we design and facilitate strategic process and meaningful collaboration to solve complex challenges

Stakeholder Engagement

Meetings, Events, Retreats:  

We design & facilitate participatory processes that enable groups to work better together - from single meetings, large scale events and conferences.We bring years of experience to help you host an effective meeting or series of meetings, and can provide a neutral voice so that you and your team or stakeholders can fully participate. We are comfortable facilitating both small scale group meetings to large scale engagements of 1000+ people.

Gathering Ideas and Feedback:  

We lead stakeholder engagement for the purpose of informing major decisions. We actively engage individuals and groups to understand context, uncover narratives, insights, patterns and challenges so that teams and organizations can make decisions that are wel informed collective decisions, transparent, and aligned with the needs and expectations of key stakeholders. This engagement often takes the form of interviews, focus groups, engagement sessions followed up by facilitated sense-making meetings with the client to draw conclusions from the gathered data.

Leadership COACHING & training

Leadership Training & Coaching for Individuals: We offer training and coaching to support your leadership to lead change and navigate uncertainty. Emphasis is placed on navigating complex systems, developing core competencies, and collective problem solving methods, with an aim to envision and develop sustainable futures.

Leadership & Collaboration Training for Teams: Colab’s experience working with organizations across multiple sectors has shown us that the way to develop a culture of collaboration and innovation is by establishing shared language and patterns for teams to work effectively together. To establish a culture of participatory leadership and innovation in your organization, we begin working with a core team of leaders who can then radiate out the learning and build the capacity of others.

Recent training programs include:

• Sustainability Leadership Certificate at Dalhousie University

• Engagement: Upskilling for Leaders

• Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter

• Effective Meeting Design

• Design Thinking: How to Foster a Culture of Innovation

Strategic planning & DEVELOPMENTAL EvaluatioN

Strategic Planning:
Internal Engagement: We work closely with leadership, staff, and key teams to align on the organization’s vision, mission, values, and priorities. By facilitating workshops and discussions, we ensure that all internal voices are heard, fostering clarity and collective ownership of the plan.

External Stakeholder Engagement: To create a plan that truly reflects the needs and expectations of the broader community, we facilitate meaningful dialogues with external stakeholders, such as partners, customers, funders, and community members. Their input helps to inform strategic directions and ensures the organization remains relevant and responsive.

Collaboration: Throughout the process, we focus on collaborative decision-making, bringing diverse perspectives together. This leads to a more resilient and actionable strategic plan, co-created by those who will both implement and be impacted by it.

Developmental Evaluation:

Developmental Evaluation (DE) is the other side of the same coin as strategic planning. DE provides an intentional and systematic structure for learning to calibrate your strategy and respond quickly to emerging issues. DE brings to strategic initiatives the element of adaptation through the processes of asking evaluative questions, applying evaluation logic, and gathering and reporting evaluative data to support project, program, product, and organizational development with timely feedback