Inspiring Communities is a New Zealand capacity building leader and partner of the Tamarack Institute. For the past 10 years, the leaders of Inspiring Communities have been working across the country to build local leadership and inspire community-led development and have documented their work in a series of resources called Learning by Doing. Inspiring Communities has the vision that all communities will flourish.
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Have you ever left a conversation about innovation suspecting that everyone was talking about very different things? Like all buzzwords, the meaning of ‘innovation’ has become muddy and unclear over time, and yet ‘innovation’ is often seen as a panacea for our social ills. But is ‘innovation’ what we do, or what we aspire to do? Here are three questions that I’ve found helpful to narrow in on exactly what I, and others, mean when we talk about innovation.
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I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend Tamarack’s Asset-Based Community Development for Healthy Neighbourhoods event this week. We gathered at Kitchener’s beautiful Victoria Park Pavilion in decidedly unspring-like weather conditions for this three-day gathering of community builders from across the country. The program featured two of the world’s top trainers in Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), John McKnight and Cormac Russell, among others.
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It's weeks before Christmas. Uptown Manhattan, NYC. I'm in a room full of frighteningly extraordinary people: religious leaders who practise the art of disaster chaplaincy.
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So far, 2018 is turning out to be an important year for poverty reduction in BC. Currently, 557,000 people are living below the poverty line in Canada’s most western province – the second highest provincial poverty rate in the country. Against this sobering backdrop, the BC government has just completed a broad range of consultations with a variety of citizens, including people with lived experience. In June 2018, the government will release a “What We Heard” report summarizing feedback from the consultations, with plans to introduce poverty reduction legislation this fall. The intended result is the development and implementation of a poverty reduction strategy.
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“Ask any Canadian what “care” means and you will get rapid-fire answers that include words like kindness, love, concern, compassion and attentiveness. We know with inner certainty what it feels like to be cared for. But ask if these qualities come to mind when thinking about experiences in the health care system and you might get a blank stare or even a smirk”. - Vickie Cammack and Donna Thomson.
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