About Niska

Founded in April 2005, the workers’ co-operative Niska is a prized and indisputable partner for sustainable community and organisational development.

The workers’ co-operative Niska is more than a consulting firm!

Niska is a collective entreprise made out of passionate and innovative researchers and practitioners, who pool their diverse facilitation, research and conceptual skills in order to best serve the evolving needs of communities and organisations for sustainable development.

Niska is a social entreprise which puts human beings, the players of development and transformation, at the heart of its interventions and research.

Niska’s mission

Our mission is to support and guide the development of communities and organisations with rigour, using strategic processes, original conceptual frameworks and adapted project management and evaluation tools.

Niska teams up with its clients to find personalised and relevant solutions with high development potential.

Niska members work with the constant care of applying solution realms which are adapted to the realities of communities and organisations. Niska listens to its clients’ needs and wishes to contribute positively to their projects through exploration and innovation.

Niska’s approach

Niska is a non-profit worker’s co-operative providing expertise in sustainable development management to communities and organisations. Niska supports development strategies and actions with relevance and rigor.

Development is the upward motion of a community’s strategic capital as a whole: human, social, political, economic and cultural capitals, which generally involve behavioural change.

Development management exists because, beyond the virtue of concepts such as sustainable, local and social development, for instance, it is crucial to entrench them into day-to-day practice.

There is the “what?” and the “why?”; However, Niska is also interested in the “How to?”, the processes of development.

Interventions

Our interventions are based upon the five following principles, which refer to the development model we abide by:

• Participation
  Development is, above all things, the “application of each person’s and each object’s capacities” (Gaston Michaud). Hence, stakeholders’ participation to their development is an essential criterion of all our interventions. It allows full ownership of knowledge and capacity development.
• Adaptability
  For us, process is as, if not more important than the final product (the report), because our interventions aim at transforming organisations and communities. Thus, it is important to adapt the process to the reality of a community, which may imply adjusting our intervention, with prior approval from the client.
• Integration
  Development within an organisation or a community does not happen in a vacuum. Solutions which are developed through our interventions are always linked to the fields of action of the various stakeholders. That is why we are committed to integrating all community stakeholders in our work.
• Holism
  Holistic and systems thinking influence our way of conceiving organisational and community development. In today’s complex reality, this approach allows us to make sense of the development in which stakeholders are engaged.
• Sustainability
  Even though sustainable development is a current trend, it remains nevertheless that it is a concern of every moment. Even when our mandates do not require the use of such a framework, our organisation advocates for this ideal.