November took me to Australia and New Zealand to meet with colleagues working on community change, community-led development and Collective Impact. I was a keynote speaker and workshop presenter at ChangeFest, a gathering of 500 Collective Impact practitioners in Logan, Queensland.
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We are all familiar with the old adage that “it takes a community to raise a child”, but translating that wisdom into high-impact action is anything but simple. In particular, developing innovative and effective strategies to address the needs of the growing percentage of youth who are neither in school nor at work is an area of specific focus for many communities throughout North America. That is why we are fortunate to have to have examples such as Canada’s Pathways to Education and a new research brief, Building Partnerships: In Support of Where, When, and How Learning Happens published by the Aspen Institute, to offer a richer understanding of the interconnected factors that enable young people to thrive and demonstrate that by working together collaboratively across sectors, communities can achieve high-impact results that ensure promising futures for all youth.
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This year both the Tamarack Institute and New Zealand-based Inspiring Communities celebrate milestones (15 and 10 years respectively) in our efforts to empower, grow, support, connect and learn from diverse community-led change efforts. Following on from our co-authored Reflections on Community Change paper released last month, the Inspiring Communities team shares more on the process involved in crafting community-led development principles for a New Zealand context.
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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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A decade has passed since Community Living Ontario first reached out to young people across Ontario to inform its understanding of how youth were experiencing their community. In doing so, we learned that a large number of youths, and especially youths who have an intellectual disability, often feel isolated within their schools and greater communities. They do not feel a sense of belonging and therefore, lack an abundance of meaningful relationships with their peers and community members. We acknowledged that this void puts youth at risk and limits the opportunities available to them. As the numbers rise, the constant restrictions placed on young people contribute to the overall poor health and sustainability of Ontario’s communities. So in 2008, we put out a call to action and invited people to join us! An idea had sparked and a movement was born.
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There is a growing understanding about the richness of life that has been lost with our fragmented and isolated lives, and attention is now being given to restore the historic nature of neighbourhoods. The close proximity and frequency to run into neighbours is what builds social capital - that relational fabric in a community. Sociologists have been sounding the alarm regarding our plummeting social capital; the absence of it is impoverishing our lives and communities. It is what builds civil society. This social connectedness is a primary contributor to a person’s sense of wellness and it is shaped by our local, daily life.
How do we combat the trends of ‘living above place’ versus being rooted, the trend of valuing the private over the common, and of the increasing isolation, fragmentation and speed of life? How do we live out our values – not as professionals – but as neighbours?
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