The Winnipeg Foundation and Endow Manitoba are hoping to share the Winkler Community Foundation’s knowledge of the Vital Signs project with other foundations across the province.
“Vital Signs has always been recognized as a manner for community foundations to better understand their community, to collaborate, to partner, to develop solutions with like-minded partners,” says Alan Goddard from The Winnipeg Foundation and Endow Manitoba.
“Winkler has always been a leader in this. In fact, one of the very first, if not the first, Vital Signs efforts in all of Manitoba happened in Winkler in 2012, and since that time they did one in 2018 and now again in 2024.”
When they found out Winkler was tackling its third Vital Signs report this year, Goddard said they saw it as the perfect opportunity to not only support the effort but also use it to establish a pilot project they hope will get more foundations launching Vital Signs in their own communities.
“We’re calling it a Manitoba Vital Signs proof of concept,” he explained. “Learning from Winkler and the leadership here, how can we make the Vital Signs process accessible to all 57 Manitoba community foundations, all the way south to Altona and all the way north to Thompson?”
Goddard said they’re hoping to create a scalable model so “that it can work for communities of a thousand people as well as it can work for communities of 50,000 or 100,000.”
