By Dilek Sayedahmed, WISIR
First and foremost, we had a wonderful first convening with the Investment Readiness Program (IRP) family. It was exciting to see many organizations gathered for three days. The ecosystem seemed alive and well. We look forward to the second family reunion, which will be another three-day event between February 28th and March 1st. As the Waterloo Institute of Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) team, we also look forward to giving back to the IRP ecosystem with our decolonial centric research focused on principles-based evaluation, peer learning, and system mapping.
Through the activities organized by the WISIR team and the Canadian CED Network (CCEDNet), we were able to learn more about the ecosystem while being in the ecosystem with everyone. We saw the IRP taking a moment to mindfully probe and build sense of itself by processing idea exchanges in real time. In this post I will give you some of those highlights.
It was informative to listen to presentations by AJAH and Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) on IRP 1.0 observations. Specifically, ESDC and AJAH discussed the pilot (between 2019 and 2021) with data and lessons learned to adapt for IRP 2.0. They also told us about their data strategy. It was great to listen to their informative presentations. Among the key findings are suggestions based on lessons learned regarding diversity and inclusion. More specifically, the lack of information on diversity limits the scope of the analysis.
Furthermore, we saw that information on leadership within social purpose organizations (SPOs) and on SPOs that serve equity-deserving groups will allow for a more in-depth analysis of SPOs in terms of several organizational and social aspects. What’s more, this also allows for an assessment of program awareness and funding distribution in relation to equity-deserving groups. ESDC emphasized for us the need to simplify and standardize the format to make it easier for respondents to enter data. For this reason, it was great to learn that New Power Labs’ new initiative to collect self-reported disaggregated demographic data.
Another part of the first convening I found exciting was the discussion on takeaways from the SPO application data. Participants contributed with interesting remarks on this topic. For example, how amazing it would be to have access to information or analysis on the entities that applied and could not get funding in IRP 1.0 and/or IRP 2.0. Lots of lessons would be learned there. Also, that way we could see whether a specific segment needs more "how to apply" support. Thanks to this discussion, we heard that the applicants matched the selected SPOs and that this was mindfully underlined during the process. Regarding the entities who were not able to be funded, it was clarified during the discussion that this was largely because the funding was exhausted and not because of poor quality applicants.
Finally, we had some excellent sessions and exchanges of ideas during breakout rooms on systems mapping. Specifically, Imagine Canada shared some excellent articles and examples of maps. New Power Labs discussed the types of system maps. They also highlighted an important point regarding how we cannot track and trace our progress in systems mapping. Catalyst made the important point that the role of mapping is to see what is missing (gaps) and engagement.
To conclude, I'll leave you with two incredible points about systems mapping. The first, raised by Cense, is that collaboration is about co-working (working together), which can take many forms and does not always involve actually working together. Second, by New Power Labs, that much of the mapping comes from simply documenting what we do and what those relationships are.
And on that note, we look forward to our future meetings to explore together different ways to map our ecosystem!
Below you can see a snapshot of the Ecosystem that went through live probing and sense-making: ⬇️
