The Latest

From Beating the Odds to Changing the Game

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

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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Change for the Audacious: A Doer’s Guide

Responding to the 21st century’s enormous global challenges such as: climate change; food sustainability; health; education; environmental degradation; and, wealth creation while also realizing its unsurpassed opportunities requires new ways of acting and organizing.

My new book, Change for the Audacious: A Doer’s Guide, is for people working on these types of issues but anchored in the perspective that we can create a future that is not just “sustainable”, but also flourishing. Our collective challenge is to see this work as not just one of incremental change, but also as one of transformation – radical change in the way we perceive our world, create relationships and organize our societies.

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Evaluating Poverty Reduction: Hearing the Music Not the Noise

From a poverty reduction perspective, we are inundated by the sound of many voices: our clients, our funders and donors, our colleagues, governments at all levels, business leaders and their labour counterparts, and on it goes. That’s what this article is about: lessening the noise that envelopes us and increasing our capacity to make music together when it comes to identifying, acting on, and evaluating poverty reduction efforts.

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Matching Evaluation Strategies to Community Rhythms

Communities change when people work together, but working together means pulling people out of their comfort zones.  That is never easy.  Good community animators know that their approach has to be carefully calibrated to their context.  Strategies that are helpful in one circumstance may not work in another. That is one of the main insights I took away from the Harwood Institute Public Innovators Lab I attended last year.  

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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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