About Us

Mission

What The World Needs Now Is More Community

In an organization the Board and their managers exist to serve the owner(s). However, in the non-profit corporation with no equity share holders, who owns the organization becomes a serious question of governance. In the field of churches and religion, Dan Hotchkiss of the Alban Institute states “the owner of a congregation (social organization) is its mission, a social organization exists to serve its mission. The great management consultant Peter Drucker wrote that the core mission of all social-sector organizations is “changed lives.” He explained that the specific mission of a social organization is its answer to the question, “Whose lives do we intend to change and in what way?” At its most general level the Sionito answer to changed lives is enriching a person’s “life-ability.” We purposely use the word “enriching” in its several meanings as it provides the needed foil to the experience of impoverishment that most of our residents experience. Life-ability change, continuous life-ability enrichment is the goal of the Mission.

Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, argues that “good” is the enemy of “great.” The Sionito mission is to rise above the efforts of doing good works and being a well meaning good hearted people towards the goal of being an organization that can intentionally facilitate and sustain fundamental change in any situation (individual or societal) that can be shown conclusively to be in need of change. Change does not occur easily, nor is it a simple concept to understand. It is our experience supported by research that enriched life-ability emerges from i) both the emotional and rational sensitivity that one’s life is supported and affirmed by a community and ii) that one’s life makes a meaningful contribution back into a community. Without this dual community identification life is diminished and in some cases spirals into the realm of meaninglessness and self-destruction. If the sense of community suffers so does the stability of mind. Change does not occur easily because community environments do not change easily. Life-ability enrichment, is a variable dependent on the interaction between mind and community. Our program known as the Sionito Model is focused on changing lives by changing this interaction interface between their community and their mindset. The Sionito mission is to change community based environments. It is the concept we use to describe the multiplicity of changes our program elicits from individuals placed within an intentional mutually supportive community. The mission statement that results is:

The Sionito Group contributes to the Canadian expression of civil society and social entrepreneurship by developing intentional, inclusive, compassionate communities of mutual support and encouragement with the goal of decreasing the impact of impoverishment on, and increasing the life-ability of, each member of that community.