A Reconciliation, Equity and Anti-racism Course for Oakville Community Foundation
Oakville Community Foundation
Oakville Community Foundation is an organization that aims to make long-term positive changes in Oakville, Southern Ontario. The Foundation is a leader in identifying their community’s challenges and needs, and serves as a central ‘storehouse’ of research, funds, and information. With a deep understanding of the local area and the community, the Foundation guides organizations and people making change possible.
The Need
The Foundation’s Vision is aligned to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and envisions “a Community where no one is left behind.” To that end, the Foundation’s Strategic Plan prioritizes reducing inequalities in its operations and in the community.
The Foundation has adopted a Reconciliation, Equity, and Anti-Racism Action Plan, which focuses on being reflective of the diversity in their community. This will help ensure that grants are inclusive and that the Foundation continues to support the local charitable sector’s diversity, equity, and inclusion journey.
While many organizations have already begun learning about Truth, Reconciliation, and Inclusivity, some organizations may be struggling to find the resources they need to implement training. The Foundation wanted to help speed up and amplify the journey to inclusivity by providing a learning resource for organizations to use.
The Challenge
In order to achieve this, the Foundation needed to create education around these topics that engages learners and makes a true impact on their behaviour.
The Foundation wanted to create training around Truth and Reconciliation and Inclusivity. They have excellent, knowledgeable subject matter experts (SMEs) but not the learning expertise to conceptualise, design, and develop the learning solution. While Enable relied on the Foundation to provide technical expertise on the subject matter, we brought the learning expertise to the collaboration.
The Solution
The Foundation and Enable Education collaborated to build a solution that:
Following the ADDIE model, an instructional design industry standard, our learning experience design (LXD) team guided the Foundation in identifying the goal and learning objectives of the course. They identified the learner audience, and determined the best learning solution to present the content to the users.
Once the Foundation and our LXD team had outlined what users would learn in the course, experts in the topics covered met with Enable’s video production team to record the videos.
The Outcome
The resulting course titled, Reconciliation, Equity, and Anti-racism, consists of four modules of video-based training. Experts on the topics of Board Diversity, The Indigenous Perspective, Gender Equity, and Equity and Racism, share their knowledge, experience, expertise, stories and insights. There are reflection exercises and action items for the learners to complete, so they have actionable steps to take.
The course is a practical starting point to help charitable organizations on their journey towards an inclusive, anti-racist, and equitable community. The videos, reflections and course activities help learners identify gaps and opportunities within their own organizations.
The course introduces and explains basic concepts and terminology for each topic – a crucial starting point to learn the language associated with inclusivity. Learners draft important steps for each topic that can be incorporated into their organization’s plans. The authenticity, passion, and deep understanding displayed by the experts engages learners and makes them feel empowered to start an action plan for their organizations.
Reconciliation, Equity, and Anti-racism is housed on Enable’s proprietary LMS, Thinkscape. Like many of our clients, the Foundation did not have a learning platform already deployed and so Enable further supported them by donating the use of our Thinkscape platform. By using Thinkscape, the Foundation is able to control access to the courses as well as track people’s learning and provide them a digital platform for assessment and communication.
Wendy Rinella, CEO of The Oakville Community Foundation, shares with us the work they’re doing.
If this sounds like a solution that could address your company’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion challenges, schedule a call below – we have some great ideas to share!