Systems and Programs: Moving from Enemies to Friends
Over the past few years, there has been an increasing emphasis on the need for “systems change” to achieve large-scale social impact.
Read More
Over the past few years, there has been an increasing emphasis on the need for “systems change” to achieve large-scale social impact.
Read More
My teen daughter is going through the anxieties and insecurities we all remember from those coming-of-age years. Adding to the stresses of her life are the much-noted amplifying effects of modern living: social media, 24-hour news cycles and the dehumanizing pace of an unbalanced world.
Read More
Inspiring Communities is a New Zealand capacity building leader and partner of the Tamarack Institute. For the past 10 years, the leaders of Inspiring Communities have been working across the country to build local leadership and inspire community-led development and have documented their work in a series of resources called Learning by Doing. Inspiring Communities has the vision that all communities will flourish.
Read More
The world of youth engagement is entangled with false assumptions, presumptuous understandings, and little follow through. However, if it is done right professionals are given the rare opportunity to work meaningfully with youth to achieve a beautifully co-created outcome that can radically change a community.
Recently I had the privilege of hearing an individual who has experienced great success in their engagement work. But they were quick to point out the negative perceptions that can often surround engagement work due to good intentions gone bad, and lack of follow through.
Read More
My colleague Sylvia Cheuy recently gave a great overview of the Community Innovation landscape in her paper The Community Innovation Imperative. Sylvia highlighted the incredible momentum driving us towards innovation and the adoption of tools and methods to help us get there. In this context ‑ a context where innovation is increasingly the norm demanded by and of funders, government, and communities, it is particularly important to keep the following in mind:
The international Association of Community Development (IACD) is a global network of community change leaders who are seeking to build the capacity of communities to realize greater social and economic equality, environmental protection and political democracy. Over its 15-year history, Tamarack has both contributed to and been influenced by the ideas of IACD thought leaders including Peter Drucker, John McKnight, and Cormac Russell.
In the most recent edition of the IACD Practice Insights, Tamarack contributed two articles which illustrate both the challenge and the opportunity of deep community engagement in co-creating change. Lisa Attygalle’s article on The Context Experts describes the value of citizens in sharing their expertise about navigating community systems. Context experts are people with lived experience of the situation, including children and youth. They are the people who experientially know about the issue and can share their expertise in how the issue impacts them and their livelihoods. Authentic community engagement purposefully including context experts in co-creating solutions.
