TRILLIUM WINS CANADA AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE

TRILLIUM
WINS
CANADA
AWARD
FOR
EXCELLENCE

"We believe that with this award, we have honoured the leadership and passion of our founders, while finding a vision for the new challenges of the future."

from acceptance speech,
Betty-Lou Souter, Chair

No question about it, winning the prestigious Canada Award for Excellence was one of the highlights of the year for all of us at Trillium. This award was established by Industry Canada and the National Quality Institute to seek out and recognize organizations which "possess the spirit and character essential to enduring success...that set a standard for others to follow and demonstrate that quality is essential to Canada's prosperity."

Applicants for the award are required to document continuous improvement in key performance indicators over a three-year period. Using our Strategic Review of 1993 as the baseline, Trillium charted its improvements in such areas as turnaround time for decisions, ratio of operating budget to grants budget, and applications received. The process also scrutinized our personnel policies, planning systems, customer service, and administrative systems. In addition to the 30-page application (and you thought Trillium was demanding!), we had a day-and-a-half site visit from three members of the Quality Award review team.

Reviewers met with all staff, individually and collectively, and members of the Executive Committee of the Board. In addition, they spoke to twelve of our constituents and community partners about our leadership, competence, and trustworthiness. They looked at everything from our files, to minutes of staff meetings, to what we had pinned to the bulletin board and the 'fridge. If we didn't sympathize with our applicants before (and of course we did), we sure did after this process. The whole experience gave us a lot to think about, and a number of benchmarks to consider in our future improvement efforts.

"Winning the Award was exciting," admits Julie White, Executive Director. "In the end, though, our success can only be seen through the quality of the grants we fund. The real work is done by our grantees."