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Community Needs Assessment or Community Understanding?

Posted by Tom Klaus on June 11, 2015

  I have a tolerate/hate relationship with community needs assessments. I really  wanted to write that I have a love/hate relationship with them but that would be  dishonest. I do not love them at all, but I do understand their importance and will  tolerate them...barely. In fact, I have designed them, conducted them, and used them  to inform and guide work on community projects and initiatives.

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"The Least of These"

Posted by Tom Klaus on August 21, 2014

My life is haunted. Some of the things that haunt me are the ghosts of stupid things I have done over the course of my life. Many, though, are the spirits of compelling ideas that just will not let go of me.

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Take a Ride on the Wild Side of Leadership

Posted by Tom Klaus on July 31, 2014

Not long ago my friend Mark Holmgren posted a blog titled Becoming a Learning Organization  that got me thinking about what it takes to provide leadership to a learning organization. As Mark points out in his post, learning organizations are more likely to address complex issues and challenges effectively. To be clear, the term "learning organization" does not refer to a specific size, configuration, purpose, or structure of a group. It can refer to a multinational corporation, public agency, small social sector or nonprofit organization, and even a project team. All of these can be learning organizations. The core idea is that it is an entity that has developed the capacity to learn, change, learn some more, and then change some more to respond effectively to its environment. Mark does a great job of explaining how this happens.

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