Explore a brand new guide on building sustainable and resilient collaborations, and how others are including anti-racism and lived/living experience in poverty reduction work
With a new year, we’re sitting in a place of reflection, renewal, and re-commitment. As changemakers, it is important to reflect not only on what we're working to address, but how we're working together with others towards positive change in our communities.
For this first issue of Engage! for 2023, we're excited to highlight a new 10 Guide for building sustainable and resilient collaboration. This guide, featuring sets of 10 stories, 10 resources, and 10 sustainability factors, is an essential read as we look to ensure our work and impact will last.
We're also proud to featuring two resources highlighting anti-racism practices and lived/living experience inclusion in poverty reduction work.
As we look towards a year of impactful community change work, we hope that these resources can help you reflect on how you are engaging with your work, mission, and goals, and inspire you to collaborate in ways that are sustainable, resilient, and inclusive.
FEATURE ARTICLE 10: A Guide for Building a Sustainable and Resilient Collaboration
Is your collaborative grappling to understand what sustainability and resilience means to your work, and what needs to be sustained or nurtured? Or perhaps you are exploring what strategies or systems changes your collaborative wants to sustain? Maybe, you want to better understand how to build a strong and healthy collaboration?
The Tamarack Institute, as part of the work of Communities Building Youth Futures, has developed 10: A Guide for Building a Sustainable and Resilient Collaboration to unpack the concepts of sustainability and resilience and share ideas, stories and resources that will benefit collaborations as they consider them.
Sustainability involves many factors, including leadership, funding, community engagement, and the ability to influence policy and systems that lead to program or a collective impact. These factors fall under four main categories of people, resources, process, and impact.
Resilience is about building a collaboration’s capacity to shift, adapt, and change, and is also focused on the overall health and well-being of the collaboration and the community.
Sustaining cross-sector collaboratives and the strategies they design is work that everyone who supports the collaborative must share.
This resource is for anyone connected to a collaborative effort including individual members of a collaborative table, members and backbone leaders connected to a Collective Impact initiative, investors and funders of collaborative efforts, board members who hold governance authority related to members of a collaboration, and individuals who are simply curious about collaboration.
The guide has been designed to broaden our collective thinking about the factors that contribute to sustainable, resilient, and impactful collaboration. You will find sections that:
define the key terms;
explore the factors relevant to creating a sustainable collaboration and the practices that build resiliency in collaborations;
provide ideas and resources that will supplement thinking and action;
explore questions for funders and collaboration tables to consider; and
share community stories about collaboration efforts and the lessons they have learned tied to their sustainability and resilience.
Field Notes: Ongoing Equity Work in Waterloo Region
Waterloo Region’s equity-focused work began in 2018, with a focus on connecting community across sectors, including by listening and creating spaces. They actively challenge systems of oppression, and work toward equity, to achieve equitable outcomes and to ensure that everyone has what they need to succeed. The collaborative works in a way that puts humanity before the work, and gives people “a push, but with a hug,” to challenge ways of thinking that are either not working or are working for them and not for others.
Learn more about the region's ongoing commitment to equity, and how changemakers areincorporating anti-racism measures into their anti-poverty planning with this entry to our series of field notes.
A unique partnership between the City of New Westminster, BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, and the Community Action Network has resulted in a ‘triple win’: strengthening the voice, skills, and contribution of people with lived and living experience of poverty; as well as improving city policies and programs, while ensuring the ongoing success of a tested grassroots approach.
This case study explores the development and impact of a pilot project that targeted skill building in anti-poverty advocacy, planning and policy development at both provincial and civic levels.
