Ten co-op students, spanning multiple disciplines, came together for a focused one-week sprint on two tools FCI is developing to support Northern communities, one centred on grant writing, the other on community economic development planning.
The sprint addressed real gaps. Northern communities frequently face the same administrative and capacity challenges when it comes to accessing funding and building long-term plans, and they face them without the resources available to larger municipalities.
What made the sprint productive was the composition of the room. Ten students, each working from a different disciplinary background, brought distinct perspectives to the same problem. That kind of cross-disciplinary pressure-testing tends to surface things a single team working in isolation might miss.