The challenges we face with respect to building more affordable housing are complex to state the obvious, and resolving them calls for an integrated set of strategies that go far… Read more Affordable Housing is an Economic Problem →
<repost> The word “innovation” conjures up positive imagery. We see it as something we want to be known for. It’s creative, desirable, inspiring, and we sense that if we can… Read more The Way of Innovation →
Cross posted – also available at http://www.edmontoncdc.org Please consider following that blog if you want to keep up to date on my work at the Edmonton Community Development Company. ——– Strong Towns is an American movement that a colleague turned me on to the other day, and it is not only a provocative movement, it offers an array of new thinking about the rules that cities and towns have when it comes to development, whether housing and business development or the inclusion of city services in an area like a… Read more Automobile-Centric Development and Parking Requirements →
Collective Impact is multi-sector approach to large-scale collaboration that is authentically inclusive of citizens in its development and implementation – in particular citizens who have life-experience with the big problems… Read more About Collective Impact: Types of Problems, Degrees of Change, Learning Loops, and Methods of Thinking →
Posting #2 in a series on Resource Development See # 1, Five Elements of Strategic Resource Development First, a definition from the Oxford Dictionary: Crowdfunding (a form of crowdsourcing) is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, today often performed via Internet-mediated registries, but the concept can also be executed through mail-order subscriptions, benefit events, and other methods. i Wikipedia adds this: Crowdfunding is a form of alternative finance, which has emerged outside of the traditional financial system. ii… Read more About Crowd Funding →
Upside Down Thinking has a relationship with Disruptive Thinking and Disruptive Innovation, but they are not merely different descriptors of the same thing. You can read a previous posting I… Read more Disruptive Innovation: a Type of Upside Down Thinking →
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,… Read more Innovation. What is it? →
What a summit it was! 260 people from Canada, the United States, Denmark, Guatemala, Singpore, New Zealand and beyond, working and learning together, inspired by the likes of Al Etmanski (my favorite speaker at the event), Fay Hanleybrown, Stacey Stewart, and Karen Pittman – all of whom gave keynote addresses. Dozens of workshops were led by Paul Born, Mark Cabaj, Liz Weaver, and other Tamarack learning leaders. I was honoured to be one of two artists in residence, doing music and spoken word throughout the week and to be able to give two… Read more Tamarack 2015 Community Impact Summit. Phew! →
Update Introduction: This is the first time in my long career in the non profit sector that I actually believe a Task Force will make a big difference. I am… Read more Why Not Free Public Transit? (Updated) →
On January 22, I was part of a Tamarack Institute webinar with my friend and colleague, Elayne Greeley. Our topic was Working in Complexity, a Case for Upside Down Thinking. I have been doing a lot of thinking about thinking and in particular about how to create cognitive tools we can use to help community practitioners not only work with complex issues and challenges but also undertake efforts of transformational change. I have written before on my blog about Upside Down Thinking and given a number of workshops on the topic… Read more Recording of Upside Down Thinking Webinar →
Over my career in the human services sector, I have been a part of many collaborative and cross-sector efforts that were formed to address a critical social problem. In most cases, if not all, the social problem being addressed was interwoven with economics. So, the problem was more accurately a socio-economic problem. As well every problem we worked on was understood and addressed through myriad lenses. Government, business, non-profit lenses were abundant and then of course each individual from those sectors brought to the table their own mindsets, beliefs and… Read more Questions We Must Answer to End Poverty →
