Fostering healthy, prosperous future cities and communities.​

On October 19, Ben Dachis, Vice President of Research and Outreach at Clean Prosperity and a member of FCI’s advisory board, sat in as FCI co-op students presented their work. For Tony Lin and Steven Men, it was a working session with an advisor who has been part of their project from the start. Their Growth Management Platform (GMP) shows cities how a growth decision ripples through development charges, property taxes, emissions and traffic. Dachis compared those trade-offs to a balloon: squeeze one side and the other bulges. He urged the team to build the structure first, add detail later, and share their work early, flagging assumptions so the people who hold better data can step in. The GMP is now close to a minimum viable product.

On October 1st, the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce hosted Vision 1 Million: Healthcare at the Delta Waterloo, where FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker presented the second update to the Vision 1 Million Scorecard. Produced by BestWR and FCI, the scorecard grades 28 metrics to assess whether Waterloo Region is ready to grow to one million residents. Minaker walked the room through what has improved, what is lagging, and what is holding steady. She then narrowed the field to three priorities: water, primary care, and child care. Progress on those three, she argued, would unlock progress across several other domains at once. She later joined Chamber President and CEO Ian McLean for a fireside chat. The next scorecard update arrives in January.

Preethi Raghuraman, a junior product manager at FCI, and Krishnam Jhalani, an FCI co-op student, joined Managing Director Eryn Stewart in Iqaluit for their first trip north. They met with the Nunavut Economic Development Association (NEDA), FCI's longtime partner on a tool to help Community Economic Development (CED) officers in Nunavut's 25 hamlets create and track their CED plans. Listening to NEDA reshaped the project. Long plans often end up on a shelf, staff change over time, and internet connectivity is limited, so the tool is shifting toward short visual summaries, progress tracking between plan cycles, spoken input, and private storage for each hamlet's documents. "Once we sat down with the people it's being built for," says Preethi, "it was clear the best version could only come from listening."