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How I Got to the Summit: A Personal Reflection

My mother was a professor so you’d think her unequivocal advice would have been to go to university after high school, but instead she directed me toward Canada World Youth, a federally funded international exchange program designed to get young Canadians thinking about cross-cultural learning, community service, and issues of local and global concern. This was long before gap years became popular and I was the only one from my graduating class doing such a thing.

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No Chicken Soup for the Soul: A Personal Transformation

In the 1990s I was terribly ideological and saw the world in containers of political, economic, and social good and bad and fought to eradicate the bad and establish the good. I had three young children at the time and now like to console myself about that period by thinking I was sleep-deprived. Or maybe I was just oxygen-deprived.

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Rethink Who You Call an Expert

Community Animator's Note: This blog was originally published on FSG's Strategic Evaluation Blog by Katelyn Mack on October 15, 2014. It has been re-posted with permission.

Have you ever been called an expert? If you are reading this post, chances are you have. It may have been by a colleague, a boss, a client, a professor…or maybe, by a parent. I’m not sure about you, but I sometimes get an uneasy feeling when I am referred to as an “expert.” People usually mean it as a compliment. In essence, there is some innate knowledge I have from my training or experience that they don’t have.

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Heart Work for #socialgood

Children are wonderful teachers.

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Sixteen Lessons Learned About Working in Collaboration

From Mary Pickering and Robert Plitt - 2013

• Collaborations SHOULDN’T be launched unless there is something that can be done together that can’t be achieved alone. There needs to be a clear assessment up front that working jointly – which requires time and effort from all participants – is going to improve outcomes.

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On Creativity and Collective Impact

“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking” 

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