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Let's Play Pretend

Pretend you run a business that sells widgets that are critical to a buyer. The price of  each widget is $1000.00 and the buyer needs 100 of them. That’s $100,000. Now  let’s pretend the cost of each widget (materials, labour, reasonable marketing costs,  equipment maintenance, transportation costs, etc.) makes up 80% of the market  price, leaving you with a gross profit of $20.00 per widget or in the case of this order  of 100, a gross profit of $20,000 or 20% of the total price.

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Bridging the Knowledge and Practice of Collective Impact

The July issue of The Philanthropist profiles the theory and practice of collective impact.  The issue contains articles from a variety of perspectives and provides a great overview from Canadian and international thought leaders on how collective impact is evolving. 

I had the opportunity to contribute two articles to this publication.  One of them looked at the promise and peril of collective impact and the second was an interview that I conducted with John Kania and Fay Hanleybrown of FSG Social Impact Consultants just before a Backbone Workshop in Vancouver earlier this spring. 

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Expanding Our Thinking About Poverty

For the majority of us, the experience of poverty is unimaginable. We intuit it must be difficult; we can read the reports of its impact and have some understanding, but in the end, we do not know poverty to the degree and depth those who live with it do.

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Evaluating Community Impact Halifax: Post-Event Resources

The Tamarack Institute is once again hosting the dynamic, three-day Evaluating Community Impact workshop in Halifax, Nova Scotia from June 2-4 and again in Winnipeg, MB this November 18-20.

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Becoming a Learning Organization

One key to organizational success has to do with the capacity of people to learn - learn from mistakes as well as learn from successes.The call for organizational learning has escalated over the years ever since our culture and economy transitioned from a "we make things" focus to what is called a "knowledge society."

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The Scoop on Social Impact Bond

I just came from an excellent meeting with local colleagues who lead some of the best known non profits in town.  We were talking about a number of things, but one topic was the emergence of social impact bonds (SIBs) as another method of financing social/health programs. Social Impact Bonds are very new and the first one occurred in Great Britain in 2010. Today, there are 14 social impact bond projects in the United Kingdom, one in Australia, and a couple or so in the United States (as of 2013).  There are none yet in Canada.

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