November took me to Australia and New Zealand to meet with colleagues working on community change, community-led development and Collective Impact. I was a keynote speaker and workshop presenter at ChangeFest, a gathering of 500 Collective Impact practitioners in Logan, Queensland.
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It was in 2004 at the first Tamarack Community Change Institute (CCI) that I first met colleagues from New Zealand. They had travelled the globe to spend a week with Canadian changemakers and to share their perspectives, wisdom and questions. For many of us attending the CCI, this seemed quite exotic, but little did we know that a bond had already been formed and the individuals from New Zealand were keen to learn about Tamarack, our way of working and community change.
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Bridging the Community Engagement and Collective Impact divide created an unlikely partnership between Norman Walzer, Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University and myself. We met at a 2011 Community Development Society conference which began a collaborative effort that has moved in many directions.
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Many of us working in community change efforts are continually searching for new resources and tools to help facilitate effective community engagement and community change processes. Over the last several weeks, some of my favourite twitter leads have shared their lists of sites that they regularly visit for tools and resources.
Place matters. The place where you live is becoming increasingly more important. A recent article in Yes! Magazine explored the importance of localism, a growing trend in the US and Canada.
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Systems change work is about understanding all of the actors in the system and the dynamic flow of power, relationships, and mindsets that exists between them. John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, in their recently released paper, The Water of System Change use the metaphor of water to describe systems. The water is the environment through which fish and other life exists but it is also a flowing, moving and changing entity.
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