Guiding Change,

Growing Resilience.

Circular sign with purple border, white background, and black text reading "D-SIDES".

Our Purpose

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D-SIDES helps organizations move beyond surface-level adjustments to embed strategic insight into their operations, evaluation, and innovation efforts.

We help institutions:

  • Assess where systems succeed—and where they fail

  • Design programs and products that align with needs

  • Engage with communities to build what matters

  • Measure progress through meaningful, context-aware evaluation

  • Adapt and scale efforts in response to shifting realities

Our goal is simple:

to help organizations do better, for the people they serve, the products they create, and the systems they shape.

We have worked with

Logo of '100 STRONG' in black, featuring a stylized purple and black arrow pointing to the right.
Toronto Catholic District School Board logo with a heart, cross, and infinity symbol in red.
Logo of Toronto District School Board with a green and black design
Logo of the LAIDLAW Foundation with blue and black text
University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies logo with crest.
Logo of Toronto Metropolitan University with blue, yellow, and white design
Logo of Pathways to Education with green text on a white background.

  • Strategic Planning & Community Consultation

    We really appreciate the support D-SIDES provided during our external consultation for developing Lakeridge Health's strategic plan. They helped us connect with diverse audiences through a public survey, independent interviews, and focus groups, making sure many diverse perspectives were heard. Their team was always responsive and offered clear, practical advice that helped us make sense of the feedback. The final report, which included a brand valuation, gave us actionable insights that strengthened our planning process and guided our future initiatives with community groups. D-SIDES made the consultation process smoother, more inclusive, and genuinely valuable. We would highly recommend them to any organization looking for a partner who can help gather meaningful input and turn it into clear, strategic guidance.

    Petrina McGrath, Health System Executive, People, Quality and Practice and Chief Nursing Executive (CNE), Lakeridge Health

  • Research & Community Leadership

    O’neil Edwards has been an invaluable partner in supporting young people in our community. Our collaboration focused on ensuring that students facing systemic barriers received the encouragement, mentorship, and resources necessary to remain engaged in their education and successfully complete high school.

    Through this partnership, O’neil played an important role in helping youth see a pathway beyond high school, supporting their transition into post-secondary education and other meaningful opportunities. His commitment to community-driven solutions and youth empowerment has had a tangible impact on students who might otherwise have disengaged from school.

    In addition to this direct support for students, O’neil also contributed meaningfully to research initiatives that helped us better understand the barriers facing youth and how community organizations can respond effectively. His perspective and leadership strengthened our ability to develop informed strategies that support long-term educational success.

    I strongly recommend O’neil Edwards and the work of D-SIDES for their dedication to youth development, community leadership, and advancing equitable opportunities for young people.

    Norman Rowen, Founding Director, Pathways to Education

  • Capacity Building

    Working with Hema from D-SIDES was a truly positive experience from start to finish. We engaged D-SIDES to help our team build capacity in evaluating systems change work during a Staff Planning Day, and Hema was an exceptional partner throughout the process. She brought deep expertise in program evaluation, along with genuine curiosity, thoughtfulness, and respect for the work of SPT. Her approach created an engaging and supportive learning environment that helped our team deepen our understanding and strengthen our practice. We came away from the day energized, informed, and inspired. We would gladly work with Hema and the D-SIDES team again and highly recommend their services.

    Kanaka Kulendran, Director, Organizational Systems, Social Planning Toronto

  • Partnership Building

    Hema Vyas and D-SIDES' approach to partnership-building is genuine and strategic, bringing together groups that have never worked closely before and creating spaces where honest dialogue can happen. It is wonderful to work with someone who listens first, consistently demonstrates results and leads with humility.

    Debbie Douglas, Executive Director, OCASI

Meet the Team

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Founders

  • PhD, MBA (he/him) is an award-winning education professional who has two decades of senior leadership experience in education globally for non-profits, secondary schools and post-secondary institutions.  During his over- twenty dedicated years of post-secondary leadership, O’neil has been instrumental in guiding planning processes to support the development of innovative programs and services that promote student retention, engagement, and success, and has led interdisciplinary teams in addressing emerging priorities. He has led collaborative work on implementing access departments, international student foundation programs and strategies at the post-secondary level in Canada.

    O’neil has experience leading government working groups in addition to university and high-school boards in policies, programs and professional development towards organizational excellence.

    O’neil has had the privilege of living and working in many different countries, bringing unique insights to his work. Building on a passion for developing people’s potential through education, O’neil continues to be part of programs that bring real social change. 

A woman with curly black hair and light skin, wearing a black and white patterned jacket and a dark top, standing against a dark green background.

  • B.Ed., MSc (she/her) is regularly invited to collaborate, present and speak to her range of expertise, including effective partnership building; key performance measures & evaluation; and strengthening democratic participation. This range reflects her experience in strategic planning and measuring progress to success in non-profit, corporate and government sectors.

    Hema is a former city council candidate. While losing isn’t easy, she reflected on her learnings to establish a program preparing other women to run for office. The program resulted in 10 of 15 participants running, with 3 elected to office.

    She has won several evaluation and policy-making awards as a result of chairing evaluation working groups for education, housing and labour market initiatives. Hema has led the design and implementation of mixed method (quantitative and qualitative) frameworks with the end goal of building consensus on report results for system transformation improvements.

Associates

  • Seyi Osinowo is a data and digital transformation specialist with over 15 years of experience helping organizations modernize their operations through cloud, automation, and analytics. His expertise lies in harnessing data to power digital transformation initiatives that strengthen governance, streamline processes, and enable smarter decision-making.
    At Scotiabank, Seyi has supported the bank’s global digital transformation by designing and deploying Google Cloud solutions that integrate with Collibra, automating user access and embedding metadata governance across business units. At Munich Re, he contributed to the development of an enterprise data and analytics roadmap, modernizing how data was collected, governed, and used to inform strategic decisions. With Bruce Power, he advanced digital reporting for nuclear outage analytics, building automated pipelines and AI-enabled scheduling tools that enhanced efficiency and performance oversight.
    He has also managed interdisciplinary teams and facilitated cross-functional collaboration, including bridging English and Spanish business requirements for multinational stakeholders. Having lived and worked in many places of the world, Seyi brings a global perspective to complex transformation projects. He is passionate about creating systems that make data more accessible and actionable, while driving the broader digital transformation journeys that position organizations for long-term success.