Mark Holmgren's Blog
I have always been tall and husky. I was my current height, 6 foot 7 inches, in my freshman year of high school, and I was a basketball player and I was pretty good at that game. Back then a guy my size was automatically assigned the center position. And that's where my coach put … Continue reading My Basketball Coach
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 or issues being addressed, such as poverty, climate change, family violence, and so many more. Collective Impact is not an approach aimed at creating program … Continue reading About Collective Impact: Types of Problems, Degrees of Change, Learning Loops, and Methods of Thinking
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 … Continue reading Thinking about the Charity Model and Systems Change Debate
This is the slide deck from the presentation I did at the Poverty Reduction Summit in Ottawa in May 2015. I give custom workshops on Upside Down Thinking. Contact me for more info.
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 … Continue reading Questions We Must Answer to End Poverty
So many great minds in our sector are talking about the need to change, the urgency to transform services and operations in ways that not only fit our chaotic environment but influence its future as well. We tend to be rather good at seeing what should change and why, but life becomes much more difficult … Continue reading Upside Down Thinking
