Message from our Founder, Pamela Jeffery
Welcome to our inaugural issue of POST, The Prosperity Project’s bimonthly online voice! Thanks for your interest.
POST is an acronym for a Powerful Organization Seeking Transformation which aptly reflects the Project’s mandate.
I am proud to say that for a start-up, there has been significant progress made since our late May launch. More than 50 women have raised their hands to support 6 internal working groups in building a solid foundation for a sustainable NPO.
We have been actively promoting TPP’s raison d’être in various speaking engagements, interviews, blogs and in an Op-Ed recently published in the Globe & Mail. I will continue to spread our message whenever possible and I invite you to do the same.
Our 2.0 website now provides more information about our 5 key initiatives. Version 3.0 is already in development.
With a goal of building a truly pan-Canadian membership, we look forward to welcoming 100 new Visionaries who will join our 62 Founding Visionaries as TPP ambassadors and will also help us amplify its awareness.
Several Founding Visionaries are currently working diligently to meet the following timelines for the roll out of our 5 key initiatives in Q3-Q4:
- The first Canadian Households’ Perspective on the new Economy study results will be released in mid-September.
- In September, we will also introduce the 12-month Gender Diversity Data Tracking initiative.
- By end of September, we will have completed a 6-week pilot project for the Matching initiative and 50 of the proposed 400 placements will have been secured.
- The 12-month Rosie the Riveter-Inspired Awareness Campaign will begin in October.
- The 12-month Prosperity Study platform will be in place to start enrolling participants by January 2021.
We will gladly continue to keep you informed of our progress.
Warmest Regards,
Pamela Jeffery
Founder, The Prosperity Project
Please find below a quick update from your group chairs.
Rosie the Riveter-Inspired Awareness Campaign
We are looking for Founding Visionaries to volunteer as members of this new Working Group that is 
co-chaired by Maureen Jensen and Pamela Jeffery.
Various iterations of what “A modern-day Rosie the Riveter-inspired” awareness campaign could look like are being developed as we speak. It will be Canada’s first post-WWII campaign designed to inspire Canadians to re-set their working and personal lives for a “better normal” and address the following 5 barriers:
- Lack of awareness of training/job opportunities
- Limited access to role models/mentors
- Lack of partner support at home
- Access to affordable childcare
- Lack of leadership commitment to gender parity
In an effort to promote a faster recovery of Canada’s economy in the face of COVID-19, the TPP awareness campaign goals are to:
- Link women and prosperity and demonstrate the need to increase the female labour force participation
- Inspire women to make informed decisions about their education, training and employment pathway
- Increase the number of women in sectors and jobs that are low risk of automation and where women are under-represented
- Mitigate the risk that women, including women in marginalized communities, are disproportionately affected by COVID-19
- Increase the number of: Female STEM graduates and workers; Women in skilled trades; Women in leadership/decision-making roles (and in the pipeline to these roles)
Gender Diversity Data Tracking (GDDT)
The GDDTWorking Group is being co-chaired by Mary Lou Maher and Pamela Jeffery. This initiative 
will focus on collecting, analyzing and publishing data (annually) that will track women in board, executive and senior management roles (and in the pipeline to senior management) in Canada’s largest 120 companies and federal crown corporations.
In September, the working group will identify a contact person for the 120 organizations and begin to conduct its research to compile a database that will identify board members, executive officers and the direct reports of executive officers.
Canadian Households’ Perspective on the new Economy (CHP)
The CHP Working Group has been created and is being led by Diane Kazarian. She is looking for a co-chair. This will be the first initiative to be launched in early September. We will create a monthly survey, recruit a group of TBD number of women from across the country and automate monthly data entry.
Matching Initiative
The Matching Initiative (MI) will match up volunteer private sector professional women/men with non-profit organizations (NPOs) that focus on women’s employment, skills training, crisis counselling and mental and physical health for 1 to 4 weeks.
Professionals will provide much-needed assistance to NPOs such as budgeting, operational reviews or capacity building and help women develop the skills they need to thrive.
The Matching working group met with Mark Patterson and his team from Ryerson to discuss the use of the Magnet platform to operationalize the Matching program.
Prosperity Study
Do moments of radical disruption like a pandemic provide 
unprecedented opportunities to reinvent the future? This is only one of the many tough questions we are confident The Prosperity Study will help us answer.
In order to accurately establish the framework of the 10-year Prosperity Study, the co-chairs have been doing their homework. They have spent several weeks reviewing reams of literature as well as interviewing several subject matter experts (academics, researchers, an economist and management consultants from across the country).
Their intense fact-finding mission has provided them invaluable insight. In a very detailed 13-page briefing document, they have summarized their exhaustive findings and identified the following areas which will need to be addressed in the Prosperity Study:
- A definition of prosperity
- Prosperity metrics
- Gender equality
- The ethnicity pay gap
- Pay equity legislation around the world
- The Pay Equity Act – Canada
- Findings from the Statistics Canada study – The Gender Wage Gap in Canada,1998-2018
- Comments and insights from interviews
A facilitated session will be held shortly with the committee members to share the findings and determine the scope and focus of the Prosperity Study.
Friends
Our Friends working group is busy replying to and personally speaking with many women who are interested in all facets of TPP.
In late August, we will host a series of on-line small focus groups/conversations. Our first three discussions will address challenges facing immigrant women, working mothers and women in the law.
More topics will follow. Email Friends if you wish to be part of future conversations.
HR/Volunteers/Jobs
We need volunteers! If yourself, your EA, members of your team, other experienced and skilled colleagues you know can each commit a minimum of 5 hours a week, we’d love to hear from you.
Marketing & Communications
Our immediate goal is to amplify TPP’s awareness. Kindly share this POST issue with members of your networks and encourage your like-minded friends and colleagues to subscribe.
We are proactively working on a pan-Canadian media outreach. We can readily facilitate interviews with our Founding Visionaries who are always keen to speak to the media or join panel discussions (in French as well). We welcome your TPP-related blogs, POV’s and Op-Ed’s. Please contact the MarCom team.
Sustainability
In addition to the funds contributed by the Founding Visionaries, we are extremely grateful for the generous in-kind donations from a substantial list of donors and partners.
Funding discussions continue with the Federal Government while partnership presentations are being made to several corporations. Funding applications have also been submitted to the Ryerson Future Skills Centre.
We are thrilled to have the Globe & Mail as our media partner and a few corporations have already committed to funding some of the five key initiatives. A detailed list of founding donors and new partners will be released shortly.
Last word
Thank you for taking the time to peruse the first edition of POST. We trust we’ve given you a perspective of the impressive amount of work being conducted behind the scenes. Let us know what you’d like to see in further POST issues. If you have any ideas, suggestions or wish to join a working group, please contact the respective co-chairs listed below
Matching Initiative Co-Chairs: Ikram Al Mouaswas at ialmouaswas@deloitte.ca and Susan Hodkinson at SHodkinson@crowesoberman.com
Prosperity Study Co-Chairs: Christy Clark christyclark@shaw.ca, Ani Hotoyan-Joly at ani.hotoyanjoly@gmail.com and Michi Komori at michi.komor@gmail.com
Marketing & Communications Co-Chairs: JoAnne Caza at joanne.caza@gmail.com and Barbara Fox bfox@enterprisecanada.com
Friends Committee Co-Chairs: Penny Collenette at penny.collenette@rogers.com
HR/Volunteers/Jobs Co-Chairs: Trudy Curran at trudycurran@gmail.com and Susan Hodkinson SHodkinson@crowesoberman.com
Sustainability Co-Chairs: Janet Ecker at jecker@kilcon.onmicrosoft.com and Pamela Jeffery at pamela.jeffery@tpjg.ca
Canadian Household’s Perspective Co-Chair: Diane Kazarian at diane.a.kazarian@ca.pwc.com
Annual Gender Diversity Data Tracking Co-Chairs: Pamela Jeffery at pamela.jeffery@tpjg.ca and Mary Lou Maher at mmaher@kpmg.ca
Rosie the Riveter-Inspired Campaign Co-Chairs: Pamela Jeffery at pamela.jeffery@tpjg.ca and Maureen Jensen at maureen.jensen5@rogers.com
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