Collective Results had the pleasure of working with Dufferin Child and Family Services (DCAFS) in the spring and summer of 2022 to support them in the development of their 3-year strategic plan. DCAFS is a multiservice agency, based in Orangeville, Ontario, that provides a variety of programs and services to children, youth, and their families across all of Dufferin County. Their three main areas of focus include: child welfare, child and youth mental health, and developmental services.
From the outset of the project, DCAFS expressed their desire to ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) principles were strongly embedded in the entire strategic planning process. Our Collective Results team gained a lot of great insight from this partnership, as DCAFS has been committed to their EDI journey for several years, offering extensive training and awareness opportunities for their staff and Board Members. As equity is one of Collective Results’ own values, we strived to honour this commitment to ongoing learning and unlearning about diversity, inclusion and belonging throughout this project.
We began with robust engagement sessions that consisted of using a combination of surveys, interviews and focus groups to connect with several groups that have an invested interest in the programs and services at DCAFS. These groups included staff, board members, community partners, and parents of service recipients. We collected insightful feedback such as recommended areas of focus, the challenges DCAFS may be facing, and how the needs of individuals and families receiving service may have changed over the last 5 years. The themes that emerged from the engagement sessions provided a contextual foundation to build upon and informed the strategic planning process.
We worked virtually with the DCAFS Board Members to develop the strategic plan in which Collective Results facilitated several sessions following a step-by-step process. First, the Board created positioning statements, which helped to identify where DCAFS wanted to go over the next 3 years. Next, the Board used those positioning statements to form strategic pillars, which consist of the big “buckets” of work that structured the strategy. Lastly, the Board crafted strategic goals within each of the strategic pillars that helped to provide direction and identify what problems needed to be addressed within each area that then informed the creation of strategic objectives.
Following the development of the draft strategic plan, DCAFS worked with our Collective Results team to identify key performance indicators for each of the strategic objectives that provided helpful ways to monitor how well DCAFS is doing with the implementation of their strategic plan over the next 3 years.
Overall, Collective Results was grateful to work with such an incredible organization that is committed to helping children, youth, and their families in the Dufferin community. The dedicated people we worked with at DCAFS were extremely engaged and invested in the strategic planning process. We are proud of the work we accomplished together and encourage you to check out the 2022-2024 Strategic Plan posted on DCAFS’ website!
To provide the client perspective, Jennifer Moore, Chief Executive Officer for DCAFS, was kind enough to share her insights on what the experience was like working together with Collective Results on this strategic planning project:
“Working with Collective Results on this project was fantastic! Strategic planning is such an important exercise within an organization – it requires engagement; sound methodology; fidelity to process while also having flexibility; and a finished product that is useful and effective. Collective Results delivered on all of these aspects. The team at Collective Results were consistently professional, responsive, open to feedback and highly organized. They actively listened and found ways for all interested parties to participate meaningfully in the process. It was clear from the initial project proposal to executing the final deliverables that Collective Results was the right choice!”