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How to Get Things Done in Your Community

Three tips if you aim to create impact in your community: Collaborate in networks! Build bridges with people who are different from you! And first and foremost, Just do it!

Paul Born got a chance to lead a workshop in Berlin, on community conservations, with Engagierte Stadt team members, in May.

Engagierte Stadt is a program, supporting 50 cities in Germany that start community conversations in their own cities to foster citizen engagement and strong cooperation between the economy, administration and the civil society. The Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and six foundations, provides financial advising as well as accompanying support.

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Building your Practice of Authentic Community Engagement

Community change initiatives are often set against complex and systematic problems – problems that cannot be solved in isolation and without authentic support from community stakeholders.

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P.E.I. Discussing Poverty and Poverty Solutions with Islanders

On November 14, 2017, the Government of Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) committed to a Poverty Reduction Plan as part of the province's Throne Speech, and more recently, appointed a 12-person multi-sectoral advisory committee to bring forward short and longer-term solutions to poverty in a Poverty Reduction Plan. The Plan is expected to be ready for fall 2018 and will include actions in the areas of housing, food security, education and employment, says Committee Chair, Roxanne Carter-Thompson.

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8 Steps to Set the Stage for Effective Youth Engagement Work

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.

 

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A Framework to Learn to ‘Play Society’ Together

Can we learn to play society together the same way we learn to play hockey? To answer this question, let’s look at how young children learn to play hockey.

First, before young children can even begin to play hockey, they must learn some basic skills: to skate forward, backward, in a straight line or turning while handling the puck with a stick. Although it is hard at the beginning, they eventually learn the basic skills.

Gradually they also start assimilating knowledge and mastering other skills associated with the dynamic of hockey.

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Why don’t we benefit from Societal Innovations as Readily as Technological Innovations?

Since 1785 there have been 5 waves with respect to our technological knowledge. Each wave doubled the knowledge we had previously accumulated. We are now in the 6th wave. This technological knowledge produced technological innovations such as steam engines, light bulbs, cars, planes, computers, smartphones, etc. We can safely conclude that we have been very successful in using our technological knowledge to create technological innovations. 

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