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Exploring Poverty Reduction Game Changers with VC Canada Members

Posted by Vibrant Communities on October 27, 2016

We Are Looking for Your Ideas 

Help make this innovative approach work! Ideas and suggestions from Cities Reducing Poverty members and broader learners of the Vibrant Communities Canada network are critical to developing a solid foundation in which to identify key levers that have large impacts on poverty reduction. 

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YAM CAM: A Film Screening for Youth, By Youth

Posted by Social Planning Council of Ottawa on October 27, 2016

By Evan Read Armstrong
Interim Director, Youth Active Media

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The Force That Bounces the World

Posted by Al Etmanski on October 13, 2016

This may be the easiest assignment Vickie and I have ever had.

The good folks at the Plan Institute and Tamarack Institute have asked us to host a webinar series on the ingenuity of people with disabilities and their families.

Easy, because innovation is the core competency of people with disabilities and their families.

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CCI 2016 Reflections: Everything We Do Is Built Upon Something Else

Posted by Amy Moritz on October 12, 2016

Center for Transforming Communities (CTC) is dedicated to the holistic transformation of communities in and around Memphis, Tennessee. Using the principles of Communities of Shalom, we strive to engage, equip, and mobilize others to seek shalom in their neighborhoods and communities.

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From Beating the Odds to Changing the Game

Posted by Bill Fulton on October 12, 2016

We live in a world where addressing complex social issues most often involves working tirelessly to bring groups and communities together to work against existing social norms and “beat the odds,” which are stacked against us. We see small numbers of individuals work their way out of the systems that are built to work against them, yet we often don’t ever realize the results we are hoping for. What if we shifted the way we approach social change from beating the odds and overcoming adversity to changing the system itself, shifting the norms of our society to level the playing field?

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Applying the Lessons: Evaluating Community Impact

Posted by Glenn Landers on October 12, 2016

In Tamarack’s Evaluating Community Impact Community of Practice, Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver remind us that traditional evaluation tends to focus on evaluating the effects of discrete, programmatic interventions. This approach is not well suited to assist social innovators in addressing complex issues embedded in diverse and often fast moving contexts. The question becomes how do we complement the traditional focus of program evaluation with a broader focus on evaluating changes at the system level? And how do we, as evaluators, improve the probabilities that evaluation feedback is timely, relevant, and used?

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