CEO's Report

As we approach our 50th Anniversary in 2012, E3 has been successfully accredited, meaning we have successfully garnered a qualified third party view that our services across children’s and adult’s programming meet the highest standards of quality.  Not to rest on laurels, we also believe that we must seek continual improvement as part of our continuous quality improvement philosophy and practice. 

Improved staff training was a focus in this past year.  One of the initiatives we implemented was the development of a new videoconference – computer training room to facilitate this goal. More and more, meetings and training are sourced remotely and this has the added benefit of saving staff travel and time budgets.
In 2009/2010 E3 finally, after some 15 years, completed our Pay Equity obligation to staff.  This is an important achievement in a long line of fiscal legislative compliance requirements by government that we have successfully implemented, in spite of tremendous challenges in the first years where we were hundreds of thousands in arrears.
With the help of stimulus funds, we were able to do extensive renovations in our headquarters and Peel Street buildings to meet health and safety requirements and generally improve the efficiency of space to accommodate growth.  The Peel Street building is now fully paid as well and this is a huge accomplishment in only eight short years.

In this past operating year, we also completed a workplace violence environmental scan and a redevelopment of policy to meet provincial legislation of the same name.  In conjunction, we completed pandemic planning so necessary to the health, safety and well-being of our clientele, in the event of any future pandemic where individuals we support may well be very vulnerable to possible widespread disease.
Because change and adaptation to new MCSS directives are always on the forefront, we proactively pursue new ways to improve staff scheduling, cut costs and improve staff morale.  In this regard we are, as this is being written, undergoing our biannual exercise of “Ideas Change”.  This essentially opens the floodgates to the submission of constructive criticism of our systems, processes and protocols across our entire spectrum of services.  In past years it has resulted in many qualitative improvements to services and conditions for staff and clients.

In the very near term we and other agencies in the system, will need to adapt and contribute to an entirely new regional access system on the adult side of our services.  We are working with county and regional agencies to ensure the change represents a qualitative improvement for consumers.  As we move forward, we need to embrace change and help modify it where it is less than progressive, since nothing stays the same in this sector or any other.   As always, our goals and focus must be to anticipate and fulfill the needs of the people we support.
   
Gordon Anton,
C. E. O.