So, how’re things?
Now that 2023 is winding down and the dust is beginning to settle on the turbulent past few years – how is your organization? What have you accomplished? How would you rate your 2023 – what worked, what didn’t?
How is 2024 shaping up?
If your organization is anything like ours – these are probably the questions your board is starting to ask. Maybe you’re beginning to draft your annual report. Maybe you’re in the middle of your strategic planning as we move forward into the not-so-new-anymore “normal”. Maybe your group, just like ours, is just planning the year to come. As the last quarter of the year dawns, the looming specter of 2024 nears. It’s organizational planning season for many housing providers.
But how can you truly plan for the challenges ahead when you don’t truly know where you stand? How can you find your way?
You need a compass. The Community Housing Transformation Centre is here to help you find your way.
Taking an honest, objective and thorough look inward is an absolutely crucial first step in any planning process. But introspection can be daunting. Especially for community housing providers, who – let’s be honest – are constantly under siege as they navigate razor-thin budgets, endless emergencies, limited resources and an ever-worsening housing crisis.
“This tool really allowed our board to undertake a really honest self-assessment to see how our organization is performing in key four areas. And in fact, through that process of completing the Organizational Compass tool, we were able to generate a customized action plan that we tailored for our organization.”
-Lisa Olivera, Housing Services Corporation
That’s why we developed the Organizational Compass. A truly turn-key, free and user-friendly self-assessment tool created to help community housing providers who don’t always have the time for crucial exercises like these.
The Organizational Compass provides guidance in four areas:
- Governance
- Property management
- Financial management
- Social and community relations
The Compass will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and following the self-assessment, create an automatically generated action plan and grant you access to a list of resources available to implement the plan. The action plan will be tailored to your situation and assessment results and It will chart a clear path forward to give you and your association the best shot at success with your organizational planning. It will also serve as a project management tool allowing you to monitor and adjust your progress. You can then request support from our program managers to implement your action plan.
“A few weeks ago, we completed the SAT-AP tool, and we were amazed to see how ideas that we had been talking about for years were quickly identified by the tool allowing us to build our action plan. The self-assessment tool is useful in that way. We can track our own pace, obstacles and effort given or needed. And we can organize our priorities in order of importance so we can reach our results faster and more effectively.”
Carolle Piché-Burton, secretary to the Board of Directors of Société d’habitation Chambrelle
Once you complete the self-assessment, you can bolster your action plan with our free Compass Resource Kits.
The Organizational Compass was created with and for community housing providers and is fully supported by the Centre and its dedicated staff. Want to know more ? Feel free to watch THIS RECENT WEBINAR we co-hosted with our friends at The Housing Services Corporation (HSC), who were early adopters of our self-assessment tools. If you’re looking for additional support, you may contact us directly or connect with us to keep abreast of upcoming events, resource additions and webinars.
At the Centre, we are dedicated to effectively address the housing crisis and as such we must transform the community sector with proactive tools and bold initiatives. Transformation, for us, means giving community housing providers the means to succeed. It means engaging board members. It means simplifying planning processes and effective management strategy. The Organizational Compass is but a component of growing gamut of resources that also includes a robust Resource Inventory, a Green Compass, energy coaches and more. All these free tools are designed to assist you and help boost sector growth.
Going forward on our journey, we hope to use the overall data generated by these tools to establish up-to-date benchmarks that will help guide stakeholders, policy makers and our fellow organizations with actionable information. Together, we can forge ahead with a clearer perspective on our destination – and perhaps more importantly our organizational capacity to get there.
So before you take the next steps forward – take some time to check your Compass.
