Community Vitality in Action

Community Development Framework

Story:

The Community Foundation of Ottawa (CFO) created a community development framework to build a common approach to addressing problems in communities, ensure communities have the system level supports to be successful at problem solving in their neighbourhoods, strategically focus efforts in the highest need areas and enable healthy communities.

The goals of the framework are to increase collaboration and coordination of services, increase sustainability of resources, increase resident capacity to enact positive change and improve health and social outcomes in neighbourhoods.

There have been many accomplishments since adopting the framework. First, a leadership commitment to support CDF implementation was established.  Ottawa also saw the development of a sound evaluation framework which was used to create a baseline to measure and monitor progress and interventions. Also, neighbourhoods were defined based on health and social indicators.

Objective criteria and indicators were developed for where to start, which focused on areas of greatest need. CFO used targeting, sustaining and evaluating investments within neighbourhoods. They created internal structures to focus efforts and reconnect staff to neighbourhoods, and strengthened and broadened communication opportunities.