I’ve just returned from the kick-off gathering of a collective impact initiative with the United Way of Greater New Bedford. A series of three community gatherings for input (as described in this blog) and other meetings with stakeholders led us to focus of how can we help families thrive, with a focus in one neighborhood. We… Read more
Category: Collaboration
Collective Impact at a Community Scale: United Way of Greater New Bedford
United Way organizations around the country are reinventing the role they play in their communities from their traditional role of fundraising for social service agencies through workplace campaigns. As this paper, Charting a Course for Change describes, United Ways are serving as a community convener, engaging local partners (e.g., residents, businesses, local government, social service… Read more
Art of the Start: Strategic Questions to Build Focus and Engagement
As I write this, I am on my way to a gathering of practitioners who work on networks approaches for large-scale social change, sponsored by the Garfield Foundation. We’ll be discussing the “art of the start” – how to navigate the early stages of an initiative. This is timely, as lately I have seen some… Read more
Open Sourcing Social Change
Most philanthropic work for social change is focused on investing grants in organizations as the unit of getting work done. The challenge is that for many issues and places, multiple foundations and/or government are investing in organizations pursuing disconnected initiatives, leading to silos that don’t talk to each other and competing organizations working in the… Read more
The Multi-Dimensional Benefits of a World Café
I recently co-facilitated a “taster” to explore a variety of ways of designing meetings to more fully engage the collective intelligence of the group. One of the techniques we explored was the World Café. About half of this group had participated in it before and here were some of their key concerns: World Café had… Read more
The Better Alternative Not on the Table
Last fall, I was driving and heard a snippet of a news story that has stayed with me. I was listening to a reporter in Syria talking about the opinions of “people on the street” in Damascus amidst this civil war. She said that they are faced with the choice of the brutal dictator Assad… Read more
Keystone Habits to Create a Highly-Collaborative Environment
How do you create a culture or otherwise encourage people to work in networked, collaborative ways? I have recently been asking a variety of social change leaders this question, in a series of interviews as part of putting together a field guide on collaborative networks with the Garfield Foundation’s new Collaborative Networks Initiative. A theme… Read more
Collaborating to Ensure Transit-Oriented Development Works for All
The City of Somerville, close to Boston, is about to undergo the kind of land use transformation not likely to be seen again in decades, with the Green Line subway adding 6-7 new stations to Somerville neighborhoods and a new Orange Line station in Assembly Square. With this opportunity, comes the challenge of how to… Read more
Collaboration Over the Long Haul: Community Revitalization in Lawrence
Last week, I had the opportunity to tour the Spiket River Greenway, a community restoration initiative in Lawrence, MA that provides an inspiring story of vision, collaboration, and persistence over decades. The tour was part of a “learning journey” organized as the kick-off event of the Great Neighborhoods Network sponsored by the MA Smart Growth… Read more
Blueprints for Collaboration from Nature
As someone who has long been fascinated and inspired by what we can learn by mimicking nature’s patterns, the field of permaculture feels like one I could study and practice for a life time and never run out of more to learn. Permaculture has various definitions, such as the science of resilience or how to… Read more