Leveraging Our Strengths

Coming together to share experience, knowledge and meet leaders and professionals from a cross sector audience to build a common agenda for the future of doing good in our community.

The LOS partners welcome you to the 8th annual Community Conference. The one day conference is an excellent and affordable opportunity to draw upon and share in the strengths, best practices and capacity of Ottawa’s non-profit sector. Participate in workshops that develop skills and knowledge, highlight innovative models of practice, identify emerging issues and raise awareness of available resources for local community agencies and partners – suitable for frontline-staff, managers, volunteers, executive directors and board members.

From 2001, United Way organized the Sharing of Our Strengths (SOS) conference for nine years with the broader objective to building capacity of the community organizations and partners.

The conferences were held to provide an effective and affordable opportunity for staff and volunteers of community-based and not-for-profit organizations to enhance their skills, exchange information and share good practices that draw upon and celebrate our collective strength as a community.

The conference was paused in 2010 to engage more partners in organizing the event and to make it more effective for the participating community service agencies. The City of Ottawa, Community Foundation of Ottawa, Ontario Trillium Foundation and Volunteer Ottawa were brought on board to review the past events.

In 2012, the conference was re-branded and called Leveraging Our Strengths Conference. The focus was to promote the concept of Collective Impact as we believe that many of our community’s most pressing and complex social problems can be resolved when nonprofits, foundations, governments, and businesses coordinate their efforts to focus on a common agenda.

The 2013 Leveraging Our Strengths Conference was directed at community development leaders. It was intended to assist all stakeholders to partner more effectively and better demonstrate impact.

In 2014, Mark Friedman from Fiscal Policy Institute was invited to provide a one day session to introduce the concept of Results Based Accountability and how it can support Collective Impact initiatives.

In 2015, the LOS Conference looked at the experience over the past four years to identify critical learnings about what makes a Collective Impact approach work, particularly from a Canadian perspective, and to suggest some of the challenges to success. Leading figures such as Andrea Cohen, CEO OTF, Hilary Pearson, president and CEO Philanthropic foundation of Canada, and Dan Clement, VP United Way Canada were invited to share their views with the participants.

In 2016, the conference was organized around the theme of social enterprise and in 2017 the conference was re-structured to offer a variety of workshops and presentations related to capacity building of non-profit sector for a deeper impact.