Last week, Tamarack’s Liz Weaver and Paul Born hosted a webinar on Community Change: The Art of Disruption as part of a Community Change Webinar Series. In this conversation Liz and Paul discussed some emerging ideas and strategies that are disrupting how some communities today are responding to the complex issues that they face.
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Innovation.
We all love it, want it, speak it, eat it, and it feels good when something we do is affirmed as innovative by others, especially those we admire. Sometimes, though, and perhaps often, when we don’t hear such affirmations, we create our own. We cite our own work as innovative.
However the recognition of our innovative work manifests, the cynic inside of me does wonder from time to time if our desire to be innovative gives birth to claiming innovation in much of the work we do. That cynic inside of me has wondered the same about me on occasion; just mention that to suggest that my inner cynic has no qualms about digging in on me, what I think, and what I do (and don’t)
What it is?
Seven years ago I mentioned at the dinner table one night that I was interested in drawing meetings. It was a casual remark that my husband took it seriously. He is a committed creative who was helping me navigate a new career in community development after 15 years as FTA (full time artist). After a quick search he found David Sibbet’s Visual Meetings book and surprised me with a gift. This was the beginning of my love affair with sketching meetings.
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Last April, my colleagues hosted Champions for Change in Halifax, Nova Scotia – a three-day Collective Impact gathering – and brought back with them a delicious recipe that I can say, with confidence, is now a staple for many of us. These Energy Bites were provided as a special treat during the event that helped to fuel participants' energy through their intense learning experience. Since then, my dear friend and colleague Sylvia Cheuy has brought these yummy treats to team meetings for the Tamarack Team to enjoy and we do exactly that! Not one Energy Bite remains by the end of the day.
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Severn Cullis-Suzuki became a catalyst for change and a thought leader at the age of nine when she founded the Environmental Children's Organization which focused on advancing the learning and understanding of children about environmental issues.
That was the beginning of her life's work as an environmental activist and her devotion to ensuring our children are able to live and thrive in a safe, healthy environment. Her passion and interests have included deepening our understanding about humanity's sacred relationship with water, working with the Million Mothers movement to stop the use of nuclear power in Japan, and being an unrelentin
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Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep is a new paper by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore that dives deeply into an a key question that is top-of-mind for many community change agents and funders: How do we scale up the impact of a promising social innovation? The impetus for this report, jointly commissioned by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and the Tamarack Institute, grew from the realization that highly successful local projects too often fail to demonstrate meaningful impact on the broader social and/or environmental systems they are operating within.
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