On a Sunday morning in February a group of about 25 of us, members and advisors, got together at Linda’s for a visioning session over brunch. We were looking to gain insight into members needs on 3 areas: Events, Workshops and others. It was a great opportunity to get feedback on direction directly from our members, while engaging them in the process.

Here are a few of the ideas we came up with:

Events for Members

• Social meetups on a bi-weekly basis
• Friday night dinners with patrons
• Holiday time, not only Jewish, but addressing the lack of family or association
• Monthly member only support meetups

Workshops

• Food, cooking, shopping and nutrition: Many members never got the basics and struggle with food security
• Professional skills: French, sex education, dating, writing, technology and more
• Financial education: Budgeting, taxes, money sense
• Coaching
• Dealing with family, both introspective and actually sitting down with families.
• Tenant rights
• Writing skills

Miscellaneous

• Outings and activities
• Establishing a network of mentors
• Sharing mental health resources
• Creating a hotline for emergencies or general support calls
• Income taxes – many members don’t file taxes (and could benefit from refunds)
• Sharing job opportunities
• Having a weekend retreat
• Help with housing
• Building a resource database of other organizations.

If any of this inspires you or you’d like to contribute to any of this, please get in touch with us.

We look forward to accomplishing a lot of this over the coming year.

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