Resilience is a Verb: What the CPA Ontario Not-for-Profit Conference Revealed

In November 2025, I hosted the CPA Ontario Not-for-Profit Conference. The theme was Resilient Futures, and over eight hours and seven speakers — covering economic uncertainty, AI adoption, cybersecurity, fundraising, governance, audit practice, and front-line service delivery — a single thread connected every session.

The organizations that will thrive are the ones actively engineering their resilience, rather than waiting for it to arrive. Every speaker framed the challenge differently. All of them pointed to the same underlying problem.

The conference rated 9.1 out of 10. The room was full of practitioners who care deeply about this work. And the sharpest thing I left with was not about any single topic — it was about the gap between knowing what needs to be built and actually building it.

Pamela Uppal-Sandhu — Financial resilience as architecture

Pamela Uppal-Sandhu, Director of Policy at the Ontario Nonprofit Network, opened the day with the sector's economic reality. The post-pandemic funding environment is not recovering — it is restructuring. Organizations that took on short-term funding during COVID without building sustainable underlying operations are now navigating the cliff edge. Pamela's message was clear: financial resilience requires proactive architecture, not reactive response. Diversified funding, flexible budgets, and honest scenario planning are not aspirational — they are operational requirements in the current environment.

Jason Shim — Minimum Viable Policy

Jason Shim, Chief Digital Officer at the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience, delivered the session that generated the most conversation. His reframe of a familiar concept has stayed with me: instead of the Minimum Viable Product, he proposed the Minimum Viable Policy — the working set of guardrails that lets your organization engage with technology today, responsibly, without waiting eighteen months for the perfect governance framework that may never get finished. His line — "if it is free, you are the product" — was the clearest articulation of the AI tool adoption risk I have heard, and it landed in the room the way plain-spoken truths do.

Dr. Richard Leblanc — Oversight to insight

Dr. Richard Leblanc, one of Canada's leading authorities on board governance and cybersecurity, spent the afternoon connecting two domains the sector often treats as separate. His challenge to boards — to move from oversight to insight — is not rhetorical. It is an architectural shift in how boards engage with organizational data, technology risk, and the pace of change happening in every operating environment. The boards that are still working from quarterly printouts are not governing the organization that exists today. They are governing a version of it that is already three months out of date.

Carolyn Stewart-Stockwell — What it's all for

Carolyn Stewart-Stockwell, CEO of Feed Ontario, closed the day by bringing the room back to what all of this infrastructure work is actually for. Her session — Surging Demand vs. Constrained Supply — was the most direct account of what happens when the infrastructure fails the mission: front-line workers trying to support communities with what she called the impossible arithmetic of structural deficits and surging need. The gap between what the sector is being asked to do and what it is resourced to do is not closing. The only variable available is operational efficiency — and operational efficiency is an infrastructure problem.

I went into the conference thinking the central challenge was capability. That non-profits needed more knowledge, more tools, more technical skills. That is partially true, and it is what the Mission Multiplier Program is designed to address.

What I left understanding more clearly is that the deeper challenge is confidence. The sector is not frozen because it does not know that AI and modern technology infrastructure exist, or because it doubts they could help. It is frozen because the risk of getting it wrong feels larger than the cost of staying stuck. Every conversation about AI adoption eventually arrives at: but what about data privacy? Every conversation about system modernization eventually arrives at: but what if we choose the wrong platform?

These are legitimate concerns. They deserve real answers, not reassurances.

What Jason Shim's Minimum Viable Policy framework offers — and what I believe is the sector's most urgent need right now — is a path out of the freeze that does not require perfect information. You do not need a complete AI governance framework before you can do anything. You need a working set of principles, a designated internal leader accountable for technology decisions, and the willingness to take one informed step at a time.

The organizations leaving the conference with momentum were the ones who had stopped waiting to have everything figured out.

Hosting this conference sharpened something I had been working through for a while. The intersection of AI, information management, governance, and non-profit operations is a specific niche that no one else is working at with both the technical depth and the sector credibility to make it useful. The conference made clear that the sector is asking for this. The gap between what organizations know they need and what they have the confidence to pursue is real, significant, and closeable.

It is why the AI Governance Advisory exists. It is why the Mission Multiplier Program is launching in 2026. And it is why I will keep doing the work of translating the complexity into something the sector can actually act on.

My closing remarks that day ended with this: "Our work is to bridge the gap between people, process, and technology. To take the world's growing complexity and simplify it, empowering our organizations to build a more equitable world for the generations to come."

That is still the work.