Building healthy community together

James Bay Community Project

By Kaye Kennish, Executive Director

The James Bay Community Project (JBCP) has recently completed a strategic planning process.  All too often mention of such a process strikes fear and trepidation in the hearts of the listener and reader, raises  nightmarish memories, and/or causes them to instantly switch off and turn to day dreaming. The products of such a process all too often sit on a shelf or in an electronic folder, never to be opened, carefully ignored, or used as a bookend.

Happily, JBCP has managed to avoid this sad kind of situation. Our new strategic plan shows a real appreciation of all that is excellent about what JBCP is and does, and plans to do more of the same for more people in more places with more partners. Of course, new services are envisioned too,  avoiding innovation for its own sake and retaining services that continue to be needed in our community.

The JBCP's mission statement has been honed to give a more succinct description of our mandate:

"To build healthy, inclusive community in James Bay and beyond by operating and facilitating programs and services that support families, youth, seniors, and other community members."

Attendance at our programs and usage of our services continues to grow, and our strategic planning process seeks to enable us not only to continue our current services but also to expand these services to more people within James Bay as well as to those beyond. The acquisition of additional resources of different kinds and the development of new partnerships are two key ways in which this can be done, as is improved evaluation of the effectiveness of what we achieve.

To all our existing volunteers, donors and supporters who read this: please continue to help us do more of what we do and to spread the effects more widely. To those who haven't used or supported our services, please come and find out more and be a part of putting our new strategic plan into action!

We are excited about our new strategic plan, and invite you to have a look at the summary of it on our new website at . Your feedback on both the new website and new strategic plan would be appreciated.