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Neighbourhood Strategy Built by Neighbours, for Neighbours

Story shared by the Neighbourhood Strategy team in Kitchener, ON

"From the very beginning, we wanted the Strategy to be driven and created by residents," shares Mike Farwell, the resident co-chair of the Neighbourhood Strategy project team. "Based on the variety of ways people were involved and the number of hours people contributed during our community engagement, I am confident the final recommendations of the Neighbourhood Strategy will be firmly rooted in the community." 

The numbers are in and the project team is very excited about the deep and meaningful ways people provided their input: 

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Dancing in the Rain

A group of neighbours gathered in the middle of King Street in Peterborough, ON on Saturday September 17, 2016. Our heads kept turning left and right, making sure no cars were coming. We were holding back our instinct to get off the road and make sure that kids weren’t darting into oncoming traffic. It took us some time to feel safe on the road knowing that barricades were set up to stop cars from passing through. In this moment, we were reclaiming the street as a public space where we could re-imagine it as a car-free space where children and adults can play, be physically active, and experience our neighbourhood in a new way.

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Chicken Soup Friends

This blog was originally published here and is reposted with the author's permission.

It was a Friday night. I was at home, lying on the couch watching an episode of who knows what through barely open eyes. I was exhausted. Around 3am that morning, I’d gotten in a cab and taken myself to the Emergency Room. I was, the ER doctor told me, having a gallbladder attack (nice ring to it, eh?). Everything turned out just fine but I had to cancel some meetings on Friday and get some rest.

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Traveling and the Art of Disruption

It's that back to school time and, even if you're not going back yourself or have children or significant others that are, there is a palpable feeling of energy that comes with the start of school that's hard to miss.

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Six tips for conducting meaningful evaluation in rural and remote communities

In planning for the Evaluating Community Impact Community of Practice (Eval CoP), members participated in two summer working group sessions to highlight challenges they faced in their poverty-related evaluation work, and brainstormed topics, content and speakers that could address them. One area that members were greatly interested in learning more about was ‘How to conduct meaningful evaluation in rural settings’.

In response, we invited Dr. Jeannette Waegemakers Schiff, associate professor in the Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary, to join our September call to share her experiences working on two studies: 'Housing First in Rural Canada' and 'Rural Alberta Homelessness', as well as to share her top tips to more effectively conduct evaluations in rural and remote communities.

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Disruptive Innovation: a Type of Upside Down Thinking

Upside Down Thinking has a relationship with Disruptive Thinking and Disruptive Innovation, but they are not merely different descriptors of the same thing. You can read a previous posting I did a while back on Upside Down Thinking; this posting is about Disruptive Innovation.

Disruptive Innovation has its roots in the private sector. The concept was first articulated by Harvard professor, Clayton Christensen in 1995 who defined it as “an innovation [that] transforms an existing market or sector by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability where complication and high cost are the status quo. Initially, a disruptive innovation is formed in a niche market that may appear unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents, but eventually the new product or idea completely redefines the industry.” [1]

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