What We Do

What We Do

Our Role in the Community

The Community Involvement Project can best be seen as a sort of "puppy breeder" for new projects. We begin our work, when we decide to have a new batch of puppies or projects. We raise and feed them and give them their shots and then we send them off to carefully selected homes (meaning usually non-profit parents).

Most often the puppies will grow up well and happy and go on to do their jobs as useful adult dogs in the community. Sometimes we will stay involved with the development of a particular puppy, but mostly the puppies are cared for by their new parents (registered societies, charities or other organized groups.)

To go further with the analogy - our work as fine quality puppy breeders means that we care about the progress of all the puppies in the community and the work that they have to do. In our example, our particular breed of, let's say, "sled dogs" happen to have a great talent for search and rescue work, so our puppies (projects) are often trained to pull and work together in teams. Even though these dogs have different homes and owners, they will grow up working together and will learn to depend on each other for the sake of the bigger rescue mission in the community at large.

The Community Involvement Project keeps an eye on the work of all the puppies and spots opportunities where (dogs or) projects, with different strengths, may work well together. Projects at one agency or society can benefit tremendously by working with projects throughout several other points in the community. Many more people can be helped in this way and the quality of life for everyone improves.

(Every once in a while, we decide again to breed a new batch of puppies and we expand the cycle, more and more… over and over again, as often as we want or need.)

How We Want To Be Perceived

The CIP structure is not like any other currently operating group that we know about. It is unique, new and flexible. It might seem hard at first to explain our work to people who are hearing about involvement principles and operations for the first time. Here, the puppy breeder analogy will be very useful, but as an active community involvement development member (because CIP is an unusually large and flexible, unstructured working group), you will often need more details. The basis of the easiest explanation for now is "we start new projects!"

Why We're Different (Working Relationships)