Case Study
Ottawa Community Loan Fund
The Ottawa Community Loan Fund (OCLF) is a bilingual non-profit organization based in the National Capital Region dedicated to supporting, training and empowering people on financial matters. Founded in 2000 to bridge Ottawa’s social finance gap, OCLF supports marginalized people and newcomers through training programs and microcredit for small businesses and people looking to return to school or seek recognition of their foreign credentials.
The Storyteller has been working with OCLF as a trainer and facilitator since 2019.
Background
The Ottawa Community Loan Fund has been offering a series of financial literacy workshops for the general public for several years, in addition to longer educational programs targeting aspiring entrepreneurs, start-ups and expanding businesses.
Thanks to its previous experience in workshop facilitation and communication, The Storyteller was recruited to the team of trainers and facilitators in 2019 for an open-ended mandate. The relationship has never been interrupted since and continues to this day.
Mandate and outcomes
One of The Storyteller’s first mandates was to organize and run a three-week entrepreneurship training program, called BizTOC, for cohorts of around 30 future entrepreneurs whose industries or areas of study vary from one cohort to the other. Naturally, the program includes introductory training in communications and marketing while also covering various aspects of setting up a business. In addition to preparing and facilitating the training content, The Storyteller is responsible for identifying and inviting guest speakers, specialists and entrepreneurs of interest to share their expertise and experience with the group. Many participants found the program and advice provided to be extremely useful and relevant to their entrepreneurial journey.
Beyond BizTOC and throughout the year, The Storyteller regularly facilitates no less than five different entrepreneurial and financial training courses on behalf of OCLF. Year in and year out, we lead 30-some two-hour workshops! Participants are always very satisfied and grateful for these training sessions, claiming to have learned a lot and felt listened to and at ease to ask questions.
While the workshops were always run face-to-face in the past, they have mostly been offered online since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, although we continue to travel from time to time for in-person workshops.
Photo Credit: OCLF
Our two cents
Although we have a repertoire of virtual, hybrid and face-to-face communication courses for clients to choose from and a customized training service, we sometimes offer workshops based on curriculums or content prepared by the client. In some cases, the customer may once have had in-house staff and wishes to delegate this work to an external party, or may have internal expertise on the topics to be covered, making them best suited to develop the content without necessarily being the most capable of delivering and communicating it. Depending on the subject matter, this may be an appropriate solution, particularly if the training is to be repeated several times or on a regular basis.
