Bridging the Community Engagement and Collective Impact divide created an unlikely partnership between Norman Walzer, Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University and myself. We met at a 2011 Community Development Society conference which began a collaborative effort that has moved in many directions.
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The video System Thinking and Evaluation, by Kylie Hutchinson, Chris Lovato and Bev Parsons is an excellent introduction to evaluating systems change. It describes how an evaluation of a hypothetical initiative to improve nutrition in a community must both ‘zoom in’ to explore the programmatic effects of the effort (e.g., improved health of program participants) and ‘zoom out’ to assess influence and change on factors in the larger systems that affect their individual health (e.g., urban design which affects levels of physical activity, the quality of industrial food production, the culture of portion sizes). The video also reminds us that deep and durable progress on complex issues depends on our ability to reshape the deeper systems that contribute to those problems in the first place.
A common thread throughout my career has been a focus on building support and commitment for change on a variety of social issues. I have learned that effective engagement rarely happens by accident. More often, it results from deliberate strategies that include: making a clear and compelling case for change; continually communicating core messages through different channels to reach several audiences; and, offering simple ways for people to take action to show their support. Occasionally, something magical would happen and our engagement campaigns sparked a groundswell of support that ignited passion and gave our campaign a life of its own. Somehow we had done more than implement an effective engagement strategy, we had sparked a movement.
Many of us working in community change efforts are continually searching for new resources and tools to help facilitate effective community engagement and community change processes. Over the last several weeks, some of my favourite twitter leads have shared their lists of sites that they regularly visit for tools and resources.
The City of Kitchener recently received an award for planning excellence from the Canadian Institute of Planners. Kitchener’s Love My Hood strategy was awarded the prize for New and Emerging Planning initiatives for its innovative and unique methodology - providing small groups of residents the tools and permission to work with their community to formulate an action plan and make decisions.
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How has the Vibrant Communities – Cities Reducing Poverty (VC – CRP) network contributed to poverty reduction in Canada? In seeking to answer this central question, the State of Cities Reducing Poverty paper highlights the network’s numerous and varied impacts.
As the paper documents, the VC – CRP multi-sector model has helped facilitate community leadership on poverty, including among mayors and municipal councils, the business community, and people with lived and living experience of poverty. The network has also led and contributed to significant policy and systems changes in domains such as living wage, transportation, housing, and financial empowerment.
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