Five Good Ideas ®
Five Good Ideas is a lunch-and-learn program where industry and issue experts discuss powerful yet practical ideas on key management issues facing non-profit organizations. The sessions are most useful for management staff and board members at small and mid-sized non-profits.
Each expert presents five concise ideas and explores with the audience how these ideas can be translated into action.
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The Five Good Ideas Book
Previous Five Good Ideas sessions
Published on 08/05/2023
In this session, Liz Weaver and Mike Des Jardins of the Tamarack Institute share stories and provide helpful ideas about how to make a collaboration more sustainable, resilient, and impactful.
It can be hard sustaining a collaboration, because tackling community issues together creates challenges to partnership and momentum. But you can set up a collaboration for success. Focus on four areas—people, resources, process, and impact—and the factors that determine their quality, like leadership, funding, community engagement, and the ability to influence policy and systems that […]
Published on 31/03/2023
In this Five Good Ideas session, Dr. Tanya (Toni) De Mello explores the ways in which feeling like you belong, knowing that you will be included, and seeing your work community as "your" community matters.
How do we create a more inclusive community at our workplaces? We have all done the trainings and listened to the TED Talks, and every second line of an organization’s website mentions “EDI.” Equity, diversity, and inclusion may have become buzzwords in business, NGO, and government sectors, in reality, organizations – including those in the […]
Published on 23/02/2023
In this session, Agapi Gessesse, Executive Director, CEE Centre for Black Young Professionals, shared her five good ideas on how community organizations, governments, and corporations can create ecosystems where everyone benefits from each other’s work, and advances the social change that we all want to see.
“We couldn’t do it without you!” “Without strong partners, this couldn’t be done.” We use these phrases because they are at the heart of how we work for social change. Social change does not happen in a vacuum. Agapi Gessesse, Executive Director, CEE Centre for Black Young Professionals, shared her five good ideas on how […]
Published on 25/01/2023
In this session, Amy and Katie offer tangible advice on how we can better incorporate our missions and values in our engagement with technology.
How can non-profits advance equity, self-determination, and reciprocity through our use of technology? Data and digital technologies can be essential tools to help non-profits and charities meet our missions and multiply our impact. Yet, non-profits have not always been well-served by technology, nor have we seen our core values embedded in how technology is developed, […]
Published on 25/11/2022
In this session, George Georghiades, Principal and CEO of Lexington Park Real Estate Capital Inc., presents his five ideas on how non-profits can best prepare, manage, and use their office space.
For many non-profit organizations, how to think about real estate, or their office space, is an important but often overlooked issue. From identifying specific requirements for space and location, ensuring relevant approvals are in place, to engaging key professionals to guide them through the process, there are many steps that non-profits need to consider before […]
Published on 24/10/2022
In this session, Michael Herrera, Chief Financial Officer at George Brown College, will share his five good ideas on how to build a healthy relationship between staff and the board for the financial wellbeing of their organization.
Boards of directors in the non-profit sector have responsibility for governance of organizations, and this includes financial decision making. How senior leadership and finance staff keep board members informed depends on good data, transparent communications, and trust. In this session, Michael Herrera, Chief Financial Officer at George Brown College, will share his five good ideas […]
Published on 28/09/2022
In this Five Good Ideas session, Sabreena Delhon, Executive Director of the Samara Centre for Democracy, presents her five good ideas for how non-profits can evolve their impact in this period of transformation.
Over the past few years non-profit organizations have been navigating massive changes related to the future of work, technology, and the breakthrough of social movements into public consciousness. As inequality continues to deepen and accelerate, expectations of how non-profit organizations make a lasting and scalable impact are shifting. There is new pressure to adapt, engage […]
Published on 01/06/2022
Katharine Coons, national workplace mental health specialist at the Canadian Mental Health Association’s national office, presents five good ideas on how to create a psychologically healthy and safe workplace.
As we’re entering year 3 of the pandemic, our workplaces, and how we work, have profoundly changed. These have been challenging times, in particular for our mental health. How we respond, as organizations and on a personal level, will have a big impact on how we come out of the pandemic. In this session, Katharine […]
Published on 26/04/2022
Join Teresa Marques, President & CEO of the Rideau Hall Foundation, for five good ideas on how to navigate effective partnership development within the non-profit and charitable sector.
If you want to go far, go together. Well, at least sometimes. There are many compelling reasons why charities and non-profit organizations might seek to collaborate in different ways: to have greater impact, for broader reach, to create efficiencies, or perhaps when driven by funder interests. But as great as partnership and collaboration sound, they […]