Four Conferences, One Shared Purpose: Learning, Unlearning, and Leading Together
- Roots & Rivers Team
- Jul 28
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 29
Our team recently had the privilege of attending and speaking at four conferences across the country, each offering its own lens on leadership, trust, systems, and the future of social purpose work. We know not everyone can step away from their day-to-day to take in this kind of learning, so we’re sharing what stood out to us.
Across all four conferences, a few truths kept surfacing. Each pointing to the kind of leadership and collaboration the social sector is being called into now:
Trust is infrastructure: Whether across sectors or within communities, building trust takes time, intention, and relationship.
Nonprofits are redesigning systems: From municipal partnerships to mission-based innovation, social purpose organizations are leading bold, structural change.
Storytelling shapes systems: It shifts narratives, builds shared purpose, and helps move from fragmented effort to collective action.
Move from transactional to transformational: In funding, partnerships, and design, we need to work like we actually want each other to succeed.
Design for everyone from the start: Accessibility, equity, and Indigenous knowledge must be embedded throughout, not added later.
You are not meant to do it all: Let’s stop performing resilience and start resourcing it. Systems change takes a network.
Read on to find conference-specific insights that can move the needle for nonprofits and social change leaders.
1. BC Nonprofit Leadership Conference(BCNPLC)
At the BC Nonprofit Leadership Conference, the nonprofit sector was recognized for what it truly is: our society’s unsung infrastructure of care.
Non-profits are the lifeblood and unsung heroes in our community. – Joan Phillip
Community-led work is systems change work. – Sumaiyyah Adam
The importance of brave storytelling came through powerfully in the words of Nadia Tchoumi, Founder of New Hope Media:
Don’t sanitize a story. Show the mess. Let your story be the counter-narrative. We need to be brave, intentional, and relentless and not let our stories stay untold.
The CEO of Vantage Point, Zahra Esmail, made a clear call for a unified sector voice to influence policy, while Kristi Rivait from Scale Collaborative highlighted the critical link between individual development and organizational strength.
There was also an unflinching look at the realities nonprofits face. As Fatima Al-Samak, Planning Consultant at Vantage Point, said:
It’s a competition of who can do the most with the least. This competitive nature is deeply destructive to the field.
We need to fund as if we want nonprofits to win, not just survive.
At the four-day Canadian Forum for Social Innovation in Halifax, the focus was on place-based innovation, mission-oriented policy, and how to build lasting connective tissue between sectors. It brought together leaders from government, academia, and community. More importantly, it made space for hard conversations about power, equity, and systems alignment.
Day 0: Grounding in Community
At Tangled Threads: A Mini Network Weaving Lab, the session opened with a reminder that social innovation is personal before it’s structural. Sonja Miokovic (Consulting Director, Community Innovation at Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement) and Michelle Baldwin (Senior Associate at Equity Cubed) invited us to connect on who we are, not just what we do. Community tours with Hope Blooms and the North End Halifax Community Land Trust grounded us in community social enterprise and stories of resilience and perseverance, especially among African Nova Scotians.
We need to unlock the potential of the collective and distribute power and agency. – Sonja Miokovic
The tapestry of our individual and collective stories is rich. It's beautiful to take a closer look at some of the stitches. – Annelies Tjebbes
Day 1: Rural Innovation
Nicole Norris (Director, Social Innovation, Georgian College) and Kjeld Mizpah C. (Founder & CEO, Future Civics) led a session on rural innovation centered on social capital, necessity-driven innovation, and the risks of applying urban solutions to rural contexts. It was a day of appreciative inquiry and generational thinking.
Urban isn’t the blueprint. We need rural solutions for rural communities.
We can’t create a future for our grandkids with systems built for our grandparents. – Vinod Rajasekaran, CEO, Future of Good
There was also a call for trust-based collaboration and acknowledgment that social purpose organizations are doing the heavy lifting where governments fall short.
Day 2: Power, Politics, and the Demand for Change
Celina Caesar-Chavannes (Former Member of Parliament & Parliamentary Secretary and Executive Director of The Canadian Community Economic Development Network) encouraged the sector to own its impact and stop playing polite:
The social innovation sector has been saving lives for decades. Don’t beg, demand the resources.
Whoever you think might be left behind, put them at the center.
There were important conversations about the role of universities, who holds decision-making power, and how to embed lived experience into the design of policies and systems.
Day 3: How to Work Together
Roots & Rivers sponsored a panel on mission-based innovation and co-led a session with Geraldine Cahill (Director, UpSocial Canada) on Mechanisms for Cross-Scale Collaboration & Alignment, digging into how to build durable partnerships across fields, levels, and timelines:
Foundational to progress is having healthy collaborative governance agreements that articulate how we’ll work together to tackle challenges.
How can we convert urgency to shared purpose so we’re rowing in the same direction?
Timothy Draimin (Board Chair, Social Innovation Canada) emphasized that no single actor can drive systems change alone:
Solutions are only possible if we can link arms and pull from our collective wisdom.
The forum wrapped with one more essential truth: trust is the engine.
The role of trust isn’t just a cute addition. It’s the driver of change. Building trust is a full-time job. – Sandra Lapointe, Director of the Canadian Collaborative for Society, Innovation and Policy, McMaster University
3. Banff Systems Summit
At the Banff Systems Summit, hosted by the Institute for Community Prosperity at Mount Royal University and Map the System Canada, the focus was less on strategies and more on ways of being in relationship, in leadership, and in community. It was a reminder that systems change is as emotional as it is intellectual, and that nonprofits are deeply entangled in both.
Day 1: Humility, Inquiry, and Letting Go
The day opened with calls to sit with complexity, listen better, and resist the urge to rush to solutions.
We need circular rather than linear leadership. – Daniela Papi-Thornton, Consultant & Author, Institute for Community Prosperity, Mount Royal University
We need to hospice old systems to birth new ones… There is a liminal space between these two systems: a beautiful, creative space where anything can happen. – Katharine McGowan, Associate Professor, Mount Royal University
Day 2: Reconciliation, Reflection, and Responsibility
This day centered Indigenous knowledge, interdependence, and sustainability, inviting participants to slow down and examine the roots of the systems we’re trying to shift.
In the Western world, if you can’t measure it, it’s not science. But in native ways of thinking, if it’s not about relationships, it’s not science. – Dr. Leroy Little Bear, Professor Emeritus, University of Lethbridge
Let’s move from transaction to transformational relationships, especially in funding. Fund us as if you want us to win. –Allan Boesak (Director | Youth, African Diaspora and Continental Engagement, Network for the Advancement of Black Communities)
Systems change is complex. But we are not alone in this journey. Let’s ask for help and support one another. – Allan Boesak
Roots & Rivers co-facilitated a workshop on Building Trusting Nonprofit–Municipal Partnerships with Sarah Lamb, Senior Innovation Designer at the City of Calgary, which sparked honest dialogue and a hopeful sense of what’s possible when trust is treated as infrastructure.
Day 3: Accessibility, Accountability, and Human-Centered Design
Day 3 brought a powerful shift in how we think about disability and access, reframed as invitations to design better for everyone. Keely Kidner, Equity and Inclusion Advisor, District of Squamish, led the conversation with clarity and urgency:
Instead of asking what we lose with disability, let’s ask what we gain from accessibility.
It’s not me that’s the problem, it’s the environment. The lack of ramps disables Kyle. The lack of captions disables me.
There were also powerful reflections on power, emotional accountability, and
existential dissonance.
We’re not responsible for full systems transformation. We can only do our own part and trust that others will take on other key parts of the change. – Christine Spottiswood, Former Network Director, Flourish Alberta
Connective relational practices that create emotional intimacy are vital. We need to experience different ways of working to believe in them. – Cassie Bingham, Director, UVU Center for Social Impact
The summit closed with a hike and smudge led by Jeff Horvath, bringing the learning full circle, grounded in land, culture, and shared humanity.
4. Local Government Management Association (LGMA) Annual Conference
In her keynote, Jody Wilson-Raybould spoke with clarity and conviction about the kind of leadership this moment demands: bold, values-driven, and unafraid to challenge the status quo. Her reminder that “excessive partisanship is corrosive and antithetical to true leadership” resonated deeply.
A recurring thread from the conference was the erosion of trust within councils, from residents, and between generations.
More Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests, rising incivility, and demands for instant solutions have left many municipalities stretched thin. There was concern around succession planning, poor hiring practices, and the rising influence of those entering council roles with limited experience or understanding of the process.
In the Trends in Municipal Government session, it was noted that 30% of communities don’t have codes of conduct, and even fewer actively use the ones they do have. The need for mandatory mayoral training and stronger hiring practices came through as urgent.
And while Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to advance, conference conversations stayed grounded in caution, underscoring the need for clear ethical guidelines, validation methodologies, and an awareness of AI’s potential for bias and hallucination if left unchecked.
We were especially proud to see the launch of a new Strategic Plan for LGMA, a project that Roots & Rivers supported and helped bring to life. It’s always powerful to see long-term planning move off the page and into action.
We also played a role in shaping conversations about innovation inside local government. In a session co-facilitated by Austin Lui and Annelies Tjebbes, participants explored how social labs can shift culture and practice. The session invited a rethinking of perfectionism, control, and top-down power in favour of more curiosity, vulnerability, and shared purpose. The underlying idea was that we can design containers for change, not just policies.
We are grateful for the conversations, insights, and shared purpose that emerged this conference season, and we are committed to integrating these learnings into our work, partnerships, and practice.
