Category Archives: #yeg

Invitation to help me write a major paper on Collaborative Leadership

#yeg, Collaboration, Leadership

I am writing to ask you to do a bit of collaboration with me regarding a paper I am writing on Collaborative Leadership and the Future of Cities.

I thought since the paper is about collaboration and leadership I would reach out to you and others to request that you invest 15 or 20 minutes in this survey.

I know. Another survey.

If you can’t do it, no worries.

If there are others you know that may wish to participate, please share this post or email them the survey link.

But before you excuse yourself from participating, be advised it’s a pretty cool survey, replete with big pictures, and quotes from smart people for you to ponder. You don’t want to miss out, do you? 😊

And if you do participate and give me your name and email, you will get a copy emailed to you (around the end of September) and you can be included in the paper’s credits (if you grant me permission), and of course you will have my gratitude.

If you wish to remain anonymous, that’s fine, too.

I am hoping for responses to be in by August 18th. Oh by the way, there are no required fields, so if you want to click the link below and page through the survey to see what’s up, please do.

Here’s the link:
https://fs16.formsite.com/tamarack/Collaborative-Leadership/index.html

Mandatory Winter Tires and Poverty

#yeg, economic choice, Income, Income Inequality, Labour Force, Poverty

Yes, perhaps an odd title for a posting, but bear with me. I was on my way back home from meeting downtown with Alberta Government colleagues who also work in the poverty reduction arena and I heard this call-in show about winter tires and more to the point about whether or not winter tires should be mandatory.

They are in Quebec now but even in some provinces without a mandatory requirement more than 80% of drivers have winter tires. Not so in Alberta where the percentage is just over 50%. Not sure about other low percentage provinces, but here is what went through my mind.

The folks that called in didn’t all agree, but I got the impression that most were for making it a legal requirement to have winter tires and my impression of the radio interviewer and guest was that they were biased toward mandatory winter tires. I get that. It makes sense, right, that all of us would require one another to do this. It’s safer. Winter tires stop a car better than all season tires.

I have never owned winter tires but could afford them if I chose to buy them or was required to, though being forced to dole out $1,000 for a new set of tires and then pay more for rims and the ongoing costs of changing and balancing each season – well, the “Albertan” in me just doesn’t want to be forced to do that.

But all of the above is not really why I wrote this post.

While I was listening to the radio show, it hit me that this radio engagement of citizens around winter tires was one more example of how a certain segment of the population is marginalized, not really considered, and in a sense relegated once again to second-class citizen. Continue reading Mandatory Winter Tires and Poverty →

Movement Building and Collective Impact

#yeg, Collaboration, Collective Impact, Collective Wisdom, Government, Leadership, Movement, Private Sector, Social Media

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.

Consider the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. in 1964; the Civil Rights Act rendered discrimination/segregation illegal, especially with respect to jobs and workplace advancement, and termination because of colour. States that did nothing to address discrimination lost federal funding. There were other impacts but you get the gist. Big change for sure.

As is often the case, the big changes that get made fuel additional change. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act, addressed the legal obstacles (e.g. literacy tests and poll taxes) that state and local governments had set up to stop African Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

Passed in August of 1965, by the end of the year 250,000 African Americans had registered to vote. The impact of such systemic and legal change was likely felt the most in the hearts and minds of African Americans, but from strictly a numbers perspective, here is one stat that exemplifies the impact: “In Mississippi alone, voter turnout among blacks increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969” (Source). Continue reading Movement Building and Collective Impact →

Acceptance

#yeg, Change, Learning, Little Stories, poetry

We can’t do it when we are young.
We know too little.
We have not tasted enough truth.

Eventually we can taste everything:
the sweet, the bitter, everything in between.
One day, Wisdom appears at our door.

Small and unsure at first,
it speaks nonetheless, each word
finding courage from the last.

One day we walk around a corner
and there it is waiting for use:
that space so deep inside

where our nature resides, that
which never changes, the constant “I.”
It is not the “self” but that which holds it close.

If you could taste it, it would
taste like candy we know
we should not eat

but we do
because of we didn’t
we could not be.