ICA Associates Canada looks back at 2012

By Bill Staples

We worked with eight First Nations (indigenous groups) in 2012, as many of them had to get their act together to negotiate treaties or get funding from the Canadian Government. Some First Nations treaties cover areas the size of small European Nations.

Three universities engaged us in strategic or integrated resource management planning. The dean of one university went to the IAF Conference in Halifax (ICA Associates Inc was the main sponsor) to present a case study on the university's participatory strategic planning. Altogether there were 50 consulting engagements in 2012.

In 2012, we did our first two test runs of an online Group Facilitation course which was well received. ICA Associates held 41 public courses for 348 people. There were also about half as many in-house courses, primarily for government and insurance companies. We have redesigned most of our Training Manuals. They are now in full colour with photos and graphics to illustrate the courses. We also did a full colour catalogue of courses (it can be downloaded from here). More and more people are registering online from Google searches, instead of from the catalogue.

About half of our ICA Professional Facilitator Program graduates go on to get their CPF from IAF, and they all pass. ICA Associates has three IAF assessors on staff, but they cannot assess any of those people. We hired three new staff this year; all women aged 25 to 35. This has shifted the energy in our office. We published "Transformational Strategy: Facilitation of ToP Participatory Planning" by Bill Staples and "Creating Community" by George West. Both books are available online at http://iuniverse.com

We provided leadership for the Community Development Stream at the ICAI Conference in Nepal and did a free pre-conference course "Meetings That Work.” The Community Development Matrix is now fully up and running. Check it out at http://top-global.org

ICA Associates decided not to ask ICAI to pay back the loan of $40,000 taken in 2010. Instead, we will write it off as an expense over several years. ICA Associates is committed to global structures and conventions created by ICAI, and is working in peer-to-peer relationships with ICAs in several nations.

Bill Staples is a member of ICA Associates:Canada