Nominator Comments:
Ronni Gorman | Nominated by Juneeja Varghese and Alex Dow
Over the last year, Ronni demonstrated that she is a trusted and respected by partners and residents, and built a strong rapport within the community sector. Ronni models a genuine passion for the community, assuring community is at the centre of everything she does and challenging us to better meet the needs of diverse neighbourhoods. She strives to improve UWGT’s grant-making, monitoring, coaching and reporting processes based on these learnings and provides lessons to key colleagues to inform other initiatives such as our new work in supporting trusteeships.
Ronni achieved many successes this past year, highlights include: her leadership and innovation, Ronni strengthened UWGT’s role in collaborative funding and rolled out a new way of place-based investments alongside residents through the Regent Park Social Impact Investment Fund (SIIF), which led to close to $1M being invested in 13 resident projects. The SIIF initiative has allowed UWGT to re-establish and build new relations in the neighbourhood, collaboratively work on solutions, continue investing in resident initiatives, and showcase our relevance in local communities. Ronni partnered with the Marketing and Donor teams to capture the essence and learnings of this work, and lessons from this investment approach will be key in informing our evolving Neighbourhoods strategy and scaling to other areas.
In addition to the Regent Park SIIF, Ronni designed, implemented and supported the launch of the new Quick Action Grants (QAG) for resident groups. Partnering with the York Region government, Ronni also led the capacity building and ongoing mentoring of three lead service agencies to engage in outreach and funding of resident projects related to safety, mental health, housing and economic opportunities in York Region. This opportunity has enabled UWGT to solidify our neighbourhoods work in York region beyond our previous Neighbourhood Development Grants from 2018, and to deepen our relationship with our government and agency partners in York Region.