Maytree Conversations

by Paul Born, Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement

Thanksgiving, Diwali, Christmas, Hanukkah, Ashura, Bodhi … these are just some of the seasonal celebrations that bring people together to remember, celebrate and enjoy each other. For people like me, who has a community and people to be happy with, it is a season of blessings. However, for others, such times can be a source of loneliness and pain.

I have often wondered what it would be like to be homeless and invited to a charity Christmas dinner. Songs are sung, lots of traditional food is served and many well-meaning people are making themselves happy by serving you. Would the experience evoke happy memories of Christmas past? Or would it evoke pain by heightening your awareness of your present situation?

The feeling of emptiness or being alone is another common feeling for many during the holidays. It is a paradox when the holiday season is often so full and busy. Alone is not just for isolated people. It can permeate one’s being even during the most festive occasions.

Can community find us this holiday season? Can we find community? I am struck by a simple understanding: our sense of community is easily shaped by our expectations. When I go to a sporting event or seasonal concert, my expectations about finding a sense of community are low. I do not go to these events expecting to find much more than a common love of the sport or the music. Yet, when I gather with my family, my expectation of a sense of community is much higher. I want to feel cared for and I want to show caring. If these opportunities or feelings of caring are not present, I feel disappointed, or, worse, I feel alone and my longing for belonging and community becomes far greater.

Faced with these possibilities, I have two choices for how to approach the holiday season. First, I can manage my expectations. If I keep them low, then I will not be disappointed. Many of us enter family events this way. A second option is for me to be deliberate about building or deepening my feeling of community.

Here are some examples of what that might look like this season:

• Build some fun new traditions – Invite people to go for a pre-meal walk; place “crackers” on everyone’s plates and crack them open one at a time; play a group game like charades; or open gifts one at a time in a circle. Research confirms that people who spend time together and enjoy the company of each other build bonds of trust that lead to a greater ease of reciprocity.

• Build opportunities for everyone to contribute – Potlucks are famous for encouraging and celebrating this. They not only make a party easier and more fun to host, but they provide an opportunity for everyone to simultaneously care and be cared for.

• Evoke collective caring or altruism – Suggest that everyone bring a hand-made, local or fair trade gift. Assemble care packages or school kits. Have people share their favorite seasonal stories of resilience or take a moment to reflect on others whose situations may not be as fortunate as our own.

Have fun together. Take care of each other. Work for a better world. These are three simple ways to be more intentional about deepening our experience of community.

Take stock of your expectations when you gather together this holiday season. It is amazing what a little creativity can do to bring people together.

Related links:

• Visit Seeking Community, Tamarack’s Online Learning Community for exploring the power of community
• Subscribe to A Seekers Journal - an e-newsletter exploring the possibilities of community
• Visit the Seekers Journal Archive to find past issues
• Learn more about Paul’s forthcoming book, Seeking Community: Finding Belonging in Chaotic Times

Compiled by Sylvia Cheuy, Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement

It’s hard to believe that only a few weeks ago, Tamarack’s 7th Communities Collaborating Institute (CCI) drew to a close. While the experience is still percolating for many, we are pleased to share highlights from some of the CCI 2012 alumni blogs that offer initial reflections and a glimpse of this unique learning experience.

Wicked Problems: Collaborative Solutions – Jill Wyatt

The conversations here have given me much food for thought. One of the speakers, Tim Brodhead, talked about three forces impacting the social sector that certainly describe our work at United Way: the drive for efficiency, the imperative of effectiveness and the complexity that makes all our work so hard!

This new paradigm demands more sharing: shared knowledge, shared risk, shared trust, shared time, shared space. Collaborative work like this takes enormous time and effort, development of tremendous trust among partners and only demonstrates outcomes over time. Brodhead went on to name some of the challenges of collaboration, including the underestimation of time and effort required to create successful collaborations, the potential for creativity to be supplanted by group-think, and the stewardship of long-term trust.

Fellow-Travellers – Liz Weaver

Once a year, at the Communities Collaborating Institute, we get to stretch. We have a week to think, to reflect, meet others who may, at times, feel alone in the work that is collaborative. There is a tribe of like-minded folks who will share their wisdom, their frustrations, and give you a peek, if only for a moment, into their aspirations and hopes for their communities. That for me is the gift of the Communities Collaborating Institute. It’s not so much the insights of the speakers, or the challenge of absorbing so many ideas in such a short time, but it is the people, who journey with you through the week.

I think it is the total package which keeps me coming back – that and the fact that each year has a unique character – largely due to those who come to the gathering and share their gifts. Thank you to all of my colleagues attending the 2012 version. The paths we walk twist and turn but it is good to know we will meet each other on the journey.

Inside/Out – Scott MacAfee

We came as many independently sharing a single thought
We moved through each other,
Shared our full selves,
Had brain explosions,
We challenged,
Grew,
Learned,
Listened,
Thought deeply,
Danced,
Dialogued,
Sang,
Laughed,
Cried,
Believed in barking dogs,
Owned our suck as well as our awesome,
And never turned back;
As we created this Perfect Space of limitless possibility
We gave all of ourselves and now are seemingly more full now than when we started
We leave as one, collectively sharing the same heart… Thank You!

We Need More Leaders – Mark Holmgren

In less than two days, I have had my mind challenged by the thinking and experience of Tim Brodhead (former CEO of the McConnell Foundation), Paul Schmitz (advisor to President Obama), and Meg Wheatley (author and teacher). I have also been fortunate as a “pod leader” to spend time and share reflections with nine colleagues from around the country.

Here are a few reflections about the types of range of changes our communities and organizations require to move forward toward a future where poverty, dis-ease, and polarization are problems of the past.

We need more leaders. We need more leaders everywhere in our community, from all walks of life, of all ages. The challenges we face will not be met by old notions of leadership as a position held by a few. Leadership is action and, as Paul Schmitz reminded us, everyone leads. One of the calls to action voiced by Paul was that a priority of all leaders is to help others be leaders, whether in our organizations, our communities, or our families.

Tim Brodhead urged funders and community organizations to work together as authentic partners. What I especially appreciated about Tim’s analysis was his observation that such partnerships need to accept the iterative nature of the work and the relationship around the work. This means that funders and organizations must be prepared to learn together and make changes along the way that further our chances of achieving successful results.

What a great two days… great food. The music of Michael Jones lifts my spirits, leads me to a peaceful place, and sparks my thinking. The energy in the rooms we work in is palpable and the sincerity of all who are attending is inspiring. I am glad I am here. I am glad all of us are here.

Related:

• Read Jill Wyatt’s full CCI 2012 Reflection Blog
• Read Liz Weaver’s CCI 2012 Reflection Blog
• Read Scott MacAfee’s CCI 2012 Reflection Blog
• Read Mark Holmgren’s full CCI 2012 Reflection Blog
• Access resources from Tamarack’s CCI 2012

by Sylvia Cheuy, Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement

The discipline of design has traditionally focused on the form and function of products (think iPod). However, design firms like IDEO are using the principles of design to create an innovative approach for addressing more complex problems. This approach is called design thinking. As traditional programs and policies within our social systems are proving less effective, a growing number of non-profit organizations are embracing design thinking to generate new solutions.

Image credit: Fraulein Schille

As Cameron Norman observed in his recent blog Evaluation and Design for Changing Conditions, “The days of creating programs, products and services and setting them loose on the world are coming to a close.” As an alternative he suggests that Design Thinking – a human-centered approach to innovation that brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable – offers a “relevant and appropriate” alternative approach for those seeking to influence our world.

In Design Thinking for Social Innovation, an article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, authors Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO describe Design Thinking as an approach that “taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. Not only does it focus on creating products and services that are human-centered, but the process itself is also deeply human. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as being functional.”

The design thinking process is described as “a system of three overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps: inspiration, ideation, and implementation.” Each of these spaces is described below:

• Inspiration: Identifying the Problem or Opportunity – Design thinkers believe that people often have difficulty explaining their needs. To gain insight into the range of unmet needs, design thinkers forgo surveys or focus groups in favour of listening to and observing behaviours of end-users to better understand the problem and its context.

• Ideation: Generating, Developing and Testing Ideas – In this space, the insight gained during the inspiration space is distilled into a plan for change. The emphasis in this space is on coming up with as many ideas as possible and testing them against each other. The focus of this space recognizes, to quote Linus Pauling, “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.”

• Implementation: Putting Solutions into the World – In the third space, ideas are turned into products, policies and services. Prototyping and pilot testing in real environments are then used to refine these solutions.

Jerry Sternin’s Positive Deviance Initiative provides a powerful case study of design thinking in action. The initiative’s goal was to decrease malnutrition in Vietnamese children. However, rather than studying the problem, Sternin sought out and studied families in the community who were not malnourished. He then worked with these families to offer cooking classes to the families of malnourished children. By the end of the program’s first year, 80 percent of the 1,000 children enrolled in the initiative were adequately nourished and the program had been replicated to fourteen villages. This is the power of design thinking: looking beyond the problem to discover the seeds of the solution which already exist and working closely with the clients and consumers to allow high-impact solutions to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.

Related Links:

• Read Design Thinking for Social Innovation by T. Brown & J. Wyatt
• Visit the IDEO website for resources and examples of design thinking in action
• Read Evaluation and Design for Changing Conditions by Cameron Norman
• Find more blogs by Cameron Norman on the Tamarack CCI website
• Learn more about Jerry Sternin’s Positive Deviance Initiative
• Check out the Human Centred Design Website and toolkit of human-centred design thinking processes and tools for NGOs and social enterprises
• Listen to Design Thinking for Social Innovation a Tamarack audio seminar with Cameron Norman

(Image credit: Fraulein Schille)

by Sylvia Cheuy, Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement

When Barack Obama, a community developer by training, became the President of the United States, he created The White House Council on Community Solutions to advance collective impact in communities. Earlier this month, the Council released its final paper, Community Solutions for Opportunity Youth, a fascinating report with solid recommendations for how communities can be more effective at “putting every young person on a clear path to economic opportunity.”

A representative from the Council, Paul Schmitz, will join us as a key thought-leader at the Communities Collaborating Institute 2012: Innovating Together.

Today, 6.7 million American 16-to-24-year olds – roughly 1 in 6 in this age group – are disconnected from both school and jobs. Research shows that connecting young people to the labour market early is critical for shaping their skills, attitudes, and outlook on life. It also impacts far beyond youth themselves. Research by Columbia University/Queens College, CUNY found that in 2011 U.S. taxpayers shouldered more than $93 billion to compensate for lost taxes and the direct costs to support disconnected youth, and that amount will grow to more than $1.6 trillion over their lifetime.

The Council’s report reflects conversations with more than 350 youth and community leaders across the country and confirms that youth have energy and aspirations. They recognize their responsibility to develop solutions with local leaders that improve their lives, benefit their communities, and help youth nationwide. To acknowledge their untapped potential, the Council chose to refer to this population as Opportunity Youth.

Speaking about the White House Council and its focus on youth, Patty Stonesifer, Chair of the White House Council, said, “Across the country, citizens and local leaders are combining their resources to achieve needle-moving change on a range of complex issues – from reducing violence to increasing graduation rates – and changing what’s possible for their communities. By applying the same focus and discipline toward supporting opportunity youth, we can dramatically change the trajectory of their lives, as well as our economy and society.”

The Council identified some key principles and recommendations that Canadian youth and community leaders can also benefit from.

Three fundamental principles were identified as central to effectively address the needs of opportunity youth:

1. Young people are key to the solution – Opportunity youth have informed views of what works for them and their peers.
2. All sectors must unite to address the challenge - To see dramatic, measurable progress, families, communities, schools, employers, nonprofits, and the government must pull together in the same direction to provide the diverse range of services needed.
3. Policies and funding must be data-driven – Policy and funding decisions need to be guided by accurate data about opportunity youth and effective interventions to ensure the most effective use of limited funding.

The Council’s recommendations focus on four key strategies to significantly reduce the number of opportunity youth and make even more substantial progress toward putting all young people on a path to prosperity. The four strategies are:

1. Drive the development of cross-sector community collaboratives – These collaboratives use a common approach and embody a core set of characteristics to solve a range of social issues, including supporting opportunity youth.
2. Create shared national responsibility and accountability for opportunity youth – Coordinate and share rigorous data to shine a national spotlight on who these young people are, what they need, and what they are capable of doing.
3. Engage youth as leaders in the solution – This ensures that relevant, high quality, and increasingly effective programs and resources for opportunity youth are being created and supported.
4. Build more robust on-ramps for employment for opportunity youth – These initiatives need to be designed to meet the needs of communities and young people by linking education and training to local jobs.

At a summit hosted by the Council to release this report, several national organizations announced new collaborative initiatives to support the report’s strategies. Two include:

• The Spark Opportunity Challenge – a crowd-sourcing competition for young people to propose their own visionary, yet viable solutions to create jobs, build and enhance skills, and bring about real change for opportunity youth.
• The Aspen Forum for Community Solutions & the Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund will spotlight communities that are successfully pulling together to move the needle on a community challenge, providing national and local leaders with the knowledge, tools and resources needed to launch a successful needle-moving collaborative, especially those focused on reconnecting opportunity youth to school and work.

With an emphasis on what’s possible through collaboration and the value of community-led solutions, the Council believes that implementing its recommendations will lower the number of opportunity youth by a minimum of ten percent. This, they acknowledge, “will lead to significant progress toward putting all of our young people on a path to prosperity.”

The Council’s participation on our recent Communities Collaborating Institute shows how ideas know no borders and sharing innovative, community-led initiatives benefits us all.

Related Links:

• City’s summer of violence calls for community-based solutions – joint statement by Toronto community organizers
• Download Community Solutions for Opportunities Youth (PDF), the White House Council’s final paper
• Join the White House Council’s Paul Schmitz at Tamarack’s 2012 CCI: Innovating Together
• Read The White House Council’s Community Collaboratives Whitepaper
• Download the White House Council’s Case Studies of Effective Collaboratives
• Explore the White House Council’s Community Collaboratives Toolbox
• Listen to The White House Council on Community Solutions a Tamarack tele-learning seminar with Paul Schmitz

by Sylvia Cheuy, Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement

We at Tamarack are thrilled that a representative from The White House Council on Community Solutions will be joining us as a key thought-leader at the Communities Collaborating Institute 2012: Innovating Together.

The White House Council for Community Solutions was established by President Obama in December 2010 to share creative ideas and collaborative approaches for building healthy communities across America. In developing its approach, “The White House Council decided to look beyond individual programs showing success with limited populations and instead look at where communities are solving problems together and moving the needle in a way that improves results for the whole community.” The Council’s decision to accept our invitation to the CCI 2012 reflects their desire to engage a global network of peers in sharing its work.

The Council’s delegate to the CCI 2012 is Paul Schmitz, CEO and founder of Public Allies, an organization whose mission is to advance new leadership to strengthen communities, nonprofits and civic participation and demonstrate the conviction that “everyone can lead, and that lasting social change results when citizens of all backgrounds step up, take responsibility, and work together.” He is also a faculty member of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, blogs on leadership for the Washington Post, and is the author of Everyone Leads: Building Leadership from the Community Up.

Paul’s work has garnered considerable recognition and praise. He was selected as a Next Generation Leadership Fellow by the Rockefeller Foundation, was recognized by the Nonprofit Times as one of the 50 most powerful and influential non-profit leaders in America, and is a recipient of Fast Company magazine’s Social Capitalist Award for innovation.

Recently Paul co-authored Needle-Moving Community Collaboratives: A Promising Approach to Addressing America’s Biggest Challenges, an article published by The Bridgespan Group. This paper begins by recognizing that, “In a climate of increasingly constrained resources, those solutions must help communities to achieve more with less. A new kind of community collaborative – an approach that aspires to significant, community-wide progress by enlisting all sectors to work together toward a common goal – offers enormous promise to bring about broader, more lasting change across the nation.”

It then reviews a number of successful cross-sector collaborative across the U.S., and synthesizes the core operating principles, key success factors, and supportive resources these collaboratives need to fulfil what the authors identify as the following primary roles: convening, facilitation, data collection, communications and administrative support.

We welcome Paul as the latest member of the 2012 CCI: Innovating Together Learning Community and look forward to learning more with him in the weeks and months to come.

Related links:

• Join Paul Schmitz at Tamarack’s 2012 Communities Collaborating Institute: Innovating Together
• Download Needle-Moving Community Collaboratives (PDF), co-authored by Paul Schmitz
• Read The White House Council’s Community Collaboratives Whitepaper
• Download the White House Council’s Case Studies of Effective Collaboratives (PDF)
• Explore the White House Council’s Community Collaboratives Toolbox
• Learn more about Paul Schmitz at the Public Allies website
• Register for Tamarack’s upcoming tele-learning seminar, The White House Council on Community Solutions on June 21, 2012

by Mark Cabaj, Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement

Tamarack has provided regular and comprehensive coverage to the Vibrant Communities initiative since it began in 2002. And why not? It was a grand experiment (2002-2011) by a group of urban collaboratives from across Canada and three national sponsors to significantly reduce poverty through comprehensive and multi-sectoral efforts that yielded significant results and lessons.

The results include concrete reductions in poverty. Over a dozen local poverty reduction roundtables contributed to 256 initiatives that have generated 439,435 benefits to 202,931 low income households. The same groups were involved in scores of systemic and policy changes and improved the local awareness and commitment to reduce poverty over the longer term.

The lessons included how to work in new ways: working across sector boundaries, engaging low income and business leaders, working comprehensively on poverty’s root causes and embracing a learning-by-doing approach that encourages risk and innovation. These insights – and many more – are captured and shared in a variety of reports, books and podcasts that are available on the Vibrant Communities Canada website.

The learning continues. The work of local Trail Builders – and the mining and distilling of their results and learning – was made possible thanks to a large and diverse array of national supports. This included generous multi-year grants; hands-on coaching from seasoned experts; an ambitious research and policy agenda; a pool of tools and techniques; a larger number of tele-learning calls exploring new practices and change stories; regular peer calls between communities; a variety of face-to-face learning events; a comprehensive website; and a constant series of electronic newsletters. Local communities and national sponsors invested a great deal of time, money and energy in developing and using a sophisticated “architecture” of supports rarely seen in other national efforts.

What difference – if any – did it all make? What are the lessons for supporting other local efforts to tackle complex issues? These are the questions that Jamie Gamble of Imprint Consulting Inc. explores in the soon-to-be released second (and last) installment of the Vibrant Communities evaluation: Inspired Learning: An Evaluation of Vibrant Communities National Supports.

Throughout 2011-2012, Jamie and his team reviewed program files and interviewed the local “users” of these supports to understand how they worked and how – if at all – they influenced the activities and outcomes of local groups. Their findings are captured in a fifty-page report that covers the following:

• A description of each of the Vibrant Communities supports and how they worked
• A summary of the ever-evolving “architecture” of how these supports worked together
• Four case examples of how Trail Builder communities used different supports
• A general assessment of the use and value of each support
• An exploration of what supports worked for whom and when

Based on these findings, Gamble draws an important conclusion: it may not be necessary to provide such a robust, elaborate and expensive constellation of supports to all local efforts tackling complex issues (e.g. poverty, homelessness, high school graduate rates); however, it was critical in the case of the Vibrant Communities initiative which operated with the concurrent objectives of: (a) providing support to local groups so that they were able to generate concrete reductions in poverty; (b) mining and distilling their results and findings to share with others; and (c) encouraging other communities and the policy makers and funders that support them to adopt this approach to tackling poverty.

Gamble’s recommendations to national intermediaries, funders and communities are useful to communities and organizations involved in the next iteration of the Vibrant Communities – Cities Reducing Poverty – and for anyone else who dreams of “moving the needles” on the most complex issues of our time.

Related Links:

• Register here to be among the first to receive a PDF of Inspired Learning: An Evaluation of Vibrant Communities National Supports when it is released
• Access the first installment of the Vibrant Communities evaluation, Evaluating Vibrant Communities 2002-2010
• Read Cities Reducing Poverty: Case Studies from Vibrant Communities
• Find more resources about poverty reduction at Tamarack’s www.vibrantcanada.ca website

By: Sylvia Cheuy, Tamarack

Over the past month, the importance of citizen dialogue in reshaping the complex issue of health care has been highlighted through two different – but complementary – projects.

The first of these projects is a video produced by the Sudbury and District Health Unit that invites us all to reframe more traditional discussions of health care by acknowledging that people’s opportunities for health are largely influenced by broader social and economic conditions that have little to do with access to medical care.

Using this broader view, the video highlights how the actions of different, non-health sectors contribute to a community’s prosperity and, in doing so, can positively impact people’s overall health. Ultimately, this video’s call to action is for everyone – teachers, builders, dads, nurses, business women, students and politicians – to start a conversation about health – and not talk about health care at all.

The second project is the release of Public Priorities for Ontario’s Health System (PDF), a document that outlines a series of recommendations to reform the province’s health care system. What makes this report unique is that it is the work of a randomly-selected citizens’ panel of twenty-eight Ontarians who agreed to spend three weekends together learning about the province’s health care system from a range of experts before reaching consensus on a set of recommendations to ensure that high-quality and publicly funded care is available to future generations.

One of the aims of this demonstration project was to show what an “informed, adult conversation” about our health system might look like and it highlights the role that citizens can play in shaping health policy. Peter McLeod, a principal with MASS LBP, the firm who designed this citizen process, has said, “Our experience has proven that the most successful public engagement strategies include real opportunities for public service, learning and problem-solving.”

Such citizen panel dialogues offer a number of advantages over more traditional methods for gauging public opinion such as polls, focus groups and public meetings. While polls measure single moments in time; focus groups and online dialogues rarely seek or establish consensus; and town hall forums often become venting platforms that provide little insight, these methods do not give to – or ask of – citizens as much as the in-depth process of a citizen panel.

The citizen panel experience stands in sharp contrast to the all too common experiences of “citizen apathy” generated by other forms of citizen engagement. It demonstrates powerfully that ordinary citizens have an overwhelming interest and ability to play a more constructive role in important policy debates. It also suggests that that civic engagement, when done well, can provide new clarity to difficult, highly-charged policy debates. At the same time, the citizen panel’s work demonstrates that any meaningful public conversation requires substantial investments, by a trusted and impartial authority, to first build awareness and knowledge.

The findings of this demonstration project also invite one to question whether simplistic approaches to soliciting public opinion – such as polls – may actually contribute negatively to public policy discussions by reducing conversations about complex issues to false dichotomies or win-lose debates that ultimately compound the problem and perpetuate public apprehension and mistrust. Mr. MacLeod puts it this way, “Although politicians pay lip service to the importance of citizens and families – especially during election campaigns – they see the broader public itself as polarized, volatile and ill-informed. And the public is cynical, lacking trust in politics and political institutions. We’re a house divided against itself…our work is about rehabilitation – authority’s view of the broader public’s capacity to play a useful role, and people’s appreciation for the complexity of issues and the sincerity of authorities. It tempers skepticism on both sides.”

As one initially cautious community leader observed after a recent citizen panel dialogue in his community, “It proved to me that you can effectively engage your community on difficult issues. But you have to structure the engagement constructively. Two microphone stands in a town-hall meeting that lets people rant and rave – that’s not the engagement we want.”

Related links:

• Download the Public Priorities for Ontario’s Health System (PDF) document
• Visit the MASS LBP website to learn more about the Citizen Panel Process
• Visit the Sudbury and District Health Unit’s website
• Find more resources on community engagement on the Tamarack website

Originally posted on the Tamarack website.

By: Jamie Gamble of Imprint Consulting Inc.

Conventional models of financial support for social-purpose activity focus on charitable donations, government grants, and fee-for-service transactions. There is some exciting new thinking taking shape in Canada that is driving towards new possibilities for attracting capital to address society’s pressing challenges.

Traditionally, we have thought of socially-oriented investing as avoiding investments in companies with poor social or environmental practices. Impact investing puts capital into investments that combine a positive social impact with a financial return. This is social finance. The idea of social finance emerged over the last decade largely in the U.K and the U.S., and we are now seeing interest in it here in Canada.

In Words and Actions: Creating a New Narrative for the Community Sector, McConnell Foundation President, Tim Brodhead emphasizes the need for new social finance tools in Canada. He says, “Looking ahead, it is clear that the traditional ways of funding community organizations – government grants and contributions, and individual, corporate or foundation donations – will not suffice to meet the challenges we face. Governments are again in deficit-cutting mode, and in Canada private donations cannot grow enough to compensate for public funding cuts.”

Some Canadian examples of financial innovation that are emerging include:

• a private foundation that has put some of its endowment capital into an interest-generating loan that lets a non-profit advance its mission;
• several Canadian investment funds now focus on social purpose businesses; and
• many voluntary sector organizations have made a social enterprise part of their strategy for sustainability.

These early adopters are complemented by the efforts of leading Canadian thinkers from the government, investment community, and voluntary sector who, through The Task Force on Social Finance, have identified the kinds of regulatory and institutional support that would strengthen and grow this emerging marketplace. In December 2010, the Task Force published Mobilizing Private Capital for Public Good, a Report (PDF) that explores how best to strengthen Canada’s emerging social finance marketplace and identifies seven key actions “that Canada needs to undertake, in parallel, to mobilize new sources of capital, create an enabling tax and regulatory environment, and build a pipeline of investment-ready social enterprises.”

The Task Force’s recommendations include developing an “impact investing” marketplace that would diversify revenue sources for public benefit activities, and providing an option for institutional or individual investors seeking to achieve a public benefit as well as personal profit from the use of their capital.

Tapping into private capital can help to “connect the best people and the most innovative ideas” to the scale of resources needed to address our most complex social problems. This will require new kinds of infrastructure, policies, and support, and above all, new ways of thinking.

Related Links:

• Mobilizing Private Capital for Public Good by the Task Force on Social Finance (PDF)
• Download the Summary Report (PDF)
• View the socialfinance.ca guide to social finance for some good examples of social finance at work
• The Canadian Social Enterprise Guide, 2nd edition (PDF)
• Visit www.socialfinance.ca – for the latest thinking about social finance

Originally posted on the Tamarack website.

Paul Born is the President of Tamarack, an organization founded with Maytree.

Maytree’s yearly Policy Insights document presents policy proposals prepared by Maytree, its partners and grantees. These recommendations make up the three important “I”s of public policy: ideas, instruments, and investments. They each identify a powerful idea to improve the life of Canadians, the instruments which will be effective in creating that improvement, and the investments that must be made to operationalize the instruments. These recommendations build on the power and potential of public services, and the resiliency of Canadians. You can read a summary of recommendations and download the complete collection of Policy Insights in PDF format. Please share and distribute to your networks.

According to Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cut-Off, in 2007, three million Canadians, or 9.2 percent of the population, lived in poverty. As a result, communities, large and small, are facing increasingly complex and challenging issues, including homelessness and poor health.

Since 2002, a wide range of partners have formed leadership tables in more than a dozen communities across Canada, giving new momentum to efforts which seek to reduce poverty. Joined by the Vibrant Communities initiative, these tables include citizens of various income levels, community workers, representatives from all levels of government and business people. Together they are clarifying their community’s needs and identifying community assets to develop tangible strategies for tackling poverty.

A recent evaluation of this work found that, together, the 164 poverty reduction initiatives:

• Reduced poverty for more than 170,000 households in Canada;
• Raised $19.5 million, most of it in local communities;
• Engaged 1,690 organizations as partners, including more than 500 businesses;
• Mobilized 1,080 individuals as partners, including 573 people living in poverty; and
• Inspired 35 policy and program innovations.

Vibrant Communities has become, and hopefully will continue to be, one of Canada’s best poverty reduction strategies.

Create a Community Fund of $25 million run by an arm’s-length body to help communities operate local decision-making tables

The federal government should create a Community Fund, administered by an arm’s-length body such as a foundation or nonprofit organization with a mandate to effect community-based change by funding the challenge involved in convening multiple and diverse parties. The government would develop a set of principles to guide funding decisions which would ensure diversity of investment in terms of geography, community size and nature of the proposed interventions.

The Community Fund would match the first $100,000 raised annually at the local level to enable communities to set up and operate their respective decision-making tables over the course of five years. The Fund would incorporate clear monitoring and review processes to track progress toward stated objectives and identified targets. It would also be required to produce a public annual report of its grant decisions.

A fund of $25 million would help 50 communities develop and implement their own poverty reduction strategies for five years.

Further reading:

Reports

• Born, Paul. (2008). Creating Vibrant Communities: How Individuals and Organizations from Diverse Sectors of Society Are Coming Together to Reduce Poverty in Canada. Toronto: BPS books.
• Chapter 8: “Creating an Enabling Environment” in Sherri Torjman’s Shared Space: The Communities Agenda. 2007. Ottawa: Caledon Institute of Social Policy.

Websites:

• Tamarck – An Institute for Community Engagement
• Vibrant Communities Canada
• Seeking Community

Reflections on Tamarack’s 2010 Communities Collaborating Institute (CCI) Conference

(Originally published in Engage!, Tamarack’s e-magazine)

By Mark Holmgren

I assess the success of a conference in terms of how it challenges my ideas and practices; fosters the exchange of questions and perspectives; and, as John Ott would say, “welcomes all that arises.” Reflecting on the 2010 Communities Collaborating Institute I would say, “Bravo Tamarack and all of us who participated in creating success.”

All of the keynote speakers shared ideas that did not stand alone but rather danced together. In the short time since, I have used Thomas Homer-Dixon’s ideas about how biases create resistance to change and had them dancing with John Ott’s ideas about creating collective wisdom, in particular John’s call to suspend certainty and welcome diversity.

I am sure those two gentleman can see their ideas dancing with Brenda Zimmerman’s clear and helpful ideas about how to work with simple, complicated, and complex challenges or problems. Most of us work with complexity and she reminded me to ward off my natural tendency to seek simple answer-recipes or think that I can discern solutions by simply breaking things into their parts. It was Thomas who said “complex problems require complex solutions.”

Anne Kubisch and Mark Chamberlain reminded us of progress but also to be real about the work ahead and how sitting on our laurels won’t move us to further innovations and transformations. Mark asked us a “wicked question” (a term offered up by Brenda). He asked us how much more information do we need to know that a hungry child will not do well in school? His message: stop admiring the problem and get on with the work!

“Pebbles from heaven” is a Zen phrase that speaks of small gems that come at us. Small insights, a piece of an idea, a fragment of a question, a phrase someone said, and so on. The Zen notion is that by themselves these pebbles have limited impact, but collectively over time, they move our minds to new places. Hmm, sounds like collective wisdom.

I have to admit my head was a bit sore from all the pebbles. I have to say there were a few very big pebbles – I think they may have been rocks – that caused more than a little discomfort. Not because they represented something bad or wrong, but because I experienced new ideas and voices that would have me face who I am, what I believe, and what I aspire to do and challenge myself to change far more than I can all by myself. Many thanks for that.

Related Links:

• View a presentation (PDF) of the Keynote Addresses
• Download resources from the CCI 2010 Workshops
• Register here to be among the first to receive information for CCI 2011
• Read Mark Holmgren’s blog here

Mark Holmgren is a private consultant who helps organizations identify and embrace strategy, change their structures and habits, and move forward to achieve their visions and aspirations.