Creating change for those with a disability in Ontario

Creating change for those with a disability in Ontario, Spinal Cord Injury Ontario, Opencity Inc, gregiej

Advocating for those with a disability in Ontario has become important to me. This post explains why I am supporting the work of Spinal Cord Injury Ontario (SCIO). 

For many years, I have worked at the intersection of pressure injuries, safe patient handling, and spinal cord injury. In short, this led me to project manage policy work for SCIO on access and affordability of medical supplies. This was described in a previous case study. The relationship continued and I am chairing an SCIO advocacy committee. This is a two-pronged approach. One aspect is financing the advocacy work and a second in communicating the message for the needs of those with a disability. 

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Lightning in a bottle | What True North means for Waterloo Region

True-North-Communitech-ONE-report-Waterloo-@gregiej

ONE may not be a familiar acronym to many, explaining why the expert review panel suggests renaming it as Innovation Ontario. Here we explore the intersection of the strands of tech debate and activities in the Toronto-Kitchener-Waterloo corridor. There is a spirit of optimism with Toronto Health Innovation Week, True North and Velocity 10-year anniversary, yet both the Building Global Winners report and the poignant book How We Can Win point squarely to the paramount need to gain global reach.

Steven Woods, Senior Director Engineering at Google Canada described “What we have, up here in the North, is lightning in a bottle.” He said that Google “recognized there was something special happening up here – the entrepreneurialism, the quality of higher education and the loyalty of the talented engineers who just want to do good work.” In the 2015 Global Startup Ecosystem ranking the newly combined Toronto-Waterloo corridor entity ranked 16th. The Region of Waterloo tech sector employes 30,000 people.

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Charity Spotlight – Lindsay Leg Club Foundation

LLCF-Lindsay-Leg-Club-Foundation-Wounds-Members-Charity-Spotlight-@gregiej-OpencityInc

Leg Clubs help to reduce social isolation while enabling leg ulcers to heal quicker. Our health is vitally important to us, but sometimes maintaining it is a struggle notes the Lindsay Leg Club Foundation (LLCF) team.

I have been fortunate enough to witness first hand the tremendous value these Leg Clubs bring to local communities. Here we explore why the LLCF service delivery model is a beacon for patient-centred care.

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Growth and scale for startups at the first Communitech HubSpot workshop

Startup, Waterloo Region, Communitech, Opencity Inc, Medtech, @gregiej

According to HubSpot, starting a business is easier than ever, while scaling one is harder than ever.

This is strong advice from the drivers behind the inbound movement for the 2,299 startups in the Waterloo Region. HubSpot ran its first workshop at one of the regions foremost incubators, Communitech.
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2019 pledge to your team

2018 pledge, New Year, team, climate KIC, OpencityInc

Start 2019 with a pledge to your team. We love New Year. It affords us another opportunity to reinforce our commitment to others after a period of reflection.

Your pledge is more than a list of new objectives, targets or resolutions. It embodies your values and how you commit to lead by example. Here we explore why this is worthwhile.

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10 top posts from the last year

Opencity Inc., top posts, hot topics, social responsibility, inbound marketing, strategy & digital communication experts, scorecard

These top posts and content resonated with you the most. They were not necessarily what we expected. The underlying topic insights will guide our future content curation.

We had lots of view and engagement analytics from among the 77 posts on the Opencity Inc. blog plus another 73 on other platforms and sites, through 2016.

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What we learned from 10,000 tweets in 12-months

Opencity Inc., online authority, thought leadership, 10000 tweets

It was the great Malcolm Gladwell who described the mastery from 10,000 hours of practice. Here is our experience on how to get the most from Twitter in building online authority.

Here we explore what we learned from posting 10,000 tweets in 12-months. This was done with original tweets, not retweets and without automated scheduling. Practice makes perfect as a level of proficiency comes with repeated and intense practice. We grew the number of followers on Twitter for the International Canoe Federation by 20,000 during 2016.

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Pursuing remarkable content – Sportscene.tv

Opencity Inc., Sportscene.tv, Rob van Bommel, content marketing, @gregiej, paddlesport

We interviewed Rob van Bommel who runs the Sportscene.tv platform to understand what it takes to achieve online authority through remarkable content.

This is the first instalment in our series studying insights from others on how providing remarkable content that your personas value can help build online authority and amplify your message.

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Leadership Summit season

Opencity Inc., LeadershipForum, Leadership Summit, Igloo Software, HBR, @gregiej, Strategy & Digital Communications experts

We enter a busy time for Leadership Summits across many multi-national corporations.

I recommend a thought provoking article from last year’s March 2015 Harvard Business Review by Bob Frisch and Cary Greene called Leadership Summits That Work. It is timely for many companies as we deliver on our latest annual conference for senior executives.

These are my reflection on Frisch & Greene’s article and how my last company stacked up against their best practice recommendations. Our last Leadership Summit used the theme Lead – Create – Perform in the historical music city of Vienna. This was wonderfully complemented with the orchestra theme and conducting led by Dominic Alldis.

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A new type of social responsibility – announcing Opencity Inc.

Opencity inc homelessness social responsibility. Milton Transitional Housing

It has long been my view that businesses can mutually meet the needs of shareholders while also driving social responsibility. With Opencity Inc. we promise to demonstrate that this can be successfully achieved.

There is a very personal connection with Opencity Limited. I am honoured to build upon the incredible shinning example built by Roland and Glenda Renyi. Thank you for mentoring me.

Opencity Inc. brings new skills and experience in strategic planning, business model innovation (beyond-the-product) and inbound marketing all wrapped up in a business with a conscience for social responsibility. Clients big or small, local or international find challenges in strategy planning and keeping up with excellence in both internal and external communications, particularly in applying new approaches of digital inbound marketing methodology.

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