New pilot programs, new partnerships, and a deeper look at how we support the diverse communities FCO serves, all while keeping pace with an organization that kept growing around us.
Building the Champions Pilot Program
One of our biggest undertakings this year was recruitment for the Champions Pilot Program. It's early-stage work, and like most early-stage work, it taught us as much as it moved us forward — more on that below. Alongside recruitment, we ran Evenings & Weekends House Meetings and consultations to review Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at FCO, work that's already shaping how we think about reach and representation going forward.
We also brought FCO's voice to some significant stages this year, with successful applications and presentations to both the AdvantAge Ontario and Ontario Long-Term Care Association conferences. We were invited to deliver a dedicated webinar on the Navigation Guide for AdvantAge Ontario and presented in person at our own FCO Conference on both of our Navigation Guide and Supporting Transitions to Long-Term Care resources. We also presented to the Community of Practice Social/Social Service Workers Group, providing another opportunity to put our resources directly in front of the people using them every day.
Behind the scenes, our new employee onboarding process is now standardized and streamlined. HowSpace, which started as a pilot, remained active all year and is now transitioning over to the Programs Department. This work continues alongside our ongoing partnership with CLRI on the Palliative Care Series and the HowSpace community of support.
DIERAC continued to support FCO as we've grown, including through the DIERAC Belonging Tree initiative — one of several projects this year that pushed us to think concretely about what "supports of FCO" means and looks like in practice.
What This Year Taught Us
Recruitment for Champions surfaced a clear lesson early: clarity matters. We found real value in being precise about what we're asking of homes and who the program is actually designed for. To support this clarity, we held two information session webinars specifically to explain the program, answer questions, and clarify the Champion role.
We also encountered a more complex challenge this year that made us reflect on connecting with members of racialized and culturally specific homes for both Champions recruitment and our Evenings & Weekends work.
More broadly, this was a year of ongoing organizational change, and change is its own kind of curriculum — we spent a lot of it simply learning as we went. One of the clearest patterns we saw was in caregivers themselves: their educational needs are evolving alongside their capacity and level of strain. That pushed us to refine our approach and manage the delivery of topics and resources, rather than assuming people have the bandwidth for anything longer or denser.
Milestones We're Celebrating
We welcomed Administrative Coordinator Taryn Jacquard to our team this year, supporting both Champions recruitment and the broader FCO team — a valuable addition to our capacity. We also began implementing the Action Plan that came out of our Innoweave project, turning strategic thinking into concrete next steps.
Our AdvantAge Ontario webinar and conference presentations were highlights, as were the ongoing requests for our Navigation Guide — a steady sign that the resource continues to be of value long after launch. We were also invited to contribute our expertise to several subject-matter opportunities this year, including RNAO’s Best Practice work, CanSpark’s Research and Innovation work, and OARC's newly developed toolkit. Being sought out for that kind of expertise is its own quiet but meaningful milestone and reflects FCO’s growing recognition across the sector.
A moment we keep coming back to: at the Together We Care conference, Daniel Clark shared that he wouldn't be where he is today without the support of FCO. We presented alongside him on a panel — and with Eldorado, he champions Family Councils and supports the work that we do. It's the kind of impact that's hard to put a number on, and exactly why we do this work.
Looking Ahead
Next year, our focus stays on the Champions pilot project and training, building on what we learned this year about maximizing our reach through clarity. We're also developing an evaluation plan to inform how we collect data on the impact of FCO's programs and services — including using the Family Council Effectiveness Tool and Family Council Engagement Tool to understand what percentage of councils across Ontario are truly effective, and how that measures against the goals in our Intended Impact Statement.
We're also looking forward to involving our Administrative Coordinator more broadly across FCO's work, including curriculum review and digital outreach work being led by the Communications team.