Camh Vs. the Faas Foundation

CAMH vs. The Faas Foundation

Andrew Faas, a Canadian philanthropist and founder of The Faas Foundation, had agreed to donate $1 million to the Toronto-area Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Foundation. Faas had a vision for the donation to be utilized to implement a Well@Work program, an initiative focused on creating psychologically healthy workplaces across Canada. Faas was adamant about what the donation should be used for and, according to him, was clear with his expectations set out in the donor agreement. He says there was a lot of time spent discussing the project and understanding how CAMH could deliver in regards to his expectations. After paying the first instalment of roughly $333,000, Faas says CAMH was not able to clearly explain how the money had been spent. As a result of the ambiguity surrounding the project, Faas has decided to pull the donation and would like CAMH to reimburse the Faas Foundation for the first instalment. There are a number of issues apparent in the facilitation of the project management of the Well@ Work program, however for the purpose of this critical response I would like to focus on stakeholder management and communications management.

In any project, stakeholders should have a certain level of involvement and should be informed throughout the project with status updates, project meetings, reports, and communication. As explained above, after the first instalment had been received, there was no further explanation of where or how the donation had been utilized. In this circumstance, Mr. Faas had immense power to impact the project (this claim is supported by the project annulment once Mr. Faas retracted the donation), and he should have been considered as a leading stakeholder by the project team. The project manager could have performed a stakeholder analysis, using a tool such as a power/interest grid, where he/she could have understood Mr. Faas’ level of authority and engagement in the project. In understanding that Mr. Faas had high interest and high power, the project manager could have developed a stakeholder management plan to ensure his support throughout the project.

A key piece of stakeholder management efforts is to constantly communicate with your stakeholders; a communication plan could have been developed to secure Mr. Faas’ support for the project. According to the text, a good project manager is one that works with the project sponsor “to define, communicate, and meet project goals” (Shwalbe, 2015, p.6). The issue, then, of communication management in this case is evident. In a written statement, CAMH has responded that it has “a rigorous process of objective financial oversight” and provides donors “accountability reports, timelines and updates” (as cited in Collyer & Vuchnich, 2016, p.1). Although CAMH claims to provide critical information to their stakeholders, it is apparent that the expectations of Mr. Faas had not been properly managed nor met. The problem, then, becomes the lack of communication and transparency between the project manager and the expectations of the project sponsor. The project manager should have taken the time to develop a communications management plan which would identify stakeholder communication requirements, what type and frequency of information to be communicated, and the best method for communicating. The ambiguity of this situation could have potentially been avoided if the project information gathered had been shared through a communication management plan. The discrepancy between the stakeholder’s expectations of communication and the information provided by the project team resulted in the failure of the project. A project can only be successful if it has met or exceeded the expectations of stakeholders; this particular project performed so poorly against the expectations of the stakeholder that the funding for the project was pulled and thus the project was a failure.