Merging for Good
As many of you know, the initial discussion between our legacy organizations began months before we announced our official amalgamation. The team knew that bringing together two organizations of our size and scope would be a challenge. There are many reasons why the conversation of organizations taking the plunge and merging with sector partners happens often and the actual execution is rare.
Navigating our merge with little direction to learn from, we wanted to be able to share what we learned along the way as a support to others while also being able to reflect back on our experience and continue growing from it as we moved forward.
Knowing that we would need an objective party’s help to document the experience, Aspen’s legacy CEO Shirley Purves, reached out to the Institute for Community Prosperity at Mount Royal University to explore if they would be interested in taking on this opportunity. We wanted to take a different approach than your standard research project.
In early conversations, several stakeholders were highly supportive of the integration documentation process and suggested evaluating this project as a learning. One founding Trellis supporter, Viewpoint Foundation, provided the financial support to make this project a reality. In addition to Viewpoint Foundation, we are grateful to have had the opportunity to work alongside James Stauch and Cordelia Snowdon from Mount Royal University’s Institute for Community Prosperity.
“We honestly enjoyed working on this project far more than we expected to. On the surface of it, “nonprofit business mergers” sounds numbingly dry. But this proved to be a high-risk, high-stakes story, unfolding before our eyes. The openness of all of the stakeholders we spoke with, from front-line staff and managers, to funders and consultants, provided us with such a rich trove of keen insights and original thinking. ”
Overall, this process was a great experience for our team and forced us to really take an even deeper look at the integration process. We had originally anticipated completing the Integration Report in October but once we were further into the project it became clear that the learnings were too rich and we would miss out on fully representing the bulk of the integration activities. So here we are today, releasing the final Merging for Good Report which you can find at the link below!
Although the amalgamation was official as of June 15, 2020 the integration work is still happening behind the scenes and will continue to be an ongoing project for months to come. We are excited to continue sharing about our journey with the community and we hope that this integration report can help other organizations to explore deeper forms of collaboration and funders who are keen to support them.