Remember the story of the Little Red Hen who tried to engage her friends to help her to plant wheat and then harvest it, make flour and eventually bake bread? She could not engage them until, of course, the bread had come out of the oven and was ready to eat.
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I admit it: I am a sports fan. I love the intrigue of competition. There is always at least one protagonist, a villain and many subcharacters. Of all the sports out there, cycling is my favourite, especially the 21 stage races or Grand Tours.
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Collective Impact has increased our focus on moving the needle on population level changes. John Kania, Managing Partner of FSG Social Impact Consultants and author of many articles on collective impact has called this 'positive and consistent progress at scale'. But are population level indicators the only ones that we need to pay attention to when moving toward collective impact?
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Creating a healthy, humane world will require more than new organizational designs, writes Hildy Gottlieb in a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Building Movements, Not Organizations. It will take rethinking the nature of organizations entirely.
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We Can Design Belonging, a report recently released by the Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation, researched the experience of belonging for residents of Kitchener, Waterloo and Woolwich and outlines an approach to improving people's sense of belonging in their region.
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Building individual capacity is a key community development principle, yet how many of us often overlook this step in our efforts? We are so skillful in engaging people in developing a common vision and identifying priorities. We often then move right into a project management approach by defining the best activities to implement, who should do them, what resources we need, timelines, and the type of evaluation methodology required. We also often assume that those involved in change efforts are there because they have passion and they are capable and competent to deliver on whatever they signed up for.
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