Submitted by Eric on behalf of Planning and Development
Planning and Development worked with Social Committee Chair Rachel Rose to submit a grant to the City of Calgary’s Affordable Housing “Home Program”. The Home Program grant provides upto $25,000 and aims to provide one-time funding to projects that stimulate innovative, lasting, positive changes in the housing system by advancing one of the key program priority areas. Our application focused on: Community inclusion and integration — Increase participation, engagement and involvement of individuals with the local community, services and supports.
This grant marks an important first step towards strenghthening our relationships with each other, our governance processes, and the operational processes of Sunnyhill.
We are posting a large section of the grant below and are encouraging our neighbours to read through it all. It’ll take you a bit of time and might be a bit boring, but this can be your first step in engaging in what will otherwise be an exciting process!
Thank you to Rachel and Phil for their leadership and hard work!
Project Description
To undertake a robust succession planning process that can re-invigorate and re-tool the social assets of the Sunnyhill Housing Cooperative. By doing so, we can create deeper engagement within the community, retain tenants, and sustain the self management model of our society as it secures the long term future of the coop. All of these combined will ensure the affordability of our housing.
Project Need: Succession Planning: Residency and Engagement at Sunnyhill Housing Cooperative
After 40 plus years of relative stability, we now find ourselves in a place of transition. Currently, we are working to purchase our leased land from the City of Calgary and are undergoing a move to secure the long-term future of the coop. We are nearing the end of our long-term mortgage and, as a result, in 2018 began embarking upon an ambitious capital project to overhaul the declining physical state of our buildings while also expanding our capacity to support current and future members to age in place by building a new multi-unit low rise apartment.
As we begin this project, we understand that it is on us, the membership, to establish a solid social and organizational infrastructure so that we remain a vibrant, inclusive and affordable community for all who call it home. We recognize that the physical changes we are undertaking are of a magnitude requiring that we also pay special attention to our social assets. Our community functions related to governance, management and operations need to be cared for. Indeed, we can see from the significant amount of decision-making that has already occured in these early days of our housing upgrade project, that we need to be at the top of our game to navigate the upgrade itself. We are making million dollar decisions related to: land tenure, long term financing, building upgrade designs and materials, new build possibilities, temporary member relocation and other disruption variables, and the possible integration of 15 new households into our 66 unit community. As a community we are excited, but on the very edge of our comfort zone. We are now at an exciting place where we must take the collective knowledge of 42 years of cooperative living and plan for our future. In doing so, we will be able to increase participation and engagement among the membership, therefore ensuring affordability and the long term tenancy of our members.
Our housing cooperative is an inner-city community with 66 units ranging from 1-3 bedrooms. About half of the households have been here twenty years or more. Our membership averages 160 people and we rely on volunteers to oversee community function and governance—this is what allows our rents to remain, on average, 20% below market rents. Approximately half of our member households have at least one person on a committee, but more accurately there is a core group of 25 members who undertake the bulk of the work. Of these 25 members nearly 85% are near retirement age or older. We must train up new and younger members. This will ensure the ongoing affordability of the cooperative, but it will also establish pride of place. The result being long-term engagement and the retention of residents.
We understand that these numbers put us in a good light when compared with other housing societies, but we know that we can expect better (and will need to) if we want to avoid reliance on a fuller service property management model that could compromise our cooperative ethic and drive up our housing charges.
Even though the cooperative movement has a long history in Canada, and across many sectors, as entities they remain a bit of a mystery to the mainstream. Cooperatives represent a rare form of deliberative democracy where members' labor and participation helps to off-set cost of housing. Members, current and prospective, have varying degrees of experience with what it is to be living (and co-managing) in a cooperative. Even in normal times (i.e. when not engaged in large scale infrastructure development projects), members are tested by the volume of governance required to keep buildings, grounds and membership aspects in good order. In our current transition and growth we worry more than normal about member conflict, fatigue and burnout. As an organization we need to establish and develop skills to mitigate this occurring. It doesn’t help that we, with the rest of the world, are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We have not done a formal skills/interests mapping exercise for a long time (our last member survey was done in 2013), but we know informally of the diverse talents and collective experience that resides within - some tapped, some not yet so. Succession planning or mentoring younger and/or newer members into leadership roles has to be a priority.
Since inception in the late 1970s, Sunnyhill has had an operating agreement with CMHC that shaped our systems and our business routines. When we exited this agreement in 2018 under a federal program to help coops find relief from high interest agreements, we essentially switched off our auto-pilot and took on new strategic decision-making roles in relation to our long term housing and finances.
As noted, we are on the edge of our comfort zone with the scope and magnitude of the decisions we are making. It is important, right now, to take stock of what members are currently experiencing and what they need in order to feel connected, engaged and secure in the future. Key questions include:
Do our members see a long-term future for themselves at Sunnyhill?
Do they feel safe, listened too, cared for, and connected?
What should participation mean in our housing co-operative?
What are the barriers to active participation and engagement in our community?
Does our governance actively serve and facilitate community well-being?
What can we do to ensure more stability and deeper connections within our cooperative?
To be successful, what must we protect as we proceed? What should we lose? What do we need that we don’t already have?
To be a strong and resilient affordable housing cooperative for the future, we need to have answers to these questions. The intention is to run a parallel and intersecting community development process alongside the capital infrastructure projects we are undertaking. By doing this we are ensuring that Sunnyhill Housing Cooperative has the governance, social, and community infrastructure necessary to be a successful and affordable housing provider for decades to come.
Project Details
This project funding will support Sunnyhill to undertake the important initial stages of a succession planning process. By doing this, we will be able to thoughtfully understand and map our social, organizational, and governance assets, collaborate with membership to develop a sustainable engagement model, and begin the important work of succession planning. As a cooperative democracy—where members’ labour directly offsets operating expenses—we must have sustained participation to keep housing costs well below market rates. Put another way, to retain affordability and tenancy, Sunnyhill requires increased participation and engagement within the community. To undertake a succession planning process, we will need the expertise of an external consultant. Our Planning and Development Committee mandated to lead Sunnyhill’s housing infrastructure activities, will involve the membership in a scoping discussion that culminates in a terms of reference. This ToR will allow us to clarify: purpose, scope, guiding questions, budget allocations, time frame and contract management aspects.
Using the ToRs, we will launch a competition for an external consultant. To start, the successful candidate will cultivate relationships and rapport with the membership—fostering trust and ensuring that the needs and desires of the community are integrated into the consultant’s work program. Our intention with the ToRs is to provide clear parameters while also encouraging the consultant to bring to the task their experience and creativity.
We envision a qualitative and quantitative data collection phase. This phase would include, but is not limited to, a member survey, interactive dialogue and focus groups, collating statistical information, and document reviews. By being open and rigorous in our processes we will be able to generate both anecdotal and analytical information that can inform smart decisions based on evidence.
Deliverables we would see from this work includes the following:
An asset map showing community resources (social assets) and offering some means for rating risks and potential benefits associated with each.
This will help us to better understand the make-up of Sunnyhill—what it will take over the next five years to keep/make it an attractive and stable community to call home.
A member engagement plan and process that we can use to help us broaden and deepen member identification with cooperative living.
We know that cooperative living requires more skills than traditional living and we need our members to have the knowledge, skills and abilities to live and work together with agency and respect. The plan will include implicit bias and diversity training for members. While we consider ourselves a diverse community we know biases must be uncovered and the dignity of all people embraced.
A review of best practices, both locally and globally, around community and social assets management in housing cooperatives.
We can draw upon this “tool box” to help us manage our day to day routines and our big housing project tasks.
To produce these deliverables, the consultant will use a collaborative inquiry method aimed at “discovery”. We anticipate a series of interactive sessions such as charrettes, kitchen table talks or visioning workshops to ensure that membership has a chance to fully understand and take ownership of what we learn together. We will ensure that all new content associated with the three deliverables is validated by the membership.
Toward the close of the process and on the strength of all that has been learned, the membership will be invited to come up with ideas/solutions that they would like to lead. This will allow the membership to test processes of engagement. Sunnyhill will allocate up to $500 toward four to six Community Asset Seed projects—ideas deemed most promising against pre-established criteria. These criteria will be aligned with the goal of this project. In adding this practice component to the project, we are:
Enacting ideas/solutions generated in the collaborative inquiry
Drawing on homegrown talents/experience discovered
Demonstrating possibilities that give momentum internally and contribute toward the work of other revitalization initiatives.
Regarding the latter point, a final step in the project will be a Webinar in which we share what we have learned. We will look to allied network organizations to assist in this dissemination including the Cooperative Housing Foundation of Canada (CHF) and the Southern Alberta Cooperative Housing Association (SACHA). We are members of both. We would also engage the Northern Alberta Cooperative Housing Association (NACHA) as well as other non-market housing groups in Calgary such as the Affordable Housing Collective.
The webinar will be produced through in kind contributions from Sunnyhill members and others. The production team will be led by Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton on behalf of Sunnyhill. Our membership includes professional writers and filmmakers among others who will support this production. We also have a full time Property Manager on site to act as a resource person for this project.
Project deliverables and the webinar will ultimately be posted on the Sunnyhill web page - some content on the public side, other content on the member side of the site. Our website receives 1000 visits on average per month.
Project Timeline and Reporting
Upon confirmation of the grant we anticipate a 1-year timeline for the work to unfold
We recognize that succession planning and its implementation is a multi-phased process. Community building and engagement require time. However we can expect a few clear outcomes on this first very important phase of the process.
The three streams of this work: Asset Mapping, Engagement Plan and Best Practices Report will be tangible outcomes of this work ready to guide the planning of our social infrastructure for the next 5 years.
The energy, innovation and uptake of the information in these reports by membership will be qualified in the community asset seed funding projects. We will know that membership has started on the path toward taking ownership of building our social infrastructure when their ideas for action are vocalized and collaboratively put into action.
We currently have 60% of membership serving in volunteer roles, some with more responsibilities than others. Our attendance at general meetings averages about 40% of our households. We will know that this project is working when we see broad participation in the process we are proposing and increase to these numbers.
This project will act as confirmation that our governance structure is fit for purpose. We will have a clear 5-year plan for what engagement and participation means to us at Sunnyhill and what good housing means for our membership.
Our insight and learnings as a community will become formalized through the sharing in our Webinar.
Outputs
We will track the number of members who participate in the Terms of Reference and scoping process along with the data collection methods. Throughout the year we will also continue to track attendance at regular meetings and volunteer numbers of various committees. The workshops and engagement processes utilized to share the data back will also be tracked, as well as the number of pitches for the Community Asset Seed Funding projects.
Section F: Sustainability
Immediately, we will have a clear course of action for how to proceed with our community building initiatives holistically. We will also have a clearer understanding of what the needs, liabilities and untapped resources are within the community, information right now that is unknown to us. By creating more opportunities for participation through the Community Asset Seed projects, along with the integration of engagement projects across all areas of governance, we anticipate we will see more participation in all areas of the community and governance. By encouraging our community to intentionally begin thinking about our social infrastructure and its significance, we anticipate we will see a renewed sense of community. These conversations and the inquiry process will give memberships an invitation to renew their sense of pride in cooperative living and the ethics of equality and democracy inherent to it.
The long-term goal of this project is succession planning. We want to see less turnover in our community. By creating sustained engagement and participation in all areas of our governance and operations, we can achieve this goal. We want Sunnyhill to be a place where all members feel safe, connected and see a future for themselves with longevity and meaning. Sunnyhill has already shown itself to be a stable long-term home for some members, but the more stability and engagement we see across membership year to year, the more we will know that we have made this shift.