Implementing Options Bytown’s Reconciliation Action Plan

 By Molly Damiani

Hello Everyone! My name is Molly Damiani. I am a 2nd-year student in the MDP program. I completed my field placement in Ottawa, Ontario, with Options Bytown. Options Bytown is a supportive housing provider that helps people get out of shelters into stable, permanent housing. Last year Options Bytown produced a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). My field placement was focused on implementing components of this plan. 

Over the course of my placement, I supported a series of RAP deliverables. Early on, I worked on a grant application to make the common spaces more welcoming to Indigenous partners, organizations and community members seeking support from the two main housing facilities in the city. Later, I proposed communications and activities for National Indigenous Peoples Day and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. In my final weeks, I drafted a land acknowledgement guidelines document and developed a positionality statement for the organization and accompanying activity for staff. Finally, I put together a draft of a monitoring and evaluation plan for the RAP working group to utilize in their year one assessment of the RAP.

I feel fortunate to have been embraced by such a compassionate, motivated, and open-minded team throughout this placement. I am genuinely excited to follow their reconciliation journey and see how it unfolds. Upon my departure, they were in the process of hiring a coordinator responsible for the ongoing support of the RAP. It is fantastic to see a whole position devoted to this work, and it will undoubtedly help them to maintain momentum and meet the objectives they have set out for themselves. The Ottawa community is beginning to recognize them as leaders in this space, and many other housing organizations are subsequently exploring how they, too, can incorporate a RAP in their workplaces.