Ashely Good, Founder and CEO Fail Forward Before launching Fail Forward, Ashley worked in Cairo with the United Nations Environment Programme and as a management consultant in Vancouver, Canada. In both lines of work, Ashley saw a fear of failure inhibit innovation, adaptation, and general growth. In response, she launched both AdmittingFailure.com and the consulting firm, Fail Forward, to spark a shift in how civil society perceives and talks about failure, and to help organizations learn, innovate and build resilience.
Ashley has spent the past three years working with a range of organizations from donors and foundations to not-for-profits and private sector companies to use failure as a learning tool and culture driver to support and foster innovation. She is well known for building the Organizational Learning Team at Engineers Without Borders Canada, and continuing to lead the development of their annual Failure Report.
Her work on failure has received coverage in a wide range of media and news outlets. Ashley was also the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Innovating Innovation Award.
Blair Dimock, Vice-President
Performance and Strategic Investment, Ontario Trillium Foundation Reporting to the CEO, Blair helps lead the development and implementation of overall strategy, operational planning and performance measurement for the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF). Blair also leads the Foundation’s information systems and information technology strategy, with the goal of ensuring effective knowledge transfer within and outside OTF and OTF’s Province Wide and Future Fund granting programs.
Blair began his career as a Lecturer in International Politics at Trent University, where he was nominated for the Trent Award for Excellence in Teaching. Prior to joining the Foundation in 2006, Blair was Director of Strategic Planning and Research at TVOntario, where he also led the agency’s first New Media division and its Regulatory Affairs department.
Blair currently sits on the Steering Committee on Not-for-Profit Research at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation and the Vital Signs Advisory Committee at the Toronto Community Foundation. He has served on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Effective Philanthropy, and the Research and Policy Committee of the Learning Partnership. An active community member, Blair volunteers with the Public Skating and Bike Works programs at Evergreen Brickworks and as a certified coach and hockey school instructor with the East York Hockey Association. Blair lives in Toronto with his wife Verity and their teenage sons Cameron and Malcolm.
Keiko Kuji-Shikatani, Education Officer Student Achievement Division, Ministry of Education
Keiko is passionate about the role of evaluation in supporting programs and organizations for the betterment of society. Keiko is an internal evaluator (Education Officer, Research Monitoring and Evaluation Team, Student Achievement Division) for the Ontario Ministry of Education, infusing evaluative thinking in collaborative teams to build Ministry and sector capacity for the use of evidence to inform decisions and implementation. Keiko’s evaluation practice and research focuses on infusing evaluative thinking, evaluation use and evaluation capacity building as an active member in the community of evaluators.
Prior to joining the public sector, she has provided services as a program evaluation and learning consultant for organizations with training, skills development, behavioral and attitudinal change programs in increasingly sensitive and complex situations both in Canada, Japan and internationally. Her ability to communicate effectively with diverse group of stakeholders and carry out studies has been benefiting non-profit organizations to improve and refine their programs.