My colleague Sylvia Cheuy recently gave a great overview of the Community Innovation landscape in her paper The Community Innovation Imperative. Sylvia highlighted the incredible momentum driving us towards innovation and the adoption of tools and methods to help us get there. In this context ‑ a context where innovation is increasingly the norm demanded by and of funders, government, and communities, it is particularly important to keep the following in mind:
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.
In September the Community Sector Council NL challenged its partners to present '30-Second Pop-Ups!' throughout its networking event. Simps! I thought then 10 minutes later I realized that this task would require a great deal of thought. I hardly ever get asked the impact question. Most funders don’t even ask for impact/outcomes reporting! The majority are still at outputs reporting. How many session were held? How many clients served? The demographic of those served? And maybe just maybe – What did the individuals think about it all?
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During my time at the Tamarack Community Change Institute, I noticed that many peoples’ focus was squarely on bringing techniques, tools and strategies back to their communities that could strengthen not only the work that they were doing, but act as a framework for future opportunities amongst partners, participants and others that have not yet come to the table.
Although, this insistence on an applicable, packaged toolkit may steer us in a direction that helps to bring ideas and actions forward quickly, it also has a downside. There is a way of approaching change, a concentration on philosophy, on values, on process that needs to be melded into the activities that we do in order to see sustainable impact.
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Hardly a day goes by without my adding a number of smileys to my emails or texts. In fact, here’s one now :) . Why? Well they are so expressive; so much better than LOL or BTW or FYI. So with one small icon, I seem to be able to convey information and feeling.
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Such a simple question, four small words that get at the core of our community change work.
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