Asking questions and listening for the strategies and ideas embedded in people’s own answers can be the greatest service a social change worker can give to a particular issue. – Fran Peavey Questions invite participation and the generation of new learning and ideas. Our context is shifting rapidly. That means that what is needed and what is possible… Read more
Category: Collaboration
After the Gathering
Imagine being in high school and getting to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak. My podcast guest, Belvie Rooks of Growing a Global Heart, shared how this interaction at a youth conference brought her from despair towards hope and became a seed for her work in the world. I found what happened after the… Read more
Conversations that Seed Collaboration in a Community
In most communities, there are dozens of non-profit and other organizations, each working on a discrete set of goals, yet operating in the same place and systems as others. “We need to collaborate to be more effective and have a bigger impact” is the frequent refrain. The question is how and where do we start? In… Read more
Conversations Connect Across Siloes
One of the biggest challenges is that organizations and larger systems are siloed: people work in the same organization/community/system or on the same issue, yet they don’t talk to each other or understand how their work or issues relate. The World Café conversational method enables people from these “fragmented” parts of a community/system to meet… Read more
Boston Schoolyard Initiative: An 18-year Success Story of Collaborative Structures that Support Transformative Change
“The story of the Boston Schoolyards Initiative is one that needs to be shared and spread!” This was my thought after hearing a keynote speech by Kristin Metz share her story at a conference. Kristin graciously accepted my invitation to interview her for this blog. I first wrote it in 2015 and am reposting it,… Read more
Why Blog?
Another blogger I admire, Chris Corrigan, just wrote a blog called How to Blog stating his intention of trying to “single handedly trying to lift a near dead art form up from a seven year slumber.” He noted that a lot of people stopped blogging around 2015. Chris, I appreciate your impulse and will lend… Read more
Three Leadership Behaviors that Undermine Collaboration
I sometimes think about how many kitchens are filled with the sounds of people who come home from their job and rant about how frustrated they are with people at work and organizational dysfunction. I grew up hearing this in our kitchen many nights when my dad got home from his office. Perhaps that’s part of… Read more
From rugged individualism to self-organized connected communities
In American culture, we tend to prize individual leadership, as illustrated by these examples: the self-made man, the hopes we put in one candidate to solve our problems, the entrepreneur with a new technology or solution, and the non-profit that comes into a community with an innovative project. In reality, any person who comes up with… Read more
Wearing Two Hats
One of the challenges to collaborative cross-sector work is that people show up to it oriented to advancing their organizational agenda and aren’t used to focusing on the broader community or systemic agenda. Particularly in the early stages of developing a collaborative initiative, we find it helpful to point out the need to focus on… Read more
Expanding the Benefits of Networked Work
What began as exasperation with dysfunctional organizations and boring meetings became a quest to discover what is possible with collaborative, networked work. My discovery process has led me to see that collaborative learning is what we can put at the center of how we work. We need a way to see how our individual work connects with larger… Read more