Welcome Message from the
Board President & Executive Director

Transition and renewal – Community Living Hamilton’s focus in 2018-19

In the life of any organization, there comes a time when it’s important to evolve and change in response to new circumstances and challenges. That’s what has happened at Community Living Hamilton over the past year.

One area of transition occurred at the leadership level and included our appointments as CLH’s new Board President (Joe Obermeyer) and Executive Director (Sylvia D’Intino). We are both honoured to be given these opportunities and are dedicated to advancing the organization’s ability to meet and exceed the needs and expectations of the clients and families we serve.

Another change related to the updating of Community Living Hamilton’s Mission, Vision and Values. These statements describe our purpose, what we aspire to do, and the values we believe in. Our board and senior team refined the wording of our Mission and Vision statements to make them simpler and more to the point. We also added a new list of five values that are reflective of Community Living Hamilton’s tagline, Helping Build Great Lives. We use the acronym G-R-E-A-T to make them easy to remember. (CLH: Mission, Vision and Values)

In addition, Community Living Hamilton’s Strategic Plan was renewed this past year and it’s a significant departure from previous plans. We have adopted a Balanced Scorecard approach that involves a rigorous process of defining strategies and ensuring that our day-to-day activities align precisely with those strategies.

By setting operational priorities and measuring progress towards achieving them, we will be better able to bring our Mission, Vision and Values to life. Fundamentally, it is all about continuous improvement and it’s changing the way we work.

For example, we are now using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with specific targets to focus on particular projects that will help us reach those targets over pre-determined time periods. As implementation of this plan continues, we will use staff ‘huddles’ to regularly review activities within each project team and ‘dashboards’ – visual presentations – to monitor our progress.

Because the Balanced Scorecard approach is new to our organization, there is some learning involved and we expect to experience challenges along the way. However, we are committed to making this change because it will allow us to ‘connect the dots’ between our big picture goals and our day-to-day actions. We feel strongly that this will help CLH function more effectively in the future.

As we embrace the revised Mission, Vision and Values and embark on this new planning process, we are building on our organization’s past successes and its years of dedicated service.

The stories and statistics in this report provide a glimpse into the inspiring lives of some of our clients and families, and the hard-working staff and volunteers who support them. Our program map on the Annual Report home page also illustrates just how far and wide we reach out to this region.

We hope you enjoy reading about Community Living Hamilton and encourage you to follow our journey through our web site (communitylivinghamilton.com), and on Facebook (facebook.com/communitylivinghamilton/).

Our accountability to the community is unwavering, and we feel privileged to play a role in helping to make our organization even stronger in the years ahead.