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Dancing with Unusual Partners (Part 2) – The Campus

This is the second blog in a series I am writing about collaboration, collective impact and unusual partners. When communities are trying to work and shift more complex issues like poverty, homelessness, the environment, etc, they require the shared wisdom of a wide-variety of diverse partners. This means opening up the collective impact experience to both usual and unusual partners. The usual partners are those organizations and individuals that we feel most comfortable working with. If you work in the community sector, it is likely that your organization feels most comfortable with other community sector organizations, government partners and funders. But there are a wide variety of other partners and resources in many communities that can be pivotal to successful collaborative and collective impact efforts.

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How Conversations with Children Can Change the World

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Dancing with Unusual Partners (Part 1) – Volunteer Centres

One of the challenges of working collaboratively in community is that most of us move quickly to the work and spend less time scanning the community to both identify and connect with unusual partners. Recently, I had the opportunity to present to the Corporate Council of Volunteer Canada. This second presentation occurred just a couple of days after a meeting with leaders of volunteer centres in Canada. 

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Field Guide to Human-Centered Design

Human­centered design is the application of design thinking to some of our most complex social problems, starting with the people you're trying to impact and ending with creative new solutions that meet their needs. While it has elements of a typical design process, including brainstorming, prototyping, and testing, human­centered design begins with empathy.

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Netiquette 2.0: Moving Forward at the Speed of Trust

When Stephen Covey published Speed of Trust in 2006, it marked a recognition that relationships are important to mainstream organizations and that trust­building is key to mobilizing their value. As the social sector increasingly builds networks of organizations to learn; engage with diverse others; and, to speed up knowledge development, we see how these loose relationships have value. But what do we really know about building trust in networks ­ structures that are less "hard­wired" than formal organizations ­ and how to work well in relationships without the defining bounds of role and structure?

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What If...

An emphasis on using "evidence based practices" is stifling experimentation. This was the statement I posed in a poll within my last blog, back in February 2015, just before I got sucked into a vortex of Federal grant writing from which I am only now extracting myself. The results are in and a full 77% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the statement is true.

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