HSI Showcase: Final Projects

Virginie Mongeon

About the project: For my final project, I helped a solidarity cooperative in rural Québec increase its trust capital with a playful mindset. This created a lighter atmosphere where workshop participants felt able to share and challenge existing assumptions about the level of trust as well as creatively invest in their new TrUSt FUNd through mock paper cheques. Approaching process consulting through playfulness presented several personal paradoxes that required careful and intentional balance between providing content and being the container, showing competence, character, and care in my interactions with the client, and finding my footing between facilitating and hosting. In the end, playing to win was replaced with playing to learn.

Stacey Dakin

About the project: My final master’s project allowed me to engage with a national NGO using a process consultation approach, exploring themes such as adaptive problems, covert processes, collusion, and power dynamics. Looking ahead, I aim to continue applying my theoretical knowledge and practical experience to navigate the complexities and uncertainties within the non-profit and charitable sectors, both in Canada and internationally. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Human Relations and a Master of Arts in Human Systems Intervention. Currently, I serve as Chief Program Officer for the Trans Canada Trail while running my own consulting business, Changest.

Dina Diab

About the project: For my final project, I worked with a not-for-profit organization committed to helping and supporting homeschooling families across Quebec. I collaborated with the organization to evaluate its structure and processes while fostering connection and communication among its members. To do so, we used Appreciative Inquiry to leverage the organization's strengths and identify specific next steps the organization wants to take to sustain its work and thrive in its mission. I look forward to applying the rich learning I gained from this meaningful project and the program while using the collaborative methods and tools in my career as an Organizational Development practitioner to help individuals and teams and leave each world I cross a little better than I found it.

Mona Abdul Ghani

About the project: For my master’s project, I partnered with a Montreal-based non-profit dedicated to providing culturally sensitive psychological support for vulnerable women. The project aimed to facilitate a team alignment process, supporting the center’s team in reexamining their priorities and co-creating a shared purpose and actionable plan. Guided by Beverley Patwell’s “Leading Meaningful Change” framework and following a process consultation approach, I gained valuable insights into team dynamics, leadership, and human-centered change. 

I look forward to applying the insights and skills gained from this experience to foster meaningful, people-centered change in my future consultancy work.

Kate Borowec

About the project: For my final project, I supported a public sector client looking for dedicated time and space to focus on team maintenance. Using Appreciative Inquiry, the team reflected on their best qualities, imagined their best possible future, and generated ideas and manageable commitments about how to achieve their shared goal. This project, and the Human Systems Intervention program, have changed my mental model of how we solve problems: from relying on diagnosis (analysis so we can fix a problem) to seeing the practical value of dialogue (storytelling to generate ideas). This, along with the other tools, techniques, and the network of other practitioners, are continuing to impact how I think about work and lead and interact with teams. As a federal public servant, I am hopeful that these learnings help me to make a positive contribution in this space. 

Julia Hall

About the project: For my final project, I worked with a not-for-profit organization that facilitates access to specialized healthcare services for patients in remote regions. Through conversations with staff, I learned that individuals and teams across the client organization are deeply devoted to patient and family care but felt detached from a sense of wellness and connectedness at work. In respect of the client’s request for support to build its capacity to articulate mission, vision, and values statements and enhance employee engagement, but with consideration for an underlying need for healing in the system, we agreed to partner in the development of processes that would surface the staff’s individual and shared strengths; give rise to a collective voice among team members; and build community across the organization. Using the Appreciative Inquiry approach, we designed processes to help members of the client system name the good already present in their system and to imagine, create, and find their way to change, together. Commentary from participants at our closure meeting captured their collective commitment to learning and acting together, leaving me with tremendous optimism for their organizational future.

My highest hope for the project was to offer processes that would give life to the organization and its members - to help it become “a place for individual and collective unfolding” (Laloux & Appert, 2016). This hope extends to my career as an educator: I want to have a life-giving impact in learning spaces I host and in which I participate.

Laura Ndoria

About the program: For my final project, I worked with an Artificial Intelligence (AI)  research institute who was facing pressures in multiple directions due to the fast pace of the industry, and projects and opportunities in multiple directions that were causing fast growth within their internal team. I facilitated for them a process within which they examined their internal structures and how they couple improve their internal collaboration. It led to them redesigning their internal structure in an iterative manner. With my support they created a culture that encouraged experimentation and an internal structure that was flexible and able to accommodate the fast changing AI environment. 

I look forward to being able to continue to bring my background in continuing professional education and intercultural exchange as well as my new skills built during this Masters, to helping build stronger and better workplaces and communities.

Stephanie Derksen

About the project: For my final project, I partnered with a local arts organisation that provides hip hop based literacy programming in high schools. While the initial asks were uncertain, through exploring feelings of burnout and frustration throughout the organisation, we discovered common goals of sustainability and resiliency. Throughout my project, we relied on relationship building, coaching, and honest conversations to create a more interdependent team - one able to function with ease while still maintaining the people oriented values it held. This involved reevaluating relationships with power, more equitably distributing responsibility, and developing transparency and accountability amongst all levels of influence.

This echoes the work I plan to do throughout my career as a consultant - moving towards working environments where humans feel respected by and connected to one another, challenging the norms currently created by colonial and capitalist working values.

Franciele Souza da Silva

About the project: In collaborating with two student-run groups from Montreal universities, our main goal was to unite their shared values and goals around social justice and community work. Both organizations were eager to strengthen their partnership but faced challenges with communication, alignment of approaches, and time management. Through a series of creative activities, individual reflections, and group discussions, we established a space of vulnerability and trust that allowed them to move beyond daily obstacles and reconnect with the core purpose of their collaboration. By the end, we had co-created a framework for ongoing cooperation that felt authentic and aligned with both groups’ values, laying the groundwork for a partnership that could grow and adapt over time.

Duha Elmardi

About the project: My master’s project included working alongside a Montreal-based non-profit organization that serves the Black Anglophone community. My role was to provide a space for the organization to refine its intentions, strategies, and messaging for a new project they have started that unites numerous Black serving community organizations to strengthen their ability to better address the issues they face in accomplishing their mission and internally within their organizations.

Sumana Ferdousi

About the project: For my final project, I collaborated with a not-for-profit organization to design a transformative experience aimed at building meaningful connections among its members. We envisioned a space where members could share personal stories about their work, cultivating trust, collaboration, and growth within the team. Through a thoughtfully facilitated workshop centred on collective storytelling and open conversation, we created an environment where participants could experience the impact of shared experiences firsthand, strengthening relationships, empowering voices, and fostering a supportive community rooted in genuine connection. In my current role as an internal consultant, my aim is to create spaces where individuals and groups can navigate the complexities of our system with simplicity, using generative dialogue as a medium for meaningful outcomes.

Liliana Sitkowiecki

About the project: For my final project, I worked with an organization that wanted to get clarity on goals, values and a shared vision for the future.

As I continue my work in the educational field, I will apply the knowledge gained through this program to develop collaborative teams.