This week was bookended with facilitated discussions in Alaska and Collingwood on the topics of Collective Impact and community transformation. While both conversations were productive, engaging and challenging, a couple of things stuck out for me.
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Sometimes, a job pays much more than just what’s in the paycheck. Millions of people have occupations that provide rewards that don’t show up on a W-2 form – the warmth of accomplishment, the knowledge that they are helping people, and the satisfaction of giving back to and improving their community. For many of these jobs, the positives linger long after the workday ends. Let’s take a look at just four such careers:
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By now we know that collective impact is often messy work. These collaborative processes are designed to address complex problems by bringing both traditional and non-traditional partners to a collective table. Inherent in this is messiness. The complex problem is often shifting both through the efforts of the collective impact table and also through external changes that are normal to community work.
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As a facilitator in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), I was excited to join the Inner Activist’s Conscious Use of Power workshop back in November 2014. I wanted to learn new ways to help people become everyday conflict heroes, and I got plenty of inspiration from the workshop’s participants and our facilitators, Gary, Camille, and Natasha.
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The holiday season was filled with books. At Tamarack, the team was asked to read the book Remote (http://37signals.com/remote/). As a team, we work in a remote office environments, separate from each other by distance, but not by technology. As I was ordering Remote, I came upon another book that caught my eye, Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein (http://rcrcconnect.org/ed-schein-humble-inquiry/).
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Every community, large or small has inherent capacity. In December, Tamarack hosted a tele-learning session with Mary Emery from the University of South Dakota. Mary shared information about her work with the community capitals framework which has been used with small and rural communities in the United States to help local leaders uncover the capacity that exists. The community capitals framework is an interesting approach to thinking differently about our communities.
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