Four Steps to Community Sanity
Where communities fail to to even get out of the gate to meaningful change is their failure to agree on a shared definition of what is the target of our collective efforts and how will we know if we are making progress to that result.
Resources for Liz Weaver's Collective Impact workshops
PowerPoint slides, hand-outs, and worksheets from Liz Weaver's Collective Impact workshops in Red Deer, Alberta - March 6 & &, 2014.
A community's expectations are a critical element to the success of our innovations
I've come to see that at the very heart of success there are just two interrelated and mutually dependent, elements: the need to change expectations or the "inner attitudes" in James' phrasing and the need to work differently, to innovate.
Deep Conversations in Alberta
At the core of each of us, we want to belong to something. How can our communities become places where everyone is invited to belong?
SWOT v. SOART
Whether it is a city, town, school, or district, what has surprised me most is that I have never had to talk a community down from too high an aspiration. I have never felt the need to pull back the reigns because a community was getting their expectations too far ahead of their potential grasp.
By now we know that collective impact is often messy work. These collaborative processes are designed to address complex problems by bringing both traditional and non-traditional partners to a collective table. Inherent in this is messiness.
Lesson from the ASU/GSV Education Innovation Summit
I am constantly struck by how destructive blame is to the ability to achieve impact and how terribly hard it is to banish blame from our most basic human interactions.
The Need to Work Differently
It is only in a "safe" place where folks, who have been doing the community's heavy lifting, are respected and see that clarity regarding the shared outcome is a full answer to their prayers for resources and tools aimed at moving the needle on the outcome they have dedicated their lives to.
Role Clarity for Community Governance
Each Action Team decides how to implement structures, processes, and measures to achieve the outcomes, while Community Governance looks at how to organize resources, decision making, accountability, and community engagement to support the work of the Action Teams in a coherent fashion in order to optimize...
"Want to" creates much more energy than "have to."
Impact needs to be embedded into the on-going community context -- not just grafted on as a transitory accomplishment.
from the Working Differently series
By creating a new working space at the community level, we can tip the scale to bring more resources, decision making, accountability, and engagement to our overall goals and outcomes.
If there is a source of "blame," it should be resoundly understood as our own diminished expectations of what is possible or worst what is permissable in a society as advanced as our own.
“For success in real estate, the one guideline is ‘location, location, location.’ For community solutions, it should be ‘outcome, outcome, outcome.’”
We tend to reinforce too many people for what they do and not for the results they achieve.
"Like the core of a planet, a clear, strong sense of purpose creates the gravitational pull that will bring people, effort, resources, and commitments to the process."
After more than 10 years, we've learned some lessons we want to share.
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.
