We are underpinned by a Foundation culture that is prepared to engage in areas that are murky, and which accepts that the response to a problem is not always clear and that the implications of an intervention or strategy may not emerge for years. Our navigational aid in this challenging context is the Foundation’s values.
At a certain point, we decided that we needed to make our values more explicit, and this exercise has guided our decisions since that time. We summarized some of these values in a statement we developed:
We believe change happens when people share hopeful visions of the future, work and learn collectively, think broadly in pursuit of comprehensive solutions, and take a meaningful role in the decisions that affect their lives.
Other values that fortify our work include:
- our refusal to be prescriptive to our grantees on method or outcome;
- our belief in the importance that a range of perspectives make to arriving at good decisions, ideas, and practice;
- the importance of respect in all our work; and
- the significance of a robust and engaged civil society in building a strong Canada.
The Foundation’s values have given us the ability to retain a flexible and open-minded approach to program development and delivery. We often feel our way into an engagement with an issue by gathering information and perspective and then shaping it, over time, into a response to the issue. We remain comfortable with an incomplete or emergent approach to an issue, one that evolves over time as we learn from what we do.