What a summer it has been. I am currently on a summer break to rest and reflect and am feeling pretty grateful to our board, Liz Weaver (Acting President) and our team for giving me this opportunity. As you can imagine, getting some extended time away can make one optimistic. I am finding it pretty easy to smile these days.
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I began my collective impact path a month after the 3.0 article was released last summer and it has taken a while to examine and understand the journey of the pre 3.0 era. My learning experience has been dynamic: I found collective impact to be a necessary alternative to the current collaborative processes, but still continued to seek concrete methods and tools for success. This is where the conference was very helpful with walking through and discussing the different tools for measurement and evaluation, and also connecting with others involved in community change. We became an extended community at this conference and though we were at different stages in our work, we were willing and open to share our struggles and highlight the little victories.
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I had expected the Tamarack Conference would offer me specific actionable items to further Synapcity’s work in neighbourhoods. What I hadn’t expected was the provocative challenges put forward to me as a person and as a professional. I imagined my takeaways to centre around the community level of change, but I was surprised to leave with a deeply personal reflection: if I intend to act as a meaningful contributor to my community, both the system and my role within the system require reimagining.
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I have a copy of the Collective Impact 3.0 paper by Liz Weaver and Mark Cabaj in my permanent reference file.
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This blog was originally posted on the Calgary Homelessness Foundation website on November 30, 2016 by Nick Falvo and is re-published here with permission.
Alberta’s seven largest municipalities recently released early results of a provincially-coordinated effort to enumerate and survey persons experiencing homelessness. Most of these communities reported reductions in homelessness, and reported a 19% reduction in province-wide homelessness compared to the first provincially-coordinated count conducted in 2014.
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What is the meaning of community for us; each of us, as individual persons? This question has been nagging at me since September when I attended Tamarack’s Community Change Institute in Toronto. It has come into sharper focus for me in the wake of the results of the U.S. Presidential election.
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