2017 Was a Big Year at COCo! Here are Some Highlights

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With our Annual General Meeting over, and our 2017 annual report ready and online, we thought it would be fun to share some highlights from our year with COCo friends and family. If you are a real keener, go ahead and read the whole thing (you can find it here!)- and if not, here are some highlights, “by the numbers”.

2017 Was a “Good News” Year Financially for COCo

We received an increase in our core funding over the next 5 years from the Ministry of Higher Education (MEES). We also received project funding for a new partnership with Centraide, the ateliers/C, and project funding from MEES for Diversité d’Abord. What’s more, we reached an all time high in our “autonomous” revenue – money we receive for our work with individual organizations. Overall, this means our annual revenue jumped from $309,995 to $463,053 (!).

More Money means More People

The increase in our funding meant that we were able to hire a new permanent staff person (Emily Clare, who was previously working as our project coordinator for Diversité d’Abord). We also added Veronica Vivanco, who coordinates the ateliers/C. With more and more organizations calling us for help (more on that soon!), we also added a number of new people to our contractual team, including Ainsley Jenicek, Kama la Mackerel, and Johanna Tzountouris. You can meet all of them here!

We Worked With More Organizations

All in, COCo worked with 281 community organizations and 1,863 people last year.

The 212 free information sessions we offered last year reached 144 organizations, and most of those lasted upwards of half an hour. Most of you wanted to talk about boards, governance, bylaw and AGMs.

We had 145 contracts last year with community organizations, a 10% increase from the year before. Those 145 contracts happened with 89 organizations, which means we are getting to work with more organizations several times over, doing deeper and more holistic work. We’re pretty excited about that! 4 of those organizations were supported free of charge, and another 22 were offered discounts on top of our sliding scale.

Of those contracts, 50 were technology related- websites, CRMs, file management, or otherwise.

Diversité d’Abord Was a Hit

Our big undertaking from last year was a new project looking at racial diversity and racial discrimination in the Quebec community sector. You can read more about that here and here – and the final research hasn’t even come out yet! While we are still chipping away at mountains of data, there are a few things we are particularly proud of, including training 120 community workers on tackling racial discrimination in their workplaces and presenting our research to 200 influential people in the nonprofit sector so far.

Ateliers/c has already become beloved

Working with Centraide, we launched a series of “learning sessions” that occur every few weeks, called the ateliers/c. In 2017, we had 5 workshops, reached 83 people and 56 organizations – not to mention having 64 people on waitlists. 80-100% of participants have said their session allowed them to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their organization. We are pretty excited to see where this project goes next year!

Your Favourite Blog Posts…

8,838 visited our blog and online resources this year, and 80,000 people visited the website overall. Our most read blog posts this year were:

Our Facebook page is also working really well as a way to communicate with COCo members and other community sector workers and volunteers, judging from a doubling of our “engagement rate” – in other words, the numbers of you who shared, commented, or liked our posts.

As you can tell, it has been a BIG year for COCo, and we are so grateful for everyone who has worked with us and supported us through this year and the many that have proceeded it.  Of course, numbers only tell part of the story- the real impact of our work is in the change that occurred within organizations and within our sector. For that, you’ll have to read the whole thing!