The Mental Health and Well-being: Considerations for the Built Environment report offers evidence-based planning principles for health professionals and local governments and it explains how we can build neighbourhood spaces that promote mental health and well-being while mitigating unintentional negative impacts.
Community Innovation is all about change - change at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Whether we’re trying to get a new policy adopted, encourage businesses to contribute more to local community, or create more spaces for community members to meet and play, we are in the business of trying to create positive change in our community. An important part of that process is that people also need to change as well. Politicians need to change policies, business leaders need to decide how best to work with community, and community members need to come out and use the spaces we create.
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Last week I engaged in an online conversation with colleagues about failure. There was an online post that asked the question about whether the current culture has a preference for failure over achieving outcomes. Shortly after, I was following a complexity workshop where the panel discussed the importance of failure as a mechanism for learning. There were several tweets about failing forward.
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As the challenges facing communities become more complex and the importance of effective collaboration across sectors and perspectives increases, the need to find simple and effective ways for people to think and learn together has never been greater.
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The part of the community change process that gets dropped most often is all that comes after the work is done. We host an event and then don’t do the debrief. We coordinate a year-long community of practice but don’t capture the way the meetings have impacted people. We convene neighbours for a community gathering and work day but don’t share how we did it and why people came.
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There are times when I am flipping through Twitter and I find a nugget of information that leads me to pause, reflect and then consider what is being shared and how this impacts my thinking about community change. With one tweet, Systems Innovation (@Sys_innovation) both asked and answered the question “what does it take to liberate the capacity of an organization?”
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