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Living History: A Developmental Evaluation Tool

Developmental Evaluation (DE) can provide vital information to inform the evolution of a program or service by connecting what is done to what is happening with what our program is designed to do and our resources using data, design, and sensemaking. That’s a tall order, but then DE is a particularly powerful approach to supporting innovation and program development. But how do we capture and document all the things that actually go into the life of a program? That’s where the Living History method comes in.

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Guelph's Community Plan Wins IAP2 Canada's Project of the Year

The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Canada Core Values Awards help to raise the bar in the field of public engagement through friendly competition to encourage new approaches and innovative uses of existing ones.

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What's Love Got To Do With It?

Tina Turner is well known for delivering the powerful song What’s Love Got to Do With it? That song was rolling around in my head after a recent webinar call with John Kania about the launch of the Collective Change Lab.

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How Safe Is It to Participate?

Something we don’t discuss much is the importance of the ‘do no harm’ principle when engaging the community (especially relevant now with the COVID-19 pandemic). Anthony Boxshall and I identified ‘people feeling unsafe’ as one of the key challenges to co-design. We rely on bringing together a diverse community of interest, but what do you do if alternative views are not welcome, or indeed people fear the consequences of participating and expressing unpopular or inconvenient points of view? This can be even more challenging than just ensuring physical distancing at this time

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Frozen: Escaping the Paralysis of COVID

It’s not yet Winter in Canada, and yet many of us feel frozen. We are six months into the COVID pandemic and things have shifted. We have moved into remote work environments, shifted how we do business, are spending a great deal of time in zoom meetings. But now, as the pandemic moves into its second wave, and the future looks blurry, if not completely opaque - we are frozen.

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Equity & Inclusion: Stepping Into the Role of the Learner

As an outcome of the global pandemic declared in March 2020, we are bearing witness to seam-tearing changes to our socio-economic, health and political systems. With seam-tearing however, comes the opportunity to re-design, re-create and re-focus how we want these systems to function, and how we as changemakers can participate in this process.

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