How to Move from Silos to Systems—with guest expert Colleen Christopherson-Cote

 Working harder isn’t the problem—working in silos is. 

Across Saskatchewan, leaders and organizations are working hard—but too often in silos. The result? Burnout, duplication, and outcomes that don’t match the effort.

In this episode of Pathways to Prosperity, we’re joined by guest expert Colleen Christopherson-Cote, a community leader and systems change practitioner based in Saskatoon.

Colleen shares real solutions and expertise on how to move from silos to systems—drawing on her experience in poverty reduction, community development, and collaborative governance across both urban and rural communities.

If you’re a municipal leader, economic development practitioner, or community builder looking for better results—not just more activity—this conversation is for you.

Because stronger communities come from systems that actually work.

Paths to Prosperity is a platform for exploring how communities can build resilient, inclusive, and future‑ready economies.

Through thought leadership, practical insights, and conversations with leaders from across Saskatchewan and beyond, Paths to Prosperity examines the forces shaping local and regional economies—and the choices communities can make to navigate change with confidence.

Our focus is on what works, what’s emerging, and what leaders should be thinking about now.

To go deeper on the ideas shaping Saskatchewan’s future, https://seda.ca/about/paths-to-prosperity/ for more podcasts, thought leadership, and resources from the Saskatchewan Economic Development Alliance. 

Transcript

Crystal Froese 0:02

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Path to Prosperity Podcast, brought to you by the Saskatchewan Development Alliance. I'm your host, Crystal Froese, and today we're diving into a conversation that I think so many communities are grappling with right now. How do we move from silos to systems? Joining me today is Colleen Christopherson- Cote. Colleen is a community leader in systems change practitioner based Saskatoon. Her work sits right at the intersection of poverty reduction, community development, and collaborative governance. She works with partners across sectors, bringing people together to design and implement coordinated, evidence-informed solutions for some of our most complex social challenges. In this conversation, we're going to unpack what it actually takes to move beyond working in silos, start building systems that are connected, collaborative, and delivering real results. So let's get into it.

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 1:51

And so the thing that sort of when I think about dot connecting and the question, the thing that I'm most interested in thinking through is where are all like everyone does their work and we all do great work, but where do we touch up against people? And what is that point of connection or that point of overlap? And do we have a purposeful, meaningful, deliberate connection point there? And if we don't, why don't we? There's a bunch of different reasons why we don't. But if we do, then how do we then make sure that that connection point takes my work from my group of my stuff and lets the people inside their silo or their area know what's going on so that there's not this like isolation around like community sectors or systems or agencies or whatever it is, communities, whatever it is that we're working within. And a lot of places, regardless of whether we're talking about community safety and well-being or poverty reduction or community economic development, a lot of processes don't deliberately create those connection points. And then they just function within themselves, thinking that they're the only one doing something, or that nobody else is connected, or that they need to solve all of the problems, even if the problems are outside of the mandate in which their agency or their whatever is doing. Because these are such complicated, complex social problems, there's a bit of that mandate creep or that that uh crisis response that comes when you think when you're not deliberately connected to other people who are doing other work.

Crystal Froese 3:36

Okay. And so there's there's there's mandate creep, but there's there's also got to be some big gaps here between the institution and communities or sectors. Like, can can you share a story of of where one of these gaps might have been created and what the challenges are around that?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 3:52

A really sort of classic example of jurisdictional gap is within the homelessness sector. So homelessness is a hot topic across Canada, across a lot of the communities, even in this province. So homeless folks still need to access services, and many of them access service services in the most expensive systems, health, justice, those let's focus on health for a sec. So homeless folks show up at health, may not be an acute health need, but there is health-related service need. So they show up mostly at a merge. So when they show up at a merge, they're probably low priority triage and they go through the health system and then they're discharged. But at the point of medical discharge, where are they discharged to? And quite frequently, they're just discharged back to the street. And in South Katoon specifically, we medically discharge pretty much every day someone without a fixed address. Now it's not health's responsibility to start housing people, and it certainly is not health's responsibility to house people inside the health system, because that's a ridiculous expense. But if there was a connection point between health, emergency discharge or whatever other discharge, and a community practitioner or a community agency or a housing agency or something, then maybe the discharge is not to the street, but to the agency. Now, during times, and health will say that they do it, and they do kind of do it, during times, it becomes a problem during times when those agencies aren't open. Friday at four o'clock, Monday or Saturday and Sunday. Because generally speaking, how homeless folks are not going to show up at eMERGE Monday at two o'clock in the afternoon and be convenient and just get access to service, right? And so they're showing up on Friday nights or whatever, and then they're medically discharged back into the street. And it's a cycle all weekend of them coming and going from emerge., which is really expensive. It's a drain on the structural of emerge.. So folks who need emergency services can't get access to emerge. because it's bogged down with folks. So, but what would it look like if we had a relationship where emergence medical discharge didn't happen on Friday at four o'clock? It happened, but it happened to a very specific thing. And in COVID, we did this. We said, hey, we can't medically discharge homeless folks when we don't know their COVID status. What can we do with them? And we created a system that held them for the duration and then discharged them either to shelter where they had a working case manager and all of those things, or into housing. Some of them got housed right from that program. So there was this intermediary that was managed by health, by community, and by government. And so they were sort of contained in this space. And so medical discharge to nothing was was decreased over time. And so those are the pieces like health, it's not health's responsibility. It's not community's responsibility to manage a health concern. But there is a there's a dot there that could be connected that would eliminate the pressure of medical discharge to the street. Sorry.

Crystal Froese 7:03

Sorry, if that if that was kind of already happening, because it makes perfect sense to me, and I'm sure to the average person listening to that, why wouldn't that be something continued if it if it was kind of solving that issue right there? Why why wouldn't that have been something that was kind of, you know, to continue to kind of connect these dots in that moment?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 7:23

Like I mean, I think probably because I mean COVID was a weird time and we did things outside of the box, and I we all hoped that some of those things would stick around. Um, but we sort of went back into the mindset that it's not health's responsibility to house folks, and so the regular process of medical discharge just went back to normal. Or discharge to a specific shelter. But the, I mean, the thing about discharge to shelter is many of the shelters are overflowing anyway, and so there's there's no space for them in that shelter, right? And some of them do have acute health needs, and so what does that look like? I mean, I'm picking on health as a system, I can pick on other systems as well. There's also connection points there, right? So yeah, so I I think I mean health is the big, is a big machine and it has a big budget. And so there are lots of opportunities where those dots and those connection points could alleviate some of those pressures in those big systems if we leaned into community practice or leaned into what I would say is like common sense approaches to smaller policy level pro problems. Medical discharge in the middle of the winter to nothing doesn't sound smart. So, what would it look like? Right? Where should they be going? Homelessness in the middle of the winter in Saskatchewan is not, I mean, it's a really hard process. And so lots of us are left scrambling. What are we going to do with homeless folks who aren't in shelter, who need to seek refuge from the cold? And so every year we're always in September, we're always scrambling for a winter strategy. Well, we know winter's coming. I don't think any of us are blind to the idea that winter doesn't exist some year, like it's coming and we're just finished. Well, I think we're not finished it, apparently, but uh, we're just finishing it now. We should be planning for the next year, right? Not thinking maybe it won't come. And so, like, we're in those kind of cycles, probably mostly because back to the idea that we're not butted up against each other and thinking strategically, because we're in crisis mode and we're in response mode all the time. And so it's really hard for agencies, community members, systems, even governments sometimes to really think long-term strategy. They're just constantly like, okay, well, we just finished winter, now it's gonna be summer, now it's gonna be hot. What do we do with hot? Oh, wait, we don't even have a hot program. Like, what are we gonna do? And so they're constantly in this state of flux through response. And so if you think about it from even from a community safety and well-being perspective, the whole purpose of CSWB work is to move us out of active response and crisis and think about proactive strategies so that we're not in response mode, because response mode is very expensive. And people feel like maybe proactive long-term strategies and connective, collaborative, collective action is more expensive. But in the long run, it's actually way more, it's way cheaper and more effective to be strategic and work in sort of that collective mindset.

Crystal Froese 10:26

So so where are we connecting the dots across sectors? Like are we starting to move away from silos? And and and if we are, like what's an example of the of the partnership or process that's kind of making the some of these things work better?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 10:42

Yeah, I mean, I think there's an appetite. I think a lot of people don't know how to do it. I think it sometimes it becomes daunting. And folks, there aren't a ton of what I I call myself kind of like that system brain, right? Like there's a ton of folks who are really good at frontline service and sort of the immediate service models, but they're so busy that they don't have time for the system conversation, the high-level like connectivity conversation, or they just their their brains are not structured in a way that that makes sense to them. But there's a handful of us out there that are systems brains who are saying, yeah, like what does it look like when we start thinking really strategically about why you're responding that way? I'm not saying your response is good or bad, but could we respond, would you respond differently if that wasn't a problem? What would you spend your resources on? What would you do? And people, I mean we're seeing it, I we see it in pockets all across the province. But so I spend most of my time in Saskatoon, so I'll use some Saskatoon examples, but we do have collaborative uh intersectoral spaces that focus on, say, poverty reduction. So I coordinate the Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership. You know, it's uh over 150 agencies from across human service sectors, all levels, from folks with current and previous lived experience of poverty all the way to federal government representation, coming together to talk really strategically and work on intersectoral goals and policy interventions that could alleviate to eliminate poverty in Canada or in province or in Saskatoon. And so, like it's it's when you get those folks to the table and say, like, what do you do and how are you connected? that they start seeing those intersections. And if we could change this one thing, what would your program or policy, what would your response look like? And then we start thinking, okay, well, it who changes that thing? Is it a policy intervention, municipal policy, provincial policy, federal policy? Is it a programmatic change? Is it that all of you are doing the same thing? And there's this gap in service where there's a huge cohort of people who aren't getting access to service because you're all trying to service one thing, like maybe we can switch up who's doing what in the service model. Those are the things that start to play out when you have collective action and collaboration across sectors and across jurisdictions.

Crystal Froese 13:09

So, do you have like an example of where that's actually happening? Like, is there are we getting any momentum with the systems idea as opposed to asylums?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 13:21

Yeah, I mean, so for me, if I I mean I can use COVID as an example because COVID was such a weird time. People were because people, everybody was really worried about and uncertain. Nobody really knew what was going on. And my question after, and whatever after COVID is, but after COVID and after the COVID response was what if we treated homelessness the same way we treated COVID? Or what if we treated poverty the same way that we treated COVID? And how would we respond differently? During COVID, we said in the sector, in sort of vulnerable sector, we're gonna come together and work collectively. There were 85 agencies that formed this interagency response. We resource shared, and because we could second staff, because nobody was really working, but people needed to work, right? So we seconded staff and we shared staff, we shared resources, which resources, funding, and time, energy, all of those things. And we said collectively, COVID can't take hold in the shelter system. If it takes hold in the shelter system, it will kill homeless folks. And so what are we gonna do collectively to ensure that that doesn't happen? And then there were spin-offs. So once we started working, you know, okay, what what about people who are already food insecure, housing insecure, living in poverty before COVID? They're gonna have further marginalization and have a lack of access to whatever's going on because they already don't have access to the things. So what does that look like? And so there was real advocacy and collaboration across sectors where we would say to health, like, this is what we need, and health would respond and say, Oh yeah, we don't really ever think about that, but you're right, here it is. And so they would put it in place. And so we built a ton of different structures so that that wouldn't, so that COVID wouldn't take hold in the homeless sector. And it was fairly, I mean, it was successful. Eventually, there was homeless cases, but really right from the get-go in the early days, we were preventing it a hundred percent. And so the interesting piece about that is that it was all about the the trust and the shared resource piece. And I I think we in systems work and in in community work and probably across all the sectors, have this like false narrative around scarcity. And it and I it's not a popular opinion when I start talking about this because people are like, no, not everybody has unlimited resources. But I don't I don't buy into resource scarcity. I think there's a ton of resources, financial time, whatever it is that you want to define resources as. There's a ton of resources out there. What we prioritize is where we spend the resources. And if we prioritize the work differently, there would be resources. And this scarcity mindset, particularly in the nonprofit sector, would disappear because we wouldn't work differently and there would be resources.

Crystal Froese 16:19

Interesting that you say that, because you know, I I was approached when I was a city counselor with a person who has a business here in our city and had was born and raised in a completely different country, and they just couldn't wrap their head around how Saskatchewan, which is to them such a prosperous province with so much opportunity, because of course they had come from a country that did not have that, and with such a low population, and they said like they just don't that she like she said that like the ratio doesn't kind of equate here. Like, why does there seem to be so many people that are struggling when she said the reason she wanted to come to Saskatchewan and the reason she was experiencing you know great business is because the the resources and the prosperity that we have here? That's a really interesting point to make. So, like for you, what would a connected Saskatchewan look like? Like if there's if there's something we could change immediately, like where would that lie? Is it is it across our political landscape, or is it across the community landscape? Or is this you know way more kind of grassroots, or are we talking really high-level kind of way to change and make our our province more connected around these issues?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 17:38

Yeah, I think it's all of those things. So if I think about I've had I've worked in community community development rurally, and if I think about rural communities and often those rural communities are quite isolated from other communities and other services and supports, thinking strategically about you know how you interact with and what you do with the surrounding communities, including the RMs, rather than trying to like hold on to all the services in one community. And I think we've seen this over the course of the history of this province where you know you want to hold on to all the schools and all the hospitals, and you want to have all of those pieces of infrastructure in every single community. And so back to the idea that we're small, it's it's not it's not an effective strategy, but it could, if you worked collectively, really strategically think about where do those pieces of infrastructure go? And how do you work to solidify them and sustain them within more of a community-based model so that you're not, and I mean, even in Saskatoon, we could have the same conversation. Does every single community neighborhood need a swimming pool paid for by the city of Saskatoon? Or can some agents, some communities and some neighborhoods, drive more effectively than others? Like so you start to play out sort of where those pieces of infrastructure go. And if you don't have a conversation with each other, then you end up sort of fighting for the limited resources and then the location of whatever that infrastructure is or whatever the program is or whatever it is that you're trying to build may end up in not the most effective space for the folks who need to get access to it. And so what and then so that's at a community level. And then when you start thinking about how government plays a role in that, if government agencies, so like even from elected officials to the, I call them the wonks, but the admin people, the people that work in government, often there's a disconnect between what the elected folks want and need to do with respect to what their constituents are saying and the loud constituents are saying, and what the realities are from the perspective of the administration folks around what is doable and not doable, and what the general population, not just the loud community members or the vocal minority or majority, even majority, are saying, but really what is an effective tool to alleviate or to deal with whatever is the concern that you're working on. I it's sort of like we've lost track of weaving our world together. I and I I didn't grow up in this province, but when I moved here, I was struck by that concept, by how much Saskatchewan folks like Saskatchewan folks, right? And how family, community, woven together communities are, except when it comes to working collectively on these kind of projects. Then there's like all this sort of territoriality, turf, and conflict. And that I think is more tied to this concept of resource scarcity than it is tied to the ideological or value system or relationship-based systems that the humans have amongst themselves.

Crystal Froese 21:09

And how would we how would we change that? Like, is there kind of one decision maker meeting that could could Yeah, I I mean, I always sort of ask the same question.

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 21:20

So I think I pose this question to some folks here. So there's federal funding stream for homelessness and housing, and I said, and so it's not a ton of money, and so there's often competition, and so there's a ton of agencies all working in housing and homelessness, all doing good work. There's no there's no like judgment or or statement about the work. They're all doing really great work. But there are things that need to happen before other things can happen. And so if you don't have a mechanism in place to talk about that sort of succession, then you have mass competition and you have a group of people who may A decision based on a great grant record grant, based on maybe some cloud of an agency, and maybe some smaller agencies always lose out because they don't have as much background or they don't have a big enough operating budget or they don't have enough, all those things start to start play into it and have nothing to do with the outcome that the money and the program is trying to achieve. It's all this sort of structural stuff. But what would it look like if we as a collective said, okay, there's four million dollars, say, in this grant. Instead of all of us writing individual grants and trying to divide up all the four million dollars, we come together, sit down, and say, okay, if we were going to eliminate how homelessness in Saskatoon, what's the first thing we would do? Okay, this. Okay, who does this? Okay, so let's write a grant. Let's all of us write one grant to that four million dollars and outline that the first year, the this is number one priority, and the money goes to do this, and we make sure that say it's shelter related. So then we would make sure that the shelter provider is operating and doing that work. And then once that is established, we would use the money to say the next priority, the next priority, the next party, and we would go through this sort of succession. And if your agency isn't in the first succession to-do list, that's okay. We're coming, we'll get there, right? But instead of fighting and trying to implement everything at once, we actually strategically think about what it could look like to alleviate or to eliminate homelessness and what are the check boxes? Because it, you're right, we're small. There, it's not that many people. So, what is it that we need to fix?

Crystal Froese 23:42

So this is probably a naive question. So, why are we not doing that? Like, when you explain that to me from an economic development perspective, a community wellness perspective, collaboration, coming together, sharing the pie, being very definite on the outcomes that you want to achieve with the funding. Like, is this coming on the horizon? Like, where are we at?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 24:09

Yeah, so it's is it coming on the horizon? There's a few of us that are working like this. I have a couple of programs or projects on the go that are like this. But for the most part, funders are a little bit caught off guard when there's a collective application. So the funders aren't caught up. So they're also demanding that we compete and the process for competition. So there's a few funders out there who are starting to realize that that's not the most effective way to disseminate resources. And then, I mean, we're really just caught in the narrative. We're caught in this nonprofit charitable community action narrative where we have, we chase grants, right? We don't think strategically about our role and what we're allowed to do and not allowed to do around resource development. And so there's a movement around social enterprise, and you see some of the conflict coming when nonprofit charitable sector starts to dip its toe into that world from the for-profit world, who is like, well, that's our world. And so I'm a firm believer that it I said it was a three-legged stool. And then yesterday I was talking to a colleague who, and I think maybe it's a four-legged stool, or I don't know if that makes it a stool or makes it a chair, but anyway, a four-legged thing. But there's a three-legged stool in my world where you can't build thriving community without for-profit, so businesses and all that stuff, government and the nonprofit charitable sector. The three of them build a cohesive and sometimes, and depending on where you are, one of those legs might be a bit more populated than the other, and that's okay. But the three of them have to coexist. And this notion that the nonprofit charitable sector is a drain, is creating chaos, is is driving low economic growth, those kind of things, we've lived in like I live in this world, right? So we've lived in this narrative for so long, but it's simply not true. And so if we start boiling down the charitable nonprofit sector and thinking about where it lays in GDP and other economic growth data, like we're the third largest employer. This sector is the third largest employer in Canada. So to exclude it from community development is a ridiculous notion. In the same breath, I recognize that it has to then be uh woven together with the other two rungs of the of the stool, right? And so it can't exist by itself. It also it also can't exist in a situation where it is to the detriment of the other two. So how do we make sure that they're they're connected and that they're doing the things that are not antagonistic, but actually collective response to whatever it is that needs to go on. Yeah, did I answer the question?

Crystal Froese 27:04

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's just like talking about just reducing the whole fragmentation and you know, kind of getting the silos, setting those aside and getting everyone as a collective together to sort of think about this, as you said, like a stool with four legs.

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 27:22

Yeah, I would add funders. So fine, so government, nonprofit, and charitable sector are like nonprofit, charitable is one leg, funders would be the other. Maybe funders is the top. I don't know. Like funders play a role because they also share in this narrative, right? I I was recently talking to a municipal counselor about, you know, why is it that we put so much clout in a for-profit business over everything else? I mean, there I don't have any issue, I don't have any problem with for-profit. Like that is part of the world that we live in, and they have a critical need and responsibility within community. But everyone's like, well, we can't just have we well, we need the for-profit people to tell us how to run a good business. But it's different than a nonprofit charitable business, right? And so there are things that we can borrow from each other, but they're fundamentally different agencies. And to have access to services and supports that support community development actually creates a space where for-profit has a stronger economy long-term because people are then connected and supported and are getting access to the things that they need. And vice versa.

Crystal Froese 28:37

Yeah, and and for-profit has, you know, they have stake in the game for this. You know, when you talk about community health and well-being, I mean the a healthy business operates within a healthy, healthy economy, within a healthy community. Yeah, it it absolutely connects those dots together for sure.

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 28:57

Yeah, and I mean, if you think about from a poverty perspective, if you think about employment and folks in your community can go can only get access to what I will call sort of predatory, precarious part-time employment that is not meaningful employment. So, like folks who can't get full-time wages or are working cobbled together minimum wage jobs to try to make ends meet. If that's the type of employment that you have and in your community, how are you going to attract young families if there isn't meaningful employment, right? How are you going ahead? And if there's not meaningful employment, how are those folks going to afford to access the things that you want them to be able to access? Great housing, transportation, service industry, whatever, shopping, all those kind of things. All of the access to service, goods and services requires a meaningful employment so that they have enough money to pay their bills and to get access to those things. And so if you don't have those, then we start to see that breakdown, right? And so this is the relationship between the sector, so vulnerable sector, or if we talk about community safety and well-being, it's not just about having one really amazing employer. It's about making sure that that employer has meaningful employment, but also then that those staff have access to all the other things that make a vibrant community. And those fall within government. They fall with government like public libraries or healthcare or education and within human and within the human service, both nonprofit and charitable and for-profit. So I think I'm not sure how over time we have moved away from that construct. I think inherently people understand it, but we but we just seem to be missing the mark a little bit. And I and I don't know whether if it's tied to like intense partisanship or like a a drive for folks to be like really polarized. I mean, the the global economy is polarized right now. And so maybe that trickles into the way we do business in this province.

Crystal Froese 31:06

Well, what's like what's one thing that you wish more people understood about how these systems connect in Saskatchewan or or or aren't connecting, I guess? Like how would you explain that to somebody who's not sort of immersed in the work that you're doing?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 31:24

Yeah, I mean, I I think the interesting thing is that we don't really consider how people end up where they are, because we look at more like we look at people through our own sets of normals. So I have my own, I have my own normal. It's different than your normal, it's different than everybody's normal. And so when I look at things, I think about it with that lens, but we don't build public policy without thinking about that lens. And the folks who are building public policy generally have a lens that isn't poverty, that isn't struggling, that is educated, is all these sort of things. And so I would like people to realize that all the people who live in this province should have equitable access to the things that they need. And some of those things that they need, I will never need, and that's okay. But and some of the things we all need, and that is also okay. And so, how do we balance everything the things that we all need and the things that some people need that other people don't? And how do we set priorities around those needs? Because if everybody needs what they need, then we need to provide what they need. And so it gets very complicated and quite expensive, right? And so, how do we really create those priorities? The issue is that some of those needs are interconnected to other needs, and so when you cut or don't resource or don't prioritize certain needs, then you'll see trickle-down uh impacts. And so those are those intersectoral pieces. If you don't have great high school graduation rates, what happens to meaningful employment? And if you don't have meaningful employment, what happens to the folks who can't get access to it? Right. And so, and if you don't have high school graduation rates, you can back all the way up. So, what's going on in like early years, right? So if you don't have childcare or meaningful early years supports and services, then you'll have a cohort of kids who will move through an education system who probably won't graduate on time, who probably won't get access to meaningful employment. Like the data all exists. We understand this inherently. So what we don't really recognize or don't spend time thinking about is oh, but then what? So if if all of a sudden all the kids in our high school aren't graduating on time and not accessing meaningful employment, then that whole cohort of kids falls into a need that we'll have to figure out how to pay for through a variety of different ways, government services or supports, but also employment or for-profit or the nonprofit sector. Like all three of the rungs of the stool will play a role in figuring out how to support that cohort of kids. Exactly. Yeah.

Crystal Froese 34:24

Well, this has been wonderful, Colleen, to hear your expertise and wisdom. And as we're kind of wrapping up this uh conversation, just wondering what comes to mind, what's one word or phrase for you that represents connection?

Colleen Christopherson-Cote 34:41

Yeah, I once I was thinking about this. I mean, there's a fundamental difference between the concept of connection and collaboration. And I think I use those, and we often interchange those two words. And I think connection is the point in which there's like intentional connect, like deliberate alignment or a touch point. But it's not enough to just do that. Then there's the so now I know you exist, and we've touched point, we have a touch point with each other. So what? So then connection has to lead to collaboration. So the whole idea now is that now I know we're connected. What can we do collectively? I'm not saying that I'm going to do your work because I don't have time to do your work. Likewise, you don't have time to do my work, but our work becomes less and becomes more meaningful and outcome-driven when we make use of this connection point. Is there something we can share? Is there something it might just be data or it might be resources, it might be just coffee, right? It might just be a relationship. But we need to think and be strategic about moving the connection into collaboration. And really, when you do that, then you are deliberately saying there's reciprocity here. I can give and you can take, but I also expect when I need you to give you that you'll give. And if there isn't reciprocity, then connection is irrelevant.

Crystal Froese 36:16

Wonderful. Well, thank you, Colleen. And really thank you for helping us connect the dots really around action. Ultimate and that is what is what will create the change and that and strengthen the collaboration. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. We really greatly appreciate your wisdom and your advice. Thanks for having me. What a great conversation that was with Colleen Christopherson Cote. What I really appreciate about her work is that it's grounded, not just in policy, but in lived experience, relationships, and a long-term commitment to real systemic change that's improving outcomes for individuals, families, and communities across our province. And if you believe Saskatchewan's future depends on more than just projects and funding, if it depends on leadership, governance, and human systems that actually deliver, there's a few more ways to go deeper. Just subscribe to Path to Prosperity for ongoing thought leadership and conversations. Because together, we can build the capacity to turn opportunity into outcomes, tearing down those silos, and really creates through human systems. To listen to more episodes, visit seda.ca/podcast. I'm Crystal Froese and thanks for listening to Path to Prosperity.