After one of seven Deepening Community with Collective Impact workshops in Australia and New Zealand, I was interviewed by Paul Bishop in Redland City, Australia, about the true cost of deepening community both socially and economically.
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Brenda Zimmerman, dear friend to Tamarack and a champion of community change and innovation, died verysuddenly in mid-December. She will be deeply missed and she leaves a lasting mark on us all. Like many of you, I was inspired and honoured that Brenda chose to share her newest idea - the concept of “snap back” - with us at the 2014 Collective Impact Summit. Her thinking offers guidance for moving forward despite being surrounded by resilient systems, and we now must share her thinking broadly so that it can live on.
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In December, Liz Weaver and I hosted Community Change: Lessons Learned 2014 a webinar exploring key community change lessons. It provided a great opportunity to generate deeper insights about our work over the past year with the 200 learners who joined the webinar. The dialogue and response energized us with the realization that our growing online community of learners has really become a movement for social change!
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I have long been a student of community. I am curious about people's varied definitions of it and how the sense of belonging to something beyond oneself, while at times a burden, can serve as a source of inspiration for generosity and shared action. Often, people's definition of community includes a specific physical place where one lives or works, a place whose well-being is linked to that of your own. Innovation - finding new ways of thinking about and addressing long-standing issues - is another concept I have studied for some time. Throughout much of my adult life, my work has focused on the intersection between community and innovation: nurturing new approaches to address the social challenges that exist within communities by working together. This is community innovation.
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