Malawi Flood Relief Fund

CDF is appealing for donations to support the Malawi Union of Savings & Credit Cooperatives to help members rebuild after recent devastating floods in Malawi.

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CDF Auction

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Bidding in CDF's Women's Day Auction runs
March 6th - 13th.

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Myrna Bentley Memorial Fund

CDF has created a tribute fund in memory of Myrna Bentley. The fund will provide support for leadership development for women around the world including the Women's Mentorship Program.

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Charitable Number: 11887 5517 RR0001

Volume 9 Number 02, February 26, 2015

Working to Continually Improve

The Canadian Co-operative Association (CCA) is embracing the concepts of learning, leaning and innovating.

Learning: Sharing together

CCA is proud to call itself a learning organization and is making sure it's not all talk. A learning organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the learning of its staff and continuously transforms itself. One of CCA's strategic priorities is To Learn & Innovate, which speaks to this commitment and is guiding a new body of work aimed at strengthening our own institutional capacity. This past year we have:

Assembled a Knowledge Team of program analysis, research and development, Lean (operational improvement) and engagement staff
Distributed a bi-weekly Knowledge Bulletin e-newsletter for staff
Instituted a Knowledge Wall and visual boards to share information at our Ottawa office

LEANING: Continuous improvement

The co-op sector has always embraced people development and meeting member's needs, but CCA as well as others like CUMIS/The Co-operators and First West Credit Union are now doing so through Lean. The purpose of Lean is to improve the operational efficiencies and effectiveness of key processes, build staff capacity to analyze workflow, make our own improvements and enhance creativity by freeing time to focus on priority work. An impressive 92% of CCA staff have been trained as Lean White Belts (the basics of Lean).

CCA engagement staff participate in a Lean Kaizen event to improve the volunteer administration process

Capacity building for co-ops is what CCA does best, so we need to continually work to improve ourselves as well and walk the talk.

Innovating: Be bold

CCA is innovating through our knowledge mobilization work. We are more pro-active, purpose driven, and critical in asking questions of our processes. This shift has lead to a growing feeling of agility in an increasingly competitive climate for international development organisations where the innovative stand out.

We believe that being bolder about our impact will make our co-op development work easier to understand, support and participate in.

Knowledge mobilization for CCA makes a direct connection between the analysis of our work and how we report it out to our stakeholders.

More insightful monitoring and evaluation
Best practices and lessons learned carried forward
New performance metrics
Collecting "big data" for CCA's 2.7 million co-op members reached by projects

With all of these positive changes combined, CCA is learning together, 'leaning' it forward and being bolder in it's determination to make a co-operative difference and serve the vision of building a better world.

CCA is a not-for-profit co-operative with a mission to establish and grow co-operatives internationally that build a better world.

To achieve this mission, CCA works closely with Canadian co-operatives and credit unions to channel their knowledge and experience to partner organizations and co-operatives in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Eastern Europe and Caribbean.

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