Podcast Archive
Comprehensive Strategies for Deep and Durable Outcomes
There are different ways to pursue comprehensive approaches to addressing complex issues. In this podcast, we’ll explore some of these approaches and consider their strengths and limitations in achieving deep and durable outcomes and impact
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What are the different ways to pursue comprehensive approaches to a complex issue like poverty reduction? What are the strengths and limitations of such approaches for achieving deep and durable outcomes? This podcast explores these questions and highlights some of the challenges that can emerging when working comprehensively.
Learning Objectives:
- To explore the different ways in which comprehensive strategies can be conceived and enacted.
- To consider the possible strengths and limitations of these different approaches, especially with respect to their potential for achieving deep and durable impacts
On this page you'll find:
- Meet the Thought Leaders
- Joined Up Solutions and Complex Problems
- Framing and Entry Points
- Five Inter-related Challenges
- Reflection Questions
- Links & Resources
Eric Leviten-Reid - Eric Leviten-Reid is the Learning and Evaluation Coordinator and Coach with Vibrant Communities. He has nearly 25 years experience as a researcher and practitioner in the field of community development with a special focus on comprehensive, collaborative approaches to complex issues.
Joined Up Solutions and Complex Problems
Eric points out that poverty is a complex problem made up of multiple and interrelated factors, so poverty reduction strategies need to address a wide range of factors simultaneously. Reliable transportation, careful family budgeting, effective parenting, and effective schooling are not enough when each is achieved in isolation from the rest. Comprehensive community initiatives operate from the premise that complex or “joined up” problems require “joined up” solutions.
What distinguishes a complex problem like poverty from ‘simple’ or ‘complicated’ problems is not the number of elements involved but the dynamic relationship among those elements. The various factors involved are constantly shaping and re-shaping one another and the overall nature of the problem. In the same way, a wide range of participants, each involved with different parts of the problem, need to continuously adjust and re-adjust how they affect one another through the decisions and actions they take.
Eric explained three ways that communities often begin addressing a complex issue like poverty:
- Around the challenges facing a particular place (whether that is a neighbourhood, a city or a city region),
- Around the challenges facing a particular demographic group (youth, recent immigrants, the working poor) and
- Around the challenges involved with a particular substantive issue (e.g., employment, homelessness, education).
In this clip, Eric talks about two other ways that communities have organized their work: as practical interventions providing services or resources to individuals or families, or as strategic interventions that are meant to alter systemic and institutional factors.
Eric’s paper describes five challenges for comprehensive community responses to poverty:
- The Completeness Challenge – Filling the Gaps
- The Coordination Challenge – Improving Links
- The Robustness Challenge – Strategic Investment
- The Governance Challenge – Collaborative Governance
- The Innovation Challenge – Social Innovation
These challenges are distinct but often manifest themselves at the same time.
Here Eric explains how these challenges work together and are nested inside each other, like the layers of an onion.
Sometimes, interventions exist and are even linked up, but lack the resources they need to be effective.
In this clip, Eric talks about two ways to improve interventions, by scaling them up, or by providing supports to help them go deeper.
Complex problems such as poverty are not static, but involve a wide range of interacting factors that continuously re-shape the specific challenges involved.
In this clip, Eric talks about how governance structures in comprehensive community initiatives need to manage changing relationships.
Although social environments are not static, dominant ways of thinking and acting tend to limit the range of possibilities that may be considered. Poverty can be perpetuated by certain patterns of social and economic life. Social innovation can open up new possibilities.
Here, Eric talks about recognizing and dislodging the underlying arrangements to open space for new relationships.
Completeness means ensuring the most important strategies are included or identifying the gaps.
Here, Eric gives examples of how “completeness” might apply to groups like the working poor or recent immigrants, or at a systems level.
This challenge asks if the pieces are effectively linked – if the whole system is working as well as it could.
In this clip, Eric shows how coordination can help families and individuals access the services in the sequence and combinations they need.
- What are the ways in which my community is unfolding a comprehensive approach to reducing poverty?
- Of the five challenges mentioned in the seminar, do you feel that some are more important than others?
To reflect on these and other important questions, refer to the Resources and Links below.
Comprehensive Strategies for Deep & Durable Outcomes –What are the different ways to pursue comprehensive approaches to poverty reduction? What are the strengths and limitations of such approaches in achieving deep and durable outcomes?
Comprehensive Community Initiatives – In this paper, the Caledon Institute provides an overview of the key ideas associated with comprehensive community initiatives.
Voices from the Field II – This document, published by the Aspen Institute, captures the experience gleaned from more than a decade of practical experience with Comprehensive Community Initiatives. Chapter Two in this document, Core Principles of Comprehensiveness & Community Building, reflects on the core principles of working comprehensively at the community level..
Reflecting on Vibrant Communities (2002-2006) – This paper identifies lessons learned from the Vibrant Communities ‘chapter one’ and raises questions to be explored in ‘chapter two.’
Evaluating Vibrant Communities (2002 – 2010) – This report highlights the findings of a nine-year experiment that demonstrates the positive impacts of an innovative and collaborative approach to fighting poverty that is driving individual benefits, neighborhood changes and large scale community poverty reductions.
Compendium of Poverty Reduction Strategies & Frameworks – An extensive listing of the specific types of strategies that communities use to reduce poverty as well as examples of frameworks in which various of these strategies are combined.
Poverty as a Complex Issue – This two page handout describes seven characteristics of complexity and ten principles for adaptive leadership using poverty as the issue.
©2011 Tamarack — An Institute for Community Engagement