The Latest

Movement Building and Collective Impact

In an article written for Fast Company, Kaihan Krisppendorff, identifies four steps to building an effective social movement, which I have adapted below:

1. A community forms around a common goal or aspiration.
2. The community mobilizes its resources to act on the goal/aspiration.
3. The community crafts solutions and acts to deliver them.
4. The movement is accepted by (or actually replaces) the establishment or established regime of laws and policies (Source).

If you are involved in a collective impact initiative, these steps should resonate with you, in particular with the five conditions of collective impact. Krisppendorff doesn’t address shared measurement in his post about social movements, but successful movements are always about moving the needle and bringing about systems change to do so.

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Adaptive Learning - A Pivotal Competence for Collective Impact

This session will introduce an integrated set of adaptive learning competencies that are essential for generating effective, collective, community impact. These competencies are: systems thinking, conversational capacity, and 'yes to the mess'.

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impak Finance: Let’s create tomorrow’s bank

Our vision is to create the first bank in Canada that will grant 100% of its loans to profitable businesses that make a positive social and environmental impact. The opportunities are huge in this new market. “According to the Global Impact Investing Network, the market for impact capital, currently sized at $60 billion, could grow over the next decade to $2 trillion, or 1% of global invested assets.” - Brian Trelstad, Harvard Business Review

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Thinking about the Charity Model and Systems Change Debate

There has been a movement afoot for the past 15 to 20 years that evolved out of a growing dissatisfaction with the charitable sector or more to the point, the Charity Model. Critics of the sector are nothing new, of course. And these criticisms are often based on unproven perceptions (e.g. there are too many charities), biases people have toward “the needy” (e.g. I made it through hell, so can you), and some that still boggle my mind like, non-profits need to be more business-like.

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1,000 Families Initiative

Recently, we were thrilled to host the second session of our three-part webinar series on Neighbourhood-Based Strategies that Reduce Poverty. In this session we featured The 1,000 Families Initiative with Anne Smith and Anna Bubel. In this webinar, Anne and Anna shared a terrific overview of how United Way of the Alberta Capital Region is working towards a goal that will create pathways out of poverty for 1,000 families.

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New book advocates for Basic Income Guarantee

Leaders and Legacies publisher, Roderick Benns, spent nearly two years interviewing prominent leaders and academics across Canada on the merits of a basic income guarantee, hoping to help put the policy on the radar of politicians across the country.

A basic income (also known as a guaranteed annual income) would ensure no one ever drops below the poverty line.

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