I sit on the Mayor of Edmonton’s Task Force to End Poverty. It’s a diverse group including the expected mix of leaders from government, business, education and community services. At a recent gathering we were working together to increase common understanding about poverty as well as to move forward with identifying strategies.
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Pretend you run a business that sells widgets that are critical to a buyer. The price of each widget is $1000.00 and the buyer needs 100 of them. That’s $100,000. Now let’s pretend the cost of each widget (materials, labour, reasonable marketing costs, equipment maintenance, transportation costs, etc.) makes up 80% of the market price, leaving you with a gross profit of $20.00 per widget or in the case of this order of 100, a gross profit of $20,000 or 20% of the total price.
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For the majority of us, the experience of poverty is unimaginable. We intuit it must be difficult; we can read the reports of its impact and have some understanding, but in the end, we do not know poverty to the degree and depth those who live with it do.
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One key to organizational success has to do with the capacity of people to learn - learn from mistakes as well as learn from successes.The call for organizational learning has escalated over the years ever since our culture and economy transitioned from a "we make things" focus to what is called a "knowledge society."
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I just came from an excellent meeting with local colleagues who lead some of the best known non profits in town. We were talking about a number of things, but one topic was the emergence of social impact bonds (SIBs) as another method of financing social/health programs. Social Impact Bonds are very new and the first one occurred in Great Britain in 2010. Today, there are 14 social impact bond projects in the United Kingdom, one in Australia, and a couple or so in the United States (as of 2013). There are none yet in Canada.
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INTRODUCTION
This piece is about our practice as community workers, our mindset, our tendencies to resist the transformative leap. Sometimes it feels like we are standing on the edge of convention, a wide chasm between us and the “New World,” and looking down at the gremlins of risk and failure.
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