As a Learning Institute, Tamarack is committed to making the work of community change easier and more effective. We do this by teaching, writing and both hosting face-to-face and online learning opportunities to provide leaders with the knowledge and inspiration they need for success in their community change efforts. In 2016 we were proud to welcome more than 22,000 learners to engage with us.
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“Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.”
- John Tukey
One of the significant challenges that community development faces today is understanding how, and in what ways, our work makes a difference. As individuals, we may labour diligently for a long time with what can feel like very little to show. Organizations have a similar challenge. Time, money, staff and volunteers pour out their creativity and passion toward some common end but the value of all that work is often not seen and we can struggle to justify to funders what all the effort is leading to.
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InWithForward brings research and development to social services to improve outcomes for people living on the margins. Our aim is to re-imagine and redesign social services, “to turn social safety nets into trampolines so that everyone has an opportunity to flourish. That means: using, enjoying, and developing our human capacities. Not just having a roof over our heads and food on the table.”
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Collective Impact is a framework that is being used by many communities to tackle complex problems. At the heart of the framework is the notion of bringing together diverse voices (business, government, community organizations and citizens) to deeply understand the problem and begin to develop strategies to address the systems context and policy barriers. The Collective Impact framework consists of five core conditions: the development of a common agenda that is shared amongst all stakeholders; shared measurement strategies to understand if progress is being made; engaging in mutually reinforcing activities; continuous communications and the support of backbone infrastructure.
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Ingenuity, the ability to be clever, original and inventive, is a skill needed in every community. People living across the Lower North Shore of Quebec have incredible ingenuity and resourcefulness. One of the biggest challenges is that this region is a mix of 15 small, often isolated communities. Some of the communities are only connected by ferry or airplane while others have roads. Cell phone service is sporadic at best and if the weather comes in, forget it. The communities, in the past have spent more time competing with each other, rather than leveraging their ingenuity to tackle their tough problems.
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Community change work is often compared to being engaged in a Tango, a complex dance where the partners exchange leadership, followership, passion, desire, intensity and drama. Now, I am not much of a dancer, but I can appreciate this metaphor.
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