“Do you trust me?” Jack asks Rose in the movie, Titanic. Jack is holding Rose by the waist so she can lean over the bow of a massive ship to experience what it might feel like to fly. Had Rose replied “No,” or had Jack been untrustworthy, the movie would’ve ended there. Luckily, there was trust, and so we all experienced something beautiful.
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As a Learning Institute, Tamarack is committed to making the work of community change easier and more effective. We do this by teaching, writing and both hosting face-to-face and online learning opportunities to provide leaders with the knowledge and inspiration they need for success in their community change efforts. In 2016 we were proud to welcome more than 22,000 learners to engage with us.
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Collective Impact is a framework that is being used by many communities to tackle complex problems. At the heart of the framework is the notion of bringing together diverse voices (business, government, community organizations and citizens) to deeply understand the problem and begin to develop strategies to address the systems context and policy barriers. The Collective Impact framework consists of five core conditions: the development of a common agenda that is shared amongst all stakeholders; shared measurement strategies to understand if progress is being made; engaging in mutually reinforcing activities; continuous communications and the support of backbone infrastructure.
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Ingenuity, the ability to be clever, original and inventive, is a skill needed in every community. People living across the Lower North Shore of Quebec have incredible ingenuity and resourcefulness. One of the biggest challenges is that this region is a mix of 15 small, often isolated communities. Some of the communities are only connected by ferry or airplane while others have roads. Cell phone service is sporadic at best and if the weather comes in, forget it. The communities, in the past have spent more time competing with each other, rather than leveraging their ingenuity to tackle their tough problems.
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Community change work is often compared to being engaged in a Tango, a complex dance where the partners exchange leadership, followership, passion, desire, intensity and drama. Now, I am not much of a dancer, but I can appreciate this metaphor.
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There is a big tension in community change efforts. There is the tyranny of the immediate - hunting for quick wins, trying to move the agenda forward and being aware of the multiple demands on participant time. With such a focus on the immediate, we sacrifice the building of relationships and reflection to meet the demands of the short term and time factors.
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