Tamarack's Top 10: Kickstart Your 2020 Learning
By: Liz Weaver
Change-making is challenging. Tackling complex issues requires skills, instinct and an appetite to work differently. The field of change-making practice is continually changing and adapting. Over the course of 2019, the Tamarack team had the opportunity to engage, watch and document how community change happens. This article reviews ten resources published by Tamarack in 2019 and highlights key themes emerging. Each of these resources provides practical tools, approaches and strategies for building your skills as a community changemaker. These resources represent our observations about community change and the work that is happening across communities in Canada, the US and internationally.
Our hope for you in 2020 is that these resources will help you lift your community change-making game. At Tamarack, our commitment is to continue to learn from you. We invite you to review this top 10 list, delve a little deeper and make a resolution to join us on a webinar or at a workshop in 2020 to continue to build your skills as a community changemaker. Learn more about upcoming events here.
1. Disruptive Times Need Skilled Changemakers
In 2018, Tamarack identified five key practices for community changemakers. These practices including understanding collaboration and systems change through collective impact; authentic community engagement; building community leadership capacity; understanding and deploying social innovation practice in a community context and evaluating impact.
The paper reviews each of these five practices and makes the case that impactful community change requires skilled and intentional changemakers who continually build their skills and connections. The paper delves into the concepts of community leadership; the shifting of mindsets and approaches which engages the wisdom of diverse and collaborative community partners and structuring community change from a systems level perspective.
2. Small Changes for Big Impacts: Behavioural Insights for Community Change
Community Innovation draws on a wide variety of tools from the field of behavioural insights, behavioural economics and behavioural psychology. The paper explores how understanding individual and group behaviours can provide critical insights to driving change forward. There are three important premises which drive behavioural insights:
- That we often mistakenly believe that both our decisions as well as others are rational (i.e., well considered and consistent with our beliefs)
- That in fact our behaviours and others are highly influenced by our environments
- That understanding how our environments influence our behaviours in consistent and predictable ways will enable us to design environments that lead to desirable behaviours.
To drive community change, practitioners must use these insights and the environments to move from low level impact to creating movements. This paper provides useful insights and strategies addressing large scale change.
3. Changing How I Think about Community Change
Multi-solving is a framework which offers a new approach and tools to understand how addressing one complex issue may lead to solving other connected and related issues. The TransformTO case study shared in the paper identifies how reducing Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions also contributed positively to boosting health, economic and social equity outcomes.
In our highly interconnected world, the multi-solving framework can begin to address and unpack some of the programmatic and budgetary silos which prevent organizations and collaboratives from being successful. It also provides a framework for looking at the whole system and deepening our understanding that benefits can accrue across a range of impacts, not just one focus.
Multi-solving makes the case that community change efforts are complex, require a different approach, but when deployed effectively can have broad and deep impact. This paper lays out the case for multi-solving and how changemakers can build their skills to effectively engage this framework.
4. Foundation for Building a Common Agenda
Many communities are utilizing a collective impact approach to make progress on a complex issue. This guide focuses on the first condition of collective impact: build a common agenda.
For community changemakers to be successful, they need to rally around a compelling issue and understand what currently exists in their local context which can be used to enable change to happen. The guide focuses on the early stages of development of collective impact efforts which include identifying local champions, convening conversations about the issue and generating support and buy in. It then moves toward the development of a common or shared agenda and designing the collective impact effort.
For communities in the early stage design process, the guide provides links to case studies, tools and resources which are foundational to success. This guide can lift your early stage collective impact efforts off the ground by building a cohesive common agenda for the change you are seeking.
5. Creating Fertile Soil: Catalyzing Community Innovation
Communities are potential hotbeds for innovation. Innovation happens without us knowing or leveraging its impact. To create the fertile soil for community innovation to seed, the paper identifies five conditions for communities to seed innovation including: understanding power; using your community sense of power for launching change; understanding the capacity of the community to take risks; building interconnections and leveraging existing resources; and building a unifying purpose for community members to invest their time and energy in accelerating the innovation.
The paper describes different types of changemakers and how they can be effectively engaged to move an innovation from idea to embedded practice. Seeding innovation is not just about hoping for change to happen, it is about intentionality, risk taking and understanding and leveraging the unique characteristics found in the local context.
6. Creating the Culture for Engagement
Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying ‘there is nothing to fear but fear itself’. This paper explores how fear prevents community changemakers from authentically engaging with community. Fear plays out in many ways including the fear of reaching out to the public at all; of being verbally attacked; of being the front-person representing a whole organization and not having all the information or answers; risk of creating additional awareness to a problem; fear of the community wanting something you can’t deliver; fear of disappointing people; or the fear of not being able to follow through.
These fears are valid and must be acknowledged as constraints to deep engagement. In this paper, fear -based scenarios are presented and practical tools, resources and approaches are shared to overcome the fear factors. If your work includes engaging community members to build commitment to change, this paper is a must read.
7. Engaging People with Lived/Living Experience
Getting over fear involves conversations with individuals with lived and living experience. Their knowledge of the barriers that they face every day can be instrumental in driving change forward. This engagement guide is written for communities working to reduce poverty by engaging individuals with the lived or living experience of poverty, but the assessments, tools and advice is useful for any group seeking to engage those most impacted by the issue. It draws from the direct experiences of a network of communities and individuals who have worked to overcome power imbalances and to treat each other with respect and value.
The guide describes 10 high impact ideas that community changemakers can use to build authentic engagement practices:
- Commit to engaging people with lived/living experience
- Create a culture of inclusion
- Hold accessible meetings
- Create opportunities for engagement
- Eliminate financial barriers to participation
- Consider paying people with lived/living experience for their time
- Take the time to build trust
- Share power by opening up decision-making processes
- Provide training and mentoring opportunities
- Diversify representation and deepen engagement
This guide was written with the support of an advisory committee of lived and living experience leaders and the ten ideas represent their best advice for deep and authentic engagement. The guide also includes community-based examples of effective engagement.
8. Building your Case for a Neighbourhood Strategy
Another approach to navigating the fear of authentic engagement can be building a case for improving the conditions in your neighbourhood Over 81% of Canadians live in urban communities which include diverse and changing neighbourhoods. And while we are more urbanized, we are also more isolated.
Many civic leaders understand that investing in neighbourhoods is critical to creating safe, socially connected and rich urban environments. This guide is designed for community changemakers interested in connecting neighbour to neighbour, building both local leadership and the case for investing in and improving your neighbourhood.
A strong neighbourhood strategy benefits from an effective case which will draw people and resources to your cause and to your neighbourhood.
9. Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) at a Glance
Tamarack has long been a fan of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach which starts from leveraging and engaging people’s strengths and gifts (assets) rather then focusing on the problems or deficits in a community or neighbourhood. An asset-based approach includes the following principles at its core:
- Everyone has Gifts: Each person in a community has something to contribute!
- Relationships Build Community: People must be connected for sustainable development.
- Citizens at the Centre: Citizens must be viewed as actors— not as passive recipients.
- Leaders Involve Others: Strength comes from a broad base of community action.
- People Care: Listening to people’s interests challenges myths of apathy.
- Listen: Decisions should come from conversations where people are truly heard.
- Ask: Generating ideas by asking questions is more sustainable than giving solutions.
This resource is a great backgrounder about ABCD and includes some useful insights about how the ABCD approach is different from other community development practice.
10. Impact Reporting: From Activities to Outcomes
In 2019, Vibrant Communities – Cities Reducing Poverty partners engaged in a shared learning experience which lead to deeper understanding of the difference between activities, outcomes and impact. This paper documents this journey of shared learning.
A multi-level evaluation framework was used which identified the following four outcomes which would have an impact on the reduction of poverty both city-wide and for specific groups or specific areas:
- Building community awareness, will and action
- Shifting systems and policy
- Programmatic/project/program interventions for individuals and families
- Targeted and population level outcomes
The paper provide links to community impact reports as well as additional resources to measure change and impact. Building a shared learning experience, engaging in reflection and reporting and sharing results has deepened the Vibrant Communities – Cities Reducing Poverty understanding of what it takes to move from activities to outcomes to impact.
