CESO Partnerships

The word “partnership” is used to signify many different things across industries and sectors. For CESO, partnership is one of our guiding principles and one of the core values for our organization. It’s about the firm belief that the best solutions come out of the convergence of multiple perspectives through true and balanced collaboration.

Whether we’re referring to partnerships with our clients in the field, the Canadian government, our funders, our Canadian volunteers, or other NGOs and organizations with whom we collaborate, our partners are instrumental to our vision of building stronger economies and better lives.

Programmatically, partnership begins with ensuring our work is locally-driven. This is a critical aspect to the delivery of our work and it means our clients become the co-creators and owners of the impacts, and not simply recipients of a Canadian intervention.

In fact, most of our work is delivered through our Partnership Model – a multi-level framework that allows us to extend our reach and scope in both cumulative and compounding ways across various stakeholders, from individuals to multi-country regional institutions, over multiple years.

Nowhere is the concept of partnership and the need for collaboration so eloquently embodied than in our work with Indigenous communities, where we’ve learned over our nearly 50 years the critical importance of developing strong relationships built on trust and true cooperation. This includes a commitment to fully understanding the context of a given issue or challenge, a collective approach to identifying the potential solutions, and finally, to ensuring our clients and partners actively participate in and take ownership over those solutions.

Whether nationally or internationally, our model of partnering Canadian business and government leaders and highly-experienced professionals with communities and organizations where they mentor clients continues to prove an effective means to create lasting economic and social change. By unlocking the intellectual capital and extensive expertise of our Volunteer Advisors through the transfer of knowledge and experience with clients and partners, we help catalyze innovative and truly collaborative solutions to local challenges. We continue to be humbled and honoured by their partnership and deep commitment to our mission.