Policy Horizons has recently published a very interesting article about policy levers. How can we make our community change efforts more impactful? One way to do this is to be aware of the policy levers and use them to your advantage to create scaled community change.
Read More
In Public Service Clouds: The Way of the Future, Jean-Philippe Veilleux imagines a future where the ideas proposed in a the recent paper Fed Cloud: the Future of Federal Work developed by GovLab –a think tank in the U.S.-based Deloitte Federal practice that focuses on innovation in the public sector -- has become a reality.
Read More
A number of years ago I was the director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction (HRPR), a comprehensive, communityinitiative focused on reducing poverty for the citizens of Hamilton, Ontario. The HRPR had the aspiration of making Hamilton the best place to raise a child. The change framework encouraged investments across five critical points in the lives of children, youth and their families: investing in the early years (0-6), helping kids to be successful in school, ensuring that kids complete high school successfully, providing bridges to post-secondary education and employment and working to build assets like savings accounts and home ownership.
Read More
I have long been a student of community. I am curious about people's varied definitions of it and how the sense of belonging to something beyond oneself, while at times a burden, can serve as a source of inspiration for generosity and shared action. Often, people's definition of community includes a specific physical place where one lives or works, a place whose well-being is linked to that of your own. Innovation - finding new ways of thinking about and addressing long-standing issues - is another concept I have studied for some time. Throughout much of my adult life, my work has focused on the intersection between community and innovation: nurturing new approaches to address the social challenges that exist within communities by working together. This is community innovation.
Read More
The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has recently published this very useful Program Evaluation Guide.
Read More
We all know that our city, region and community is different from those neighbouring us and different again from those in other provinces. The mix and interactions of the people, organizations, companies, local government, history and context make each city, region, place unique. This uniqueness presents both challenges and opportunities to collaborating around complex issues in a place-based context.
Read More