Farzana Doctor is an activist, community organizer, social worker, and author. In this session, Elizabeth McIsaac talks to Farzana about about how you can practice self-care and community-care around your work. You can find Farzana's good ideas, resources, and full bio here. 

Diana Chan McNally is a frontline worker and advocate for homeless people.  In this session, Elizabeth McIsaac talks to Diana about what she's learned in combining both roles.  You can find Diana's Good Resources and full bio here. 

Ombudsman Toronto is an independent and internal office that holds the City accountable to its residents. It makes recommendations to the City to improve its service and ensure they're fair.  In this session, Elizabeth McIsaac talks to Toronto Ombudsman Kwame Addo about how individuals and residents can get the most out of working with his office for positive change.  You can read the transcript and Kwame's full bio here: Five Good Ideas on working with Ombudsman Toronto for positive change -...

In this session, Sree Nallamothu and Fran Odette joined Elizabeth McIsaac to discuss how to create an accessible workplace. They explain how to be proactive, to move beyond niceties, the power of language, embracing intersectionality, and putting accessibility in the budget.  You can find the transcript, and Sree and Fran's full bios here: Five Good Ideas for disrupting ableism in the workplace - Maytree

In this session, Joan Garry, founder of the Nonprofit Leadership Lab, emphasizes the need for proactive and ongoing succession planning, reframing it as part of organizational readiness, and the critical role of the board in driving this process forward. She highlights the risks of inadequate succession planning, such as difficulties in recruiting a competent replacement, staff dissatisfaction, and donor anxiety. For Joan's full bio, resources, and the session transcript, visit the Five Good...

This session provides a guide to participating in nonprofit boards, drawing on the expert knowledge of Rick Powers, a governance and board leadership specialist at Rotman School of Management. Topics include the importance of understanding fiduciary duty and duty of care, addressing the "information chasm" between board members and management, the significance of financial literacy, CEO succession planning, board memberships and recruiting, and dealing with conflicts of interest. Rick places...

Your non-profit organization does good work and has an important story to tell. Media coverage can be a great way to establish credibility, build cachet, and reach a larger audience. But journalists are not necessarily short on stories or sources. So what are the Five Good Ideas for getting a journalist to call you back? Denise Balkissoon, Ontario bureau chief of The Narwhal, joins Maytree president Elizabeth McIsaac to explain how she identifies stories and sources. For Denise's ideas,...

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 lead to collective change. When things do get hard (and they will), the collaboration’s resilience will be...

Silence around questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the workplace has started to sound more like complicity. Now people can’t talk enough about EDI. But how do you put all you’ve read and learned into action? In this session, recorded live on March 31, 2023, Dr. Tanya (Toni) De Mello, Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion, Toronto Metropolitan University, shared the ways in which feeling like you belong, knowing you’ll be included, and seeing your work community as...

“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.  In this session, recorded live on February 23, 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,...

How can you advance your non-profit’s values through the use of technology?   In this session, recorded live on January 23, Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN and author of The Tech That Comes Next¸ and Katie Gibson, Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience, presented their answers to this question.   [5:38] 1. Never put technology ahead of people. [10:23] 2. Create diverse tech committees to support decisions, testing, and feedback. [15:01] 3. Only collect data...

When searching for a new office space, it’s all about the lease. In this session, recorded live on November 25, George Georghiades, Principal and CEO of Lexington Park Real Estate Incorporated, presents his advice on who to hire for help, what to look out for, and how to minimize risk in what is often an organization’s second largest expense. These are his five suggested steps for a non-profit’s leasing process. [6:03] 1. Define your space needs [11:56] 2. Align your internal team [15:51] 3....

If the well-being of a non-profit organization depends on its financial health, then the quality of the relationship between senior, or finance, staff and the board of directors is key. In this session, recorded live on October 24, Michael Herrera, Chief Financial Officer at George Brown College, shares lessons from his wealth of experience as a staff member and a director. These are his five good ideas on bringing your financial story to the board. [3:12] 1. Set up your new board members for...

The charitable sector has navigated many new challenges in the past few years. How do we now quantify our impact, respond to the future of work, and relate and respond to social movements?  In this Five Good Ideas session, recorded live on September 28, Sabreena Delhon, executive director of the Samara Centre for Democracy, discussed how to break out of default binary non-profit work processes to find exploratory, creative, and substantive approaches to making meaningful change. [5:18] 1....

In this session, originally recorded on June 1, 2022, we asked Katharine Coons, National Senior Manager, Workplace Mental Health at Canadian Mental Health Association, to share her five good ideas on how create a psychologically healthy and safe workplace. Read the full transcript. Download the session handout. Five Good Ideas Reduce stigma Normalize the conversation Use appropriate language Hold space to check in Prioritize flexibility Involve your employees in decision-making Remain...

In this session, originally recorded on April 26, 2022, we asked Teresa Marques, president and CEO of the Rideau Hall Foundation, to share her five good ideas on how to navigate effective development within the non-profit and charitable sector. Read the full transcript. Download the session handout. Five Good Ideas Form should follow function. Figure out your internal and shared goals, the table stakes for each party, and your respective strengths and weaknesses, then design the partnership...

In this session, originally recorded on March 29, 2022, we asked Nandita Bijur and Galen MacLusky to share the mindsets and principles that have helped their organization, Prosper Canada, introduce and integrate human-centred design into their projects.   Download the session handout at https://maytree.com/wp-content/uploads/5GI-Mar2022.pdf. Five Good Ideas More poetry, less long-division Use design tools as a scaffold, not a checklist Start and end with people’s experience Focus on the...

In this session, originally recorded on February 24, 2022, we asked Marlene Oliveira, a communications advisor and copywriter, to share her five good ideas on how to best get an organization’s communications fundamentals in order and how to plan to strengthen them. In her presentation, Marlene discussed the importance of specific frameworks, tools, and tactics, including a non-profit’s strategic plan, brand, website, and storytelling. Read the full transcript at...

In this session, originally recorded on January 26, 2022, we asked Matthew Mendelsohn, a public policy entrepreneur, researcher, strategic advisor and public sector executive, to share his five good ideas on the best ways to influence the decisions governments make. Matthew provides an overview of lessons he has learned during his time in government, advocacy, consulting and policy think tanks. Read the full transcript at...

In this session, originally recorded on November 25, 2021, we asked Rosemarie Powell, Executive Director of the Toronto Community Benefits Network (TCBN), to share five good ideas about the lessons she has learned as the leader of a community-labour coalition charged with implementing community benefits agreements. Local communities want the workforce building public infrastructure to reflect the demographics of their neighbourhoods and for the accrued economic benefits to be shared more...

In this session, originally recorded on October 25, 2021, we asked Owen Charters, President & CEO of BGC Canada, to present his five good ideas about how a board can be better. They say strategy starts with the board, but is that really true, and should it be? Whether you’re an executive director or CEO (including an aspiring one), managing a board is a skill that’s rarely taught, yet vital to any senior non-profit leader. In this Five Good Ideas session with Owen Charters, find out how a...

In this session, originally recorded on September 28, 2021, we asked Neena Gupta, a partner at Gowling WLG (Canada) LLP, to present her five good ideas about creating a successful hybrid workplace. COVID-19 forced employers and employees to adapt to a virtual workplace. More than one and a half years into the pandemic, many employees don’t want to go back to the old ways of working, and employers are looking to find ways to create a hybrid workplace where their staff can work in the office as...

In this session, originally recorded on June 15, 2021, we asked Jeff Szeto, Chief Financial Officer at Avana Capital Corporation and Maytree, to speak about his five good ideas to enhance your finance toolkit. For anyone working in a for-profit, non-profit, or charitable organization, it is critically important to have a robust finance and accounting team that can help them understand and leverage the financial aspects of their organization. This will help minimize risk but also support them...

In this session, originally recorded on March 25, 2021, we asked Lesa Francis, Avvy Go, Samya Hasan and Shalini Konanur to share five good ideas for racial justice change-making. How do we best address growing colour-coded inequality – for Indigenous peoples and peoples of colour, including Black Canadians? What are the institutional, structural, and systemic impacts of racism, faithism, and related inequality in education, housing, justice, health, and employment? How can individuals,...