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Waiting for Hope

Posted by Paul Born on February 15, 2021

As an unapologetic optimist, hope is normally not hard to find. The COVID-19 second wave has descended on us this fall like a deep west coast fog. All summer we knew it was coming. Many of us relaxed bathing in the familiar relationships and interactions we so missed. How could this be happening again?

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What's Love Got To Do With It?

Posted by Liz Weaver on October 27, 2020

Tina Turner is well known for delivering the powerful song What’s Love Got to Do With it? That song was rolling around in my head after a recent webinar call with John Kania about the launch of the Collective Change Lab.

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Conserving our Natural Environments: A Capacity Challenge

Posted by Liz Weaver on February 19, 2019

From time to time, the Tamarack Institute is contacted to be a key informant in different studies.  Last Fall, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and its partners were interested in understanding how capacity building could improve sustainability and outcomes for the California Landscape Stewardship Network. 

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Evaluating Systems Change Results: An Inquiry Framework

Posted by Mark Cabaj on December 18, 2018
At Tamarack’s Community Change Institute in Vancouver in 2015, Karen Pittman, CEO of the Forum on Youth Investment, shared a noble prize worthy piece of poetry:  Programmatic interventions help people beat the odds. Systemic interventions can help change their odds.
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Planning Systems Change Evaluation

Posted by Mark Cabaj on September 21, 2018

The video System Thinking and Evaluation, by Kylie Hutchinson, Chris Lovato and Bev Parsons is an excellent introduction to evaluating systems change. It describes how an evaluation of a hypothetical initiative to improve nutrition in a community must both ‘zoom in’ to explore the programmatic effects of the effort (e.g., improved health of program participants) and ‘zoom out’ to assess influence and change on factors in the larger systems that affect their individual health (e.g., urban design which affects levels of physical activity, the quality of industrial food production, the culture of portion sizes). The video also reminds us that deep and durable progress on complex issues depends on our ability to reshape the deeper systems that contribute to those problems in the first place.

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Evaluating Systems and Social Change: New Developments and A Ground-breaking Program by SFU

Posted by Mark Cabaj on July 31, 2018

One of my roles as ‘curator’ of the Tamarack Institute’s Evaluating Community Impact work is to track and share ideas and methodologies that community changemakers might find useful in their work.  

Over the next six months, I will focus on evaluating systems change and social change. Innovators  all over the world are focused on reforming or transforming systems, whether they be related to energy, child protection, ecological education, economic, social systems, or (more likely) a mix of all them.

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