July 23, 2026

As part of this year’s Implementation Plan supporting Our People—helping employees feel equipped, supported, and connected—the Re-imagine the Program Manager role project is underway. 

This initiative is focused on determining the structural changes needed to provide Program Managers with more time to effectively coach, support, and develop their teams. 

Over the past 3 months, the project team has completed a current-state review and a sector scan and identified future state target capabilities needed to support strong outcomes for people supported, employees, families, and community partners. 

This work has been informed by organizational leaders and a dedicated Program Manager Advisory Team made up of 12 Program Managers from across Karis, with representation from every district. Their collective insight is helping ensure future recommendations are grounded in operational reality and reflect the diverse needs of programs across the organization. One of the key learnings so far is that strong outcomes are most likely when leaders have the time and support to focus on people, quality, and relationships. 

As we move this work forward, the focus shifts to generating and evaluating future organizational design options. The goal is to identify structures and supports that strengthen leadership capacity and create more time for coaching, staff development, service quality, and relationship-building. As we move through the next phases of the project, we will generate and evaluate potential organizational design options, with the goal of testing a future-state model in a limited pilot environment before considering any broader implementation. We have been engaging various roles including Program Managers, Executive Directors and shared services Directors to ensure our options are co-designed through engagement ad feedback for practicability. Once the future state of the new Program Manager role is well-defined, we will expand the engagements to Direct Support Persons (DSPs), families, and people supported. 

A dedicated SharePoint site—Re-imagine Program Manager Role  —is now available and will be used to share project updates, milestones, and progress throughout the initiative. Make sure to follow this site to stay updated on how this work progresses!  

Joy Wilson, Executive Director, Central District, Ontario
Sandra Selmani, Director of Human Resources
Aaron Kennedy, Project Lead, Human Resources