Meet the team

This week is a busy week for us. We made several trips to the airport, booked field trips, and turned our little studio in Burnaby into a beautiful dining hall. This week is also an exciting week for us as we welcome organizational partners and designers flying in from Amsterdam, San Fransisco and Toronto. This week is Team Induction Week!

Over the next 6 months, we will be trying out different things: turning Kudoz into a start-up in British Columbia; prototyping interventions that stick at West Neighbourhood House in Toronto; finding out people’s sense of social connection in high-rise buildings in Vancouver; exposing other teams around the world to the Grounded Change approach via Residencies; and last but not least, exploring what kind of organizational leadership and systems are required to embed Social Research & Resource Development as an organizational function – not a project.

We’ve got some pretty big ambitions. So for a full 5 days, we are coming together as one big team to revisit our core concepts, refresh our values, and explore our methods. What we do, why we do it, how we do it, and what we are measuring.

We kick-started our Induction Week with a candlelight dinner in our Burnaby studio, with each of us doing a short PechaKucha presentation of the things we’ve made: from starting businesses when we were little, to doing two-years of immersive ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea, to winning a thousand dollars in a marathon, to organizing big events, to building a mobile school in India. It is interesting to see what inspires us to make things and how we are shaped by what we make.

A Cross-Canada Social R&D brings these Chief Executive Directors together in one room. (L to R: Maureen Fair and Lambrina Nikolaou from West Neighbourhood House, Toronto, Fernando Coelho from posAbilities Association of BC, and Richard Faucher from Burnaby Association of Community Inclusion.

Prototyping interventions within the system is a big deal! Maureen Fair (West Neighbourhood House) met with Richard Faucher (BACI), Tanya Sather (BACI), and Theresa Huntly (SFSCL) to talk about some of the challenges innovating within the agencies, and shared their perspectives as Chief Executive Directors of a service delivery organization. Watch Maureen’s biggest take-away from the conversation:

Enjoying dinner and getting to know each other.

Doing PechaKucha presentation about the things we made.

We started Monday morning with a Skype discussion hosted by Dr. Corinne Gartner, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College, to explore different theories of ‘flourishing’ – including contemporary theory and Aristotelian notions. We talked about what it means to live a flourishing life? Is it only about getting what we want? Or also about having ‘good’ virtues? We had a great discussion about how the theories get translated, or not translated, in our current welfare system. And what it means for our work and what we want to achieve.

Dr. Corinne Gartner led us in a discussion about the theories of human flourishing.

In the afternoon, the teams went out to different locations to imagine what the world would look like if it has adopted InWithForward’s vision of flourishing. The teams visited public libraries, Service Canada, and Brentwood development site to get some context of what these places look like and what kinds of people’s interaction are there. They came back and made their visions as real as possible using visual languages and different styles of presentation.

Lambrina and Julie from West Neighbourhood House are out and about with Andie and Charlotte from the Kudoz team.

Checking out how things are framed and written in a WorkBC site.

Watch Sabrina reflect on her biggest take-aways on what it means to be in a flourishing community.

We will be posting more reflection from the Induction Week as we go along!

From a group of 6 to 18 team members and partners