Welcome and thank you for your interest in learning more about Connect Ontario!

Our Workplace Community

Connect Ontario Professional Development Group is an organization that stands at the intersection of Life and Work – observing the traffic of change and preparing to walk across together as a workplace community. For a better idea of just what we are referring to, check out this article titled "In it together: the power of a professional development network."

Connect Ontario talks about life issues such as, culture, race, parenting, technology, mental health etc., which impacts our work as public servants. Our goal is to cultivate a community of career champions where each member of our group has a vested interest to see their fellow members succeed and advance. We're are a community of belonging. That is "A Little Who We Are: A Place of Belonging" (Video) as a community of practice.

Our members include staff, management, and executives from various ministries across the Ontario Public Service (OPS). We also have participation from Federal and Municipal employees. 

Our Value to You as a New Member

We are different from other public-sector, networking organizations in that our desire is to build a workplace community through connecting (not just networking) and dialoguing (not just acting). This creates a safe space for belonging and reflecting as keys to network and develop professionally.

In an age of disruption, it becomes more critical for public servants to innovate and deliver programs and services in tax-efficient ways. Today this is done better when public servants understand their colleagues and citizens from various backgrounds and their needs in an agile, collaborative and integrative way.

Connect Ontario embraces leveraging work-life experiences of their community to make us better public servants all round to meet the challenges of a new way of working, which would benefit any new member.

Our Value to Each Other as Existing Members

We value sharing, listening, dialoguing, reflecting, and then finally acting on concrete takeaways which empowers us as public servants in our workplaces and helps us to act in more humanizing ways with each other and our stakeholders.