $715 million is earned by mothers and fathers available to work due to child care (source). Furthermore, child care is critical to ensuring Manitobans have the time to develop the skills and knowledge necessary for full participation in our society.
“Child care is a cornerstone of complete communities and community economic development.”
In light of these community benefits, new child care spaces should be prioritized for Manitoban communities who face the greatest social and economic challenges. Allowing parents to continue their education or employment helps contribute to familial and community stability. And with over 10,000 names on the Online Child Care Registry, there are many more opportunities to be seized. CCEDNet-MB looks forward to working with our member-organizations and the Province to roll out this 5-year commitment and ensure our communities and families have access to safe and affordable child care. We all win when our children prosper.
It was preceded (April 24 and 25) by the 3rd meeting of the African Social and Solidarity Economy Network (RAESS). More than 50 participants, from about 25 African countries, deepened their analysis of problems for development in Africa, and examined how SSE could make a difference. Fifteen participants from France and from the RIPESS Board of directors (two from Asia and myself) also attended. It is also very significant to mention that there were participants from several English-speaking countries, a first for RAESS.
During their presentations, several delegates from West Africa mentioned the partnership with theCentre d’études et de coopération internationale (CECI), a CCEDNet member and partner. In particular, its noteworthy to mention the presence of Madani Koumaré, the President of RENAPESS, the network in Mali. He is a long time CCEDNet partner.
The Moroccan network, REMESS, had a strong presence with more than twenty participants from across the country, as well as several representatives of the Ministry of Handicrafts, responsible for SSE in the government. There were also representatives from various sectors of government, including the Office of Development and Cooperation. The opening plenary, at the City Hall, was quite striking with interventions, including the governor of the region of Marrakesh, which showed that SSE is recognized by various jurisdictions. RIPESS, through its coordinator, Ben Quiñones, reported the results of the Manila meeting held last October. www.ripess.org
Although SSE is alive and well in Morocco, great strides remain to be done. Poverty is still highly prevalent, especially in rural areas far from urban centers. Moreover, the legislative framework is insufficient. The adoption of a law is under consideration. To this end the Social Economy Act adopted in Quebec in October is attracting interest.
For its part, the Board of Directors has established RIPESS areas of work for the next two years, such as the promotion of its vision, networking, communications and interventions in the debates on the adoption of the Post- 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Finally, following the practice of a rotating political coordination at the Board level, this responsibility will be assumed by RIPESS Latin America and the Caribbean for the next period.
April 30th, 2014 marked the 15th anniversary of the incorporation of the Canadian CED Network. In celebration of this milestone, we asked for comments and reflections from some of the people who played a pivotal role in the founding and initial growth of a national, grassroots, member-led network that would help to share effective practice, learn from setbacks, create a collective voice for public policy development, and connect people across the country who share a common vision for inclusive and sustainable communities.
In his last post, Garry reminds us that our task “is not just to create economic opportunity for low income people. It is to create a more equal society.”
One of the early Board Chairs, David Pell, sent this via email:
“As one of the founding members I had the privilege of working with a group of very knowledgeable and committed colleagues. Giving birth to this unique organization was not an easy task. Discussions were lengthy and ranged from hilarious to very tense. However our shared commitment to the vision of a national voice for community economic development practice and our willingness to commit both time and money was sufficient to overcome our differences. A treasured memory.”
David Pell co-authored one of the first Canadian CED books, “Community Profit”, and was CEO of the Community Business Resource Centre, the Canadian Youth Business Foundation and Street Kids International before starting a private consulting practice. Find him on LinkedIn.
Dianne Kelderman, one of the founding members of CCEDNet sent us the following reflection of her experience helping to build the basis for a national network of CED practitioners.
“I remember fondly a group of radicals (Mike, Stewart, Flo, Me, Walter, Rankin, Garry and a few others) meeting at the Crowne Plaza in Ottawa some 15 years ago. It was there that the Digby Network (now CCEDNet) was hatched. Why the name Digby Network? Well, in every conversation, deliberation or debate, our friend Rankin would make it real by asking “what does that mean for a place like Digby”.
There was so much hope, passion and commitment in that room. We dreamt of having a Pan-Canadian organization. We dreamt of being able to influence economic development policy. We dreamt of creating a vibrant, sustainable, just and fair economy. We dreamt of a civil society where ordinary people were engaged and felt empowered.
Here we are 15 years later, with an equal amount of passion for the work that we all do in community economic development from coast to coast. In my home province of Nova Scotia, we have sure moved the yardstick significantly down the CED field. And as the Carpenters said “we’ve only just begun.” 15 years from now Social Entrepreneurship will be for Canada what Technology Entrepreneurship is today.”
Dianne Kelderman is the president and CEO of the Nova Scotia Co-operative Council and President of Atlantic Economics, a firm specializing in economic analysis and development, related public policy and alternative finance. Recently she has been invited to participate on Canada’s G8 National Advisory Board, to create Canada’s Report for the G8 Social Impact Investment Task Force meeting being held in June 2014.
CED trailblazer Stewart Perry shared a story from one of CCEDNet’s first national events, the 2001 National Policy Forum in Vancouver, where Rankin MacSween delivered a memorable keynote address.
Stewart also shared some of the history, stretching back to the early 1980s, of the initiative to create a national organization devoted to community development/community economic development in Canada.
In his final post Stewart reflects on the initial gender imbalance in the founding of CCEDNet, and how it was called out by Carol Rock (see her take below).
Carol Rock, another founding member of CCEDNet, sent us the following reflection to expand upon Stewart Perry’s post about the level of testosterone at the early meetings of the “Digby Network,” which later evolved into the Canadian CED Network.
“I have warm memories of CCEDNet and its beginnings. I should thank all of those involved in the early days, especially Stewart Perry. I learned a lot from everyone and have great respect for the work CCEDNet did and continues to do. Our organization, Women and Rural Economic Development (WRED) went on to assist 500 women start small businesses. I retired from WRED in 2001.
Stewart has a pretty good recollection of the meeting where my patience ran out. To defend myself I need to let you know 2 things. I did not coin the phrase ‘Digby Dicks’, I think that honour belongs to one or both of the women from Industry Canada who heard my story. Secondly, while I was listening to the guys at the ‘checking in’ portion of the notorious meeting, I was thinking of the women we were working with in our tiny new organization, who told us stories of being refused even the smallest of loans by the banks or being told to come back with a business plan by agencies that provide the kinds of support they needed to get their small business off the ground. So as I listened to the guys that evening I think I really understood how intimidated our participants felt and I decided to get the attention of the guys around the table.”
Carol Rock was Executive Director of Women and Rural Economic Development and a founding partner of the Digby Network, CCEDNet’s predecessor. She was also a founding member of the Women’s Economic Council.
Here are some pictures courtesy of Flo Frank and gathered from the CCEDNet archives over the years.
In her reflection, Flo Frank brings us back to the original meeting of ‘radicals’ that could have easily just been non-committal talk but led instead to real commitments to action.
Sherri Torjman‘s eloquent blog post explains how the logo of the geese came to be, and what really united such a diverse group of founding members.
Paul Born explains in his joyful blog post how it takes a village to build a network, taking it from wish to reality.
Rupert Downing talks in his blog post about how proud he is to be part of an organization that taps into true community spirit and culture.
Mike Lewis provides an extensive overview of the history leading up to the creation of the Canadian CED Network and the early days of the organization in a 4-part blog post.
If you’d like to share any memories or thoughts about CCEDNet’s development over the last 15 years, send us an email at communications at ccednet-rcdec.ca
Are you ever wondering “what if our economy was guided by the key community economic development (CED) principles?” And “why has the German economy emerged as the leading economy in Europe?” Here’s an excerpt of an article (http://www.arton.co/eurozone.html) that might provide some insights and new inspiration to keep the focus on CED.
~ Walter Hossli
“Industrially, the regional focus of the Landesbanken again played a major role in the creation of yet another German “Economic Miracle”, in particular through the provision of secure on-going finance to the German “Mittelstand” (small and medium-sized companies) in their respective regions. Nor should their power be underestimated. With 3 million mid-sized businesses the Mittelstand industries employ more than 70% of German workers and contribute roughly half the country’s GDP.
Klaas Hubner, a former member of the German Parliament and himself owner of a Mittelstand company observes that mixing social democratic values with localism is a major element in Germany’s sustained economic success. “What we have here is stakeholder capitalism, not shareholder capitalism,” he says. And like most Mittelstand owners, he adds: “I live where my company is located. I want a good image in the town I live in.” The Mittelstand remains blissfully immune to the many pressures that share-price-oriented financial markets inflict on their American counterparts. “We don’t have short-term strategies, only long-term strategies,” says Hubner.
Mittelstand companies are not publicly traded, and they benefit from an extensive system of vocational education and a sector of municipally owned savings banks that work solely with local businesses. Roughly two-thirds of German small and mid-size businesses get their loans from these banks. “Our banks are restricted to doing business in their regions; they have to concentrate on the real economy.”
Walter Hossli has been Executive Director of Momentum since it was founded in 1991. Under his leadership, Momentum has won the Community Achievement Award from the City of Calgary, been recognized by the Tides Canada Foundation, by Charity Intelligence as one of the most effective organizations in Calgary and named one of Alberta’s top 50 employers. Walter is a founding board member of CCEDNet, and he helped establish Vibrant Communities Calgary, an organization dedicated to fighting poverty.
I was the Executive Director of SEED Winnipeg when the founding group of fourteen people came together to start CCEDNet. It was a very exciting time for me. While CED had been practiced in Canada and the United States for quite a number of years, the models, techniques and principles of CED were still quite new to many people – even to those who were involved in it. Information exchange across the country was weak. Instead of building on the knowledge and work of others across the country, practitioners in local settings often duplicated the mistakes and false starts that could have been avoided if they had been in stronger communication with others. The idea of building a national network to promote CED and to learn from each other was an exhilarating proposition. And the chance to be included in the group was very affirming of our work in Winnipeg. I learned so much from my interactions with the rest of the group in those first few years, that it really enhanced the work we were doing locally.
The CCEDNet that was incorporated on April 30, 1999 was quite different than the one we initially envisioned. Initially we were going to organize as a partnership of CED consultants, who would covenant to work with one another across the country, and to contribute a percentage of our CED earnings to the partnership to sustain the work of promoting CED practice, providing technical assistance, advocating for policy change etc. That eventually proved unworkable, and after a few redesign iterations we ended up with the CCEDNet we have today.
I remember the day when we settled on the final model. We were sitting outside in the sun (I think it was in Guelph) at picnic benches, feeling good about the consensus that had developed. Each of us was asked to make a financial commitment of a minimum of $1,000 to the cost of getting CCEDNet started. Paul Born handed around a blank sheet of paper on which each of us signed our names, and wrote down how much money we were each prepared to commit. I was a bit hesitant to sign the document without checking with my board back home, but the peer pressure was great, and I caved in. I kept that sheet of paper for a number of years, but I think it eventually got lost in the transitions to subsequent Executive Directors.
We thought we were pretty clever when we named the organization the “Digby Network”. Rankin MacSween had been in Digby, Nova Scotia shortly before one of our meetings. Digby was struggling with poverty and economic development at the time, and Rankin mused that “one test whether this new organization is going to bring any value at all, is that it has to make a difference to Digby” and other places like it. So we named ourselves “The Digby Network”, hoping this would serve as a touchstone for us to constantly strive for. The only problem was that nobody had consulted the good folks of Digby as to how they felt about having the network named after them. A few months after choosing the name, we began to get feedback that the residents of Digby were not very eager to have their community held up as a national symbol of economic exclusion – so we changed the name.
One of the early challenges we faced was to ensure that CCEDNet was perceived as a truly inclusive network. Shortly after we formed, we got negative feedback from a number of women’s organizations who saw CED as an important vehicle for addressing the economic exclusion of women. Even though there were a number of women within the founding group, there was a substantial constituency of female practitioners who felt that there was way too much testosterone in the way we conducted our meetings, who had influence, the developmental priorities we set, and the networks we tended to connect with. CED is all about inclusion, so we were very disturbed to discover that a critical constituency of practitioners didn’t feel included in our initiative. In the early months of my time as Executive Director of CCEDNet, I spent a lot of time connecting with women’s groups across the country to make sure that CCEDNet evolved into the kind of organization they felt at home in.
I was Executive Director of CCEDNet for less than two years. It was a half time position at that time. My other half time job was as Executive Director of the North End Community Renewal Corporation in Winnipeg. Both organizations needed a full time leader, and I chose to focus on the local rather than the national work. Later I spent about a dozen years doing consulting work related to poverty reduction and CED. I also chaired the board of Assiniboine Credit Union for about seven years. Now I am still on the board of the credit union, but otherwise I am mostly retired.
Yes, it was April 30, 1999 that CCEDNet was officially incorporated.
I’m lucky to have been connected to CCEDNet in different ways for most of those 15 years, so I’ve seen a lot of the Network’s growth and development. And what has struck me most over the years is the amazing array of people who have dedicated countless hours to creating and building this resource.
Because ultimately, that is what CCEDNet is meant to be: a resource to support the thousands of local leaders who are tirelessly striving to make their communities better places. Through its formative years, the Network sought to provide technical assistance and support effective practice, but it gradually evolved into a means to share members’ learning, to amplify their calls for a more enabling public policy, and to connect people with a common vision of inclusive and sustainable communities.
To mark the occasion, we’ve asked some of the leaders who founded or helped build CCEDNet over the years to share reflections and stories about its creation. The efforts of many people deserve to be celebrated, and we have much to learn from the interesting stories of how CCEDNet came to be and has grown. But it’s not just for the fun of reminiscing with some of the most inspiring Canadians (and a few Americans!) I know. It’s also so that all CCEDNet members, better knowing where we’re coming from as an organization, can better think about where we’re going and how this shared resource of ours can best help us get there.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be posting their thoughts here on the blog. Watch for them, please login and add your comments, and others who would like to share stories are most welcome to contact us at communications [at] ccednet-rcdec.ca.
Birthday wishes? Only that CCEDNet continues to inspire and support the kind of dedicated and visionary community leaders that got us this far, bringing us closer to our shared goal of inclusive and sustainable communities.
Michael Toye is the Executive Director of the Canadian CED Network, having worked in various other capacities with CCEDNet since 2000. Michael has also taught courses on CED and social enterprise at Concordia University and has written a number of articles and other publications on CED and the social economy, including co-editing the book, Community Economic Development: Building for Social Change.
This is an interview between New Start editor, Clare Goff and the Canadian CED Network’s Executive Director Michael Toye, originally published in the UK’s New Start Magazine
Where did the term community economic development (CED) come from and what is its purpose? It’s a term that was first used in the 1960s in the United States and comes out of the war on poverty. It is perceived to be a proactive approach, using local resources and action to create meaningful jobs, strengthen local economies and improve social conditions. The idea was scaled up through the community development corporations in the United States, which spread to Canada.
New Dawn Enterprises in Nova Scotia was the first community development corporation in Canada and one of the founding members of the Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet). Set up in response to challenging economic forces in the 70s, New Dawn runs a number of local services, from a training college to healthcare as well as community investment funds. What’s emerged in Canada since then is a patchwork of place-based approaches. Most of our members see themselves as part of a transformational holistic community development approach that recognises the need for economic change as part of a broader community development agenda. But the complications and interlocking problems of a challenged community cannot be dealt with by one organization or project. So CDCs know they must rely on partnerships and promoting others’ work in renewing the community. Our members include credit unions, community futures organisations, co-operative development agencies, community loan funds, employment and business development agencies, social planning councils and many others. What unites us is our focus on inclusive communities and a desire to transform the system so that there are not as many symptoms to treat. We believe that if the economy and government functioned properly, we wouldn’t need to exist.
What is the alternative that community economic development offers? Community economic development tends to be crisis driven. So New Dawn Enterprises grew because the coalmines were shut down. It’s always an attempt to make a difference in ways that improve immediate conditions while changing the systems that create impoverishment — whether it’s industrial dislocation in south-west Montreal or decline in Toronto or central Winnipeg. Community economic development mobilises the local community and builds engagement. It liberates the creative energies of people and helps them to work together for the common good. It is focused on alternatives and solutions and it is often more effective than government because it is locally-led and builds on community assets. It puts the emphasis on people not profits.
Michael Toye (left) with long time
and founding members
We are seeing now that the kinds of alternatives that government is willing to accept are conditioned by a neoliberal lens. So government is interested in solutions that come from business, and from alternative sources of finance, impact investing or social enterprise. They are solutions that harness private capital and create alternative (i.e. non-governmental) revenue sources. These are valuable components of the new economy movement: anything that continues to re-embed economics in social objectives and the environment is good. But when it comes to reaching and empowering people in poverty, there are limits as to what can be done with a social enterprise or social finance. You need community outreach, local mobilization and government investment in human capital through local agencies. That’s what community economic development adds. There will always be transition, companies in decline and shutting down, and people and neighborhoods whose history of exclusion means they need specific help.
It’s a more human approach? Yes. Evidence is accumulating that freeing up ‘the market’ over the last 30 years has primarily increased inequality and not improved living standards for most people. At the same time as governments’ role has been diminishing, the largest corporate structures are getting bigger and stronger, so the distances between people and the decisions that affect them grow. The new economy movement puts people and the environment first, articulating the efforts to rehumanise the economy, to keep human values in decision-making.
Community initiatives on their own can’t compensate for the great downturn of 2008. John F Kennedy wasn’t entirely right when he said GDP was a rising tide that lifts all boats — some people do get left behind. In an enabling environment, community economic development strategies are effective to reach those people, smoothing out inequalities in a region and providing attention to specific needs.
Can you name some of the impacts and achievements of CCEDNet? As long as CCEDNet has been around one of our fundamental questions has been evaluation. We know that strategies and outputs make a difference but we can’t definitively say that how much worse things would have been if a particular project or process hadn’t happened. So we have a wealth of information about the social return on investment from community-led economic development of individual programmes. We collect all the evaluations and social return on investment analyses we can find of community economic development and related strategies. The biggest challenge is that the practices are so varied that it’s very hard to do an evaluation that’s transferable, but there have been some major evaluations. In 2011 there was a study of the economic impact of a network of businesses offering employment training in Quebec. The study found that government recouped its investment in less than two years in terms of employment outcomes. and saved $60m over 20 years. We have members like the Learning Enrichment Foundation, which began as a youth theatre and now runs a wide range of training, employment, childcare and enterprise programmes. And Quint which provides affordable housing for marginalized groups in Saskatoon.
We need more evidence to quantify the benefits of public services being tailored locally or more locally adapted. Ultimately the real challenge for CED is the alternative measurements of outcomes, accounting for natural systems and alternative measures of wellbeing such as gross national happiness. My belief is that if we were able to account for the real outcomes of our members activities in terms of community wellbeing, you’d find in community-based approaches there’s a valuable, cost-effective role contributing to better overall outcomes.
Michael Toye is the Executive Director of the Canadian CED Network, having worked in various other capacities with CCEDNet since 2000. Michael has also taught courses on CED and social enterprise at Concordia University and has written a number of articles and other publications on CED and the social economy, including co-editing the book, Community Economic Development: Building for Social Change.
When Katie and I arrived at the Second Annual Global Pro Bono Summit in San Francisco, it felt like stepping into a family reunion. It was like meeting Spark’s long-lost relatives: some we’d heard about, some we’d heard rumours of, and many we had no idea existed. But there they were, in the flesh, and sharing the same strange creative space we do as intermediaries between community-based organizations, and volunteers with specialized skills (or “pro bono consultants” in the language of our new family!).
When Spark was created nine years ago, some of Winnipeg’s community organizations, activists, and funders envisioned a vehicle that would help to build capacity and strength in the community economic development sector by matching organizations – who sometimes don’t know what exact skills would be best to address their specific challenges, or can’t afford to hire consultants or new staff to address those challenges – with professionals looking to give back to their community by donating their time and skills. Scans of the national and international pro bono landscape were done at the beginning, and again five years ago. Few services were doing this kind of work, and nothing was found that really fit the wished-for model, or that we could collaborate or share ideas and resources with.
Building our local pro bono movement was kind of like trying to build a bicycle without ever having ridden or even seen one, and we’ve done a lot of experimentation while developing the model. A number of approaches and methods haven’t worked (like asking professionals to sign up for a pre-pledged yearly amount of service, carte blanche), but many of our experiments have (like formalized match agreements). Along the way, we have made almost 300 matches, leveraging close to a million dollars in relevant, specific, and high quality assistance for the community development sector, where and when organizations have needed it the most.
It’s been an incredible journey so far. Our model is local, home-grown, and a bit quirky – a lot like Winnipeg itself.
Photo used with permission from Jieun Choi
A couple of years ago we began to hear about US-based groups like Catchafire and the Taproot Foundation (thank you, internet!) and started to reach out, as well as follow them on social media to see what they’re up to. We discovered that the First Annual Global Pro Bono Summit was happening in New York City in 2013 and eagerly followed the proceedings on Twitter. We were stunned to discover that there are groups from all over the world – including Endeavour, our new pals from Toronto – doing pro bono matching work. It seemed like it was destiny that our paths would cross, and after reaching out to Taproot and the Summit’s co-sponsor the BMW Foundation, we finally met the organizations and great people who form part of the global pro bono intermediary family, and shared four jam-packed days of information sharing, problem solving, strategizing, and, of course, socializing.
It’s taking us awhile to process everything that we’ve learned, but we’re happy in the knowledge that we’ve started down a new road – one that we’re not alone on! There were 27 representatives from 20 organizations in 14 different countries, including France, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Canada, Hungary, China, South Korea, Portugal, Japan, Singapore, Slovakia, Germany, the United States and the Netherlands.
Three things really stood out:
Sometimes many people have the same good idea at the same time, all around the world.
A number of other pro bono intermediaries started around the same time that Spark did.
There are many ways of going about the same work.
Some intermediaries create teams to help a non-profit, while others work with one particular business to place a team of their employees in a pro bono opportunity. Others (like Spark) mostly match one volunteer to one organization. Some work globally, some locally. Some provide financial as well as pro bono assistance. Some of the models are focused on done-in–a-day pro bono marathons, others arrange matches that take place over months.
There are more people wanting to be involved as pro bono consultants than there are non-profits ready or able to take on the time and resource commitment of working with a volunteer and carrying on the work after the volunteer is done.
Spark has seen this disparity in supply and demand for years, but we are not alone in this. Our new family reports the same thing, all around the world. Challenges of organizational readiness, exact skill fit, timing and many more intangibles make matchmaking challenging!
One thing that we’ve been doing since returning is changing our language around the matches we make – expect to see less use of “skills-based volunteers,” and more “Pro Bono Consultants”. This change has a double intention: first, by using the term “pro bono” to refer to the work that Spark volunteers do, we’ll be helping spread the understanding that pro bono refers to more than just legal services, and; secondly, we’re aligning Spark with the global pro bono movement.
There’s so much interest in pro bono, all around the world. Thanks to our new family ties, we now know that Spark is part of a global movement. An intention of the ongoing summit series is to foster a real shift in the world, creating a permanent and foundational place for pro bono work across professional disciplines and in the corporate sector.
We’re on an interesting road, and we look forward to journeying with our fellow pro bono intermediaries, and with Winnipeg’s community development sector and pro bono consultants. If you’re in Winnipeg, join us!
Geoff Ripat is the Program Manager ofSpark, a service that matches community development and CED projects and organizations with pro-bono consultants in Winnipeg. Geoff has worked and volunteered in Winnipeg’s inner city for over 15 years.
Dalhousie University, through its Local Government Program, has created a new certificate program in Community Economic Development (CED). This program will be targeting those already working in the field of CED, predominately at the local government level, through the College of Continuing Education. The program will consist of 6 distance education courses in the following areas:
Local Government
Municipal Law I
Local Government Finance
Citizen Engagement and Consultation
Community Economic Development: Business and Community Development I
Community Economic Development: Business and Community Development II
Offering these courses by distance will help CED professionals to remain connected to their communities. The certification attained through this program will be recognized by the Economic Developers Association of Canada (E.D.A.C.).
This certificate program, offered in partnership with CCEDNet member Cape Breton University – a leader in CED education in the country – will have its first student cohort in the fall of 2014.
If you have any questions regarding this program, please feel free to contact Shelby Lang, Program Manager, at or 902-494-7459.
In last month’s budget, the United Kingdom announced a 30% tax relief-rate for social investment. The Social Economy Alliance (SEA), a network of over 150 organizations (including social enterprises, co-operatives, universities, housing associations, crowd-funders, social investors, think tanks and charities) is optimistic that the tax relief will help spur greater investment in the UK’s social economy. They have reason to believe this, as over £8.7 billion has been invested to over 20,000 businesses during the past 20 years through similar tax incentive schemes.
The social investment market in the UK has been a source of inspiration for Canadian governments who are interested in supporting the development of innovative economic approaches to solving complex social and environmental issues. With other tax incentive measures already in place in various provinces of Canada (e.g. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick) time will tell whether other jurisdictions in Canada will adopt similar tax incentives. In the meantime, there is growing evidence that tax incentives are helping to level the playing field, making investments in charities and social enteprises as attractive as traditional market investments.
Wendy Keats is a co-founder and the Executive Director of the Co-operative Enterprise Council of New Brunswick. Prior to this, she spent 18 years as a CED consultant and trainer working with nearly 200 community groups in organizational development, strategic planning, governance, and many other development areas. Wendy is a certified mediator and served for 10 years as a senior faculty member of UPEI’s Centre for Conflict Resolution Studies. She has sat on numerous boards and committees related to CED and has a special passion for youth engagement and renewable energy, having lived completely off-the-grid for nearly a decade.
Carol Madsen has been involved in Community Economic and International Development for 3 decades. She is an associate with the Centre for Sustainable Community Development and teaches CED and social enterprise courses at Simon Fraser University since 2002. For 10 years she worked with Tradeworks Training Society in the heart of the inner city downtown of Vancouver, working on employment and social development strategies with marginalized residents. She has organized the Alternative Investment Strategy conference for the Montreal Community Loan Association and served as Director of Bridging the Divides, a 3-year CED research project in Trail and North Island, BC. In her twenties Carol had the opportunity to work with Canada World Youth in several small communities across the country and in Bolivia, Togo, Brazil, and Indonesia. Carol speaks several languages including French and holds a Masters in Business in CED.
Derek Pachal has been active with CCEDNet since its inception in 1999 and has contributed locally serving on the CCEDNet-Manitoba Advisory Committee and the Annual Gathering Organizing Committee. As an enterprise development consultant, Derek currently works as a portfolio manager for the Jubilee Fund providing loan guarantees for non-profit organizations, social enterprises and co-ops. Derek has worked in urban, rural, northern and Aboriginal communities and volunteers on several local committees related to CED. Derek has a lifelong passion for social justice and the empowerment of marginalized individuals and communities.
CCEDNet has partnered with the Centre de la francophonie des Amériques to promote community economic development (CED) and the social and solidarity economy (SSE) to francophones in the Americas.
Last week marked a very successful step for the hard work of child care advocates in Manitoba. The Province of Manitoba has committed to a substantial 5-year plan for child care, including investing in 5,000 newly funded spaces, $25M for child-care centre capital projects, higher wages for Early Childhood Educators, and the creation of an Early Learning and Child Care Commission.
A meeting of the 
