Deep River Ontario is a small community of less than 5,000 people nestled on the shores of the Ottawa River. A 2 hour drive northwest of Ottawa, it is home to the Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratory, Canada's foremost nuclear research lab.
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Considerable attention is being paid to the role and importance of community engagement in successful collective impact efforts. The recent paper entitled Putting Community in Collective Impact by Richard Harwood and published by the Collective Impact Forum, dives more deeply into this important issue and concludes that, "civic culture matters for Collective Impact. Big Time!" Civic culture refers to the unique characteristics that describe "how a community works: how trust is formed, why and how people engage with each other; and the degree of readiness for change amongst leaders." Each community has its own civic culture and paying attention to it, makes it possible to accelerate and deepen collective impact efforts.
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In a recent webinar exploring six patterns of social innovation, Tamarack Thought-Leader Al Etmanski spoke of his hope for a "resurrection of the ordinary" which he described as "recognizing ordinary people and their extraordinary power."
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In the September 2014 issue of Engage! I profiled a new article co-authored by John Kania, Fay Hanleybrown and Jennifer Splansky Juster of FSG entitled Essential Mindset Shifts for Collective Impact, which is included in Collective Insights on Collective Impact a new resource published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
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I have been designing, facilitating and hosting organizational and community events for more than twenty years. While I do believe in the adage from Open Space that "whoever comes IS the right people", at the same time, I appreciate that to build a robust and shared vision, or to generate new ideas for how to address a complex shared issue, it is essential that individuals -- or sectors -- that hold a key perspective should be present.
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When Social Innovation Generation (SiG) launched in 2006, the global conversation about social innovation was between relatively few players. In 2013, you can track considerable amplification; the most encouraging aspect of this growth in social innovation activity is that millions of people around the world want to dedicate time and energy to solving complex social and environmental challenges. The conversation has now deepened into the ways we can most effectively achieve impact and scale.
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