♫“Though the weather outside was frightful, KM-ing is just delightful…”♪
Seriously though, Victoria had a blizzard while York was visiting and of course York got blamed. York traveled to UVic for our quarterly meeting March 8-10. The group met on a wide range of topics from operational updates to funding to common grant programs. We were pleased that we received applications to our KM grant funding programs: child and youth mental health (2 in York Region, 1 collaborative grant York-UVic) and poverty, housing & homelessness (1 collaborative grant York-UVic). These grant applications are under review and results will be announced early April for funding to start immediately. The most in depth discussion we had was on evaluation. Thanks to Professor Jim McDavid (UVic) who joined us to discuss our evaluation needs and to help us develop an evaluation framework for RI. We are following up on a number of his suggestions so that we can undertake a formative evaluation of RI over the summer.
We were also joined by York’s KM volunteer, Gary Myers, who demonstrated his efforts at developing a shared RI reference database. More work will be undertaken learn how this database can be shared amongst the RI partners but York and UVic, as well as our partners MUN and USask, are behind this effort. Gary also demonstrated his pilot mapping of community and government KM contacts for York. This work was well received and Gary will be extending his efforts to include UVic’s contact data.
Probably the most important meeting was dinner on Monday night at The Mint. Thanks to our server Jason we had a lovely evening of fun, good food, something to do with champagne + gin, and some great networking (otherwise known as conversation). We also took a very cold walk through the UVic flower gardens and while it was too early for the flowers the mobilizers were in full bloom.
