Going beyond our own agendas and focusing on what's best for the whole community.

Over the past 10 years, thirteen cities across Canada have been involved in an action learning experiment to reduce poverty. They have been applying collective impact conditions and have learned some lessons.

Five things to consider when working on the first condition of collective impact - building a common agenda.

Technology is increasing the reach of ideas, organizations and actions but with so many multi-media channels, there is alot of noise interrupting your message. Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, authors of 'The Impact Equation' provide useful strategies for launching ideas with impact.

It was a week to remember. Looking forward to October 2013 when I will be participating in my 8th consecutive Communities Collaborating Institute.

Is your organization or collaborative pushing the right policy levers? Here are some useful policy levers we should all be paying attention to if we want impactful community change efforts.

Community change efforts are akin to a snowstorm. There are many individual flakes of activity but they are difficult to distinguish once the snowstorm has finished. The Outcomes Diary tool helps you track both individual snowflakes and the cumulative results.

Read my recent blog post about Place-Based Policy Change.

In 24 pages, you can think through and design a pretty thorough evaluation process for programs and services.

This Policy Horizons Canada brief explores the unique challenges of evaluating place-based initiatives within a federal government context.