On November 29, Tamarack will be hosting its second Evaluating Community Impact workshop.  Over the last year, we have witnessed an incredible interest in evaluation, community change and community impact.  John Kania and Mark Kramer of FSG Social Impact Consultants wrote a very interesting article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on Collective Impact (http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact/) which takes evaluation to the next level - how do we understand the impact of individual efforts on community change. 

Tamarack, through its Vibrant Communities experiment over the past 8 years, has also explored how local multi-sector roundtables focused on reducing poverty can collectively impact their cities and drive forward larger scale change.  Read the evaluation results here:  http://tamarackcommunity.ca/g2_VC_Evaluation.html. 

For those of us working in organizations, we have gotten good at evaluating our individual programs and services.  But collectively, are we making a difference?  What is our collective community impact?  The workshop will explore tools, techniques and strategies to evaluate community impact but we also recognize that this is an emerging field of practice. 

We invite you to share your thoughts, resources and strategies to build our collective knowledge about the impact we have on community change.