Women's Economic Council

Published purpose

This 60-month project will address organizational and sector capacity needs to allow the Women’s Economic Council and its partners to continue promoting social and systemic change towards gender equality. Key activities will include consultations and assessments to help the Women’s Economic Council to collaboratively identify its strategic capacity-building priorities and to implement both tried tools and newly created capacity-building resources. The organization will partner with sector stakeholders that have previously taken steps to build their own capacity to avoid duplication, and will support women and women’s organizations working in community economic development in Canada to address their own capacity needs through training, workshops, and knowledge-sharing on effective capacity-building tools. A Strategic Plan and Sustainability Plan will be created and adapted based on evaluation results. Due to the current environment and the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have beenstruggling with the implementation of their planned activities and have expressed difficulty addressing emerging needs. The additional funding would be used to increase the pace at which WEC builds a healthy financial base and processes. While growing capacity in the area of financial health was one of six key WAGE-funded priorities, since the pandemic, the need to transition from manual, place-based financial systems and tools to a fully digital system is more pressing than ever. The old systems can no longer be used effectively and a slow measured transition over the full four years of the project is no longer an option. We must, for example, move quickly to widely used software such as QuickBooks, which means hiring specialists to make the transition now, rather than WEC moving things slowly over time, using internal resources. The second supplemental funding will be used to create an organizational program strategy for the next 3-5 years. It will activate the theory of change and ensure it is well translated into a solid program portfolio that describes in greater detail how to create the impact that WEC is trying to achieve.