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Featured ArticlesNavigating Collective Impact [By: Liz Weaver]
A particularly relevant session had the participants explore the development of a collective impact initiative over four phases of maturity: from generating ideas and dialogue through to sustaining action and impact. Fay Hanleybrown of FSG Social Impact Consultants presented the four phases of collective impact (see visual) and the distinct elements including governance and infrastructure; strategic planning; community involvement; and evaluation and improvement. Workshop participants brainstormed what was working well, what was challenging and what was missing in each of the four phases. Below are highlights of their discussions.
Navigating collective impact initiatives can be challenging work. The community issue is often very complex whether school achievement, poverty, neighbourhood revitalization or youth engagement. There are multiple actors engaged in the issue with diverse and sometimes incongruent expectations about services and outcomes. When you add in the voice of individuals with lived experience to this mix, urgency is created but simple solutions become more complex. Framing collective impact through four phases is useful. Each phase builds on the one that preceded it but there are common challenges that backbone organizations encounter in this work. FSG, Tamarack and Innoweave will collectively develop resources that will help collective impact initiatives move forward. Learn More:
The Way of Innovation [By: Mark Holmgren]
How to be innovative is of course the question and that is what this little article is about: the way of innovation and a call for the kind of leadership that fosters innovation throughout the organization. Anticipate Tomorrow This is both a mindset and a discipline which requires that a leader accept that anticipation is rife with uncertainty. In other words, at the same time as a leader must try to plot the future course of the organization, he or she must also understand it is impossible to do so with certainty. This means one's view of the future is a mixture of projection based on current momentum and one's sense of various scenarios that could unfold. This "sense" of things might also be seen as the result of educated, creative, and courageous "guesswork." An example: demographics enable us to project current realities into future scenarios. We understand that by 2031, the aging of the population and a low birth rate will result in fewer workers supporting more seniors than in the past. In that year, Stats Can predicts there will be 2.3 workers for each senior. Today there are 4.2 workers per senior, and in 1971 there were 6.6 workers per senior. One can argue that Stats Can doesn't have it quite right, but getting the exact ratio is not the issue here; the issue is the direction of the trend. Could the trend be affected by an increased birthrate or increased immigration? Yes. But those factors are, at this time, unpredictable even though they may be desirable. What we anticipate is that there will be a much lower participation rate in the workforce in the future and that, along with the aging population, implies an impact on tax generation, wages, and in the case of non-profits a deleterious effect on hiring and sustaining employees. Leaders who anticipate a future based on these projections recognizes that the impact of the 2031 scenario is taking place now. It is a structural reality that a leader of an organization cannot change, but what can be done is to explore innovative ways of operating in such an environment. So how might such exploration take place? Innovative Culture My experience tells me that most people are not by default resistant to change but rather lack clarity of what change to make and/or how they might engage in change-conversations, which restrains their willingness to take risks and venture into new territory. This calls for leadership that is aspirational and more focused on the exploration of tomorrow's possibilities than on stipulating and then managing the changes people must make. Aspirations built together will not only shine light on tomorrow but also on the actions required to move toward the light. Our propensity to want blueprints of change, chart duties via job descriptions, and limit actions to the prescriptions of best practice are not innovation-seeking attributes or activities. Rather they often create a culture that over-values the status quo and under-emphasizes possibilities. Innovative Space The implications of "creating space" are structural and systemic in nature while also calling for a discipline to not only create the space but to then live and work in it. As Kasper and Clohesy point out this space has a democratic mien in that it is there for the entire organization to populate and contribute to - not just leaders or managers, but front line service deliverers and functional staff as well. It is a space in which routines, history, and best practice are welcome but not as confining forces to limit free thinking and the collective generation of new, if not radical ideas. In other word it is an open space for taking chances, postulating the wild dream, mixing colors together never before mixed and not being chastised or disciplined for experimentation that ends up failing. It is a space that desires the view points of the boat rockers, the lone ranger, and the outliers, while also enabling collaboration, group think, and collective sense-making. Here is where true dialogue occurs purposed to explore and understand before running to the gates of resolution or submitting our minds to the machinations of logic models and unrealistic expectations of ordering actions into a matrix of outcomes and indicators. Of course the space cannot be created unless accompanied by the time required to enter it. Again this is a structural challenge. If we are content to fill staff time with status quo work, we will be hard-pressed to engage in "intentional" innovation. How staff meetings are designed and lived out have to change to allow for generative conversations. Hierarchy - while always present - must be de-emphasized, if not absolved of being present, within innovative space. Idea generation will not happen if staff are assessed as being successful only if the ideas produced are the right ideas. Innovative Purpose
Such questions and others like them are not for leaders and management to address and resolve. Instead it is their job, if not innovative mandate, to create the space and conditions for everyone in the organization to ask and address such critical questions. Investigating Innovation Learn More:
Ideas We're Following...Changing the Equation: Measuring Financial Vulnerability [By: Michel Frojmovic, MCIP RPP PMP]The Low Income Cut-Off (LICO), The Low Income Measure (LIM) and The Market Basket Measure (MBM) are the tools and acronyms by which Canadian poverty is currently defined. A group of national non-profit organizations - The Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD), the Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) and SEDI (Social & Enterprise Development Initiative) - is now collaborating with an aim to change the equation when it comes to measuring poverty. In building a better measurement system, the group must overcome several obstacles and limitations embedded in our current tools:
Better evidence in the discussion of financial vulnerability in our cities, neighbourhoods, towns and villages will help us prepare for situations like this one: An inevitable increase in interest rates will have a negative impact on areas with high levels of debt, but will be good for those with high savings rates. Which neighbourhoods will be at-risk, which stand to gain? A more sophisticated measurement system will also enhance our national and local advocacy efforts, and, ultimately, contribute to better designed policy and program interventions. One way out of the LICO-LIM-MBM box is to acquire the analytical tools used by our major financial institutions and adapt these to the world of community practitioners. This would make it possible to:
While these data source are expensive, complex and unfamiliar, the Canadian Council for Social Development (CCSD)'s Community Data Program (CDP) is designed to overcome these barriers. Established by the CCSD in the mid-1990s as a gateway for municipalities and community sector organizations to access complex and costly data, the Program now supports over 1,200 data users working for over 400 municipal and community sector organizations in over 20 Community Data Consortia across Canada. To learn more about the CDP and how to measure financial vulnerability, join community practitioners from across the country as part of a one-day interactive Community Data Canada (webinar) Roundtable on Wednesday, June 19th. Contact Michel Frojmovic at michel@communitydata.ca or click here to sign up for the Roundtable. Michel Frojmovic is the CCSD’s CDP Lead and Director of Community Data Canada. Related Links:
Sacred Fundraising: Reframing Philanthropy [By: Sylvia Cheuy]Innovation emerges when our thinking about typical or habitual activities is reframed in new ways. It involves a willingness to pause; reflect; and, consider the assumptions we hold about "how things are" and also consider "how things should be". Through this process of examining - and trying on - new ways of thinking, new possibilities for action are revealed. The 2008 economic downturn precipitated a dual pressure for non-profit organizations. For many, the demands for service began increasing while simultaneously, shifting donor patterns and an increased number of charities heightened the sense of urgency and competitiveness regarding fundraising efforts. For non-profit leaders who find themselves here, perhaps this is a good time to innovate your fundraising strategy by considering not only what your strategy involves but also re-evaluating how that strategy is implemented. What else could be possible and what new opportunities might emerge by reconsidering your own fundamental assumptions about fundraising? A recent video on Sacred Fundraising by Paul Born is an excellent starting-point to encourage you to think about raising funds from a completely fresh perspective. Drawing on his own successes in securing funds for large scale, complex community challenges, Paul shares from his own experience of interacting with a multitude of philanthropists to reveal a valuable snap-shot of what it is like to "walk in their shoes" and how that ultimately leads him to frame the task of fundraising in an innovative new way. We would like to acknowledge Maytree for helping to profile this timely video to their network and helping to disseminate Paul's important message to the non-profit sector. Related links:
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In April 2013, Tamarack, FSG Social Impact Consultants, Social Innovation Generation and Maytree hosted a workshop in Toronto for 150 leaders of collective impact backbone organizations. Called Champions for Change, this three day workshop explored a number of topics including: a detailed look at the roles played by backbone leaders; dealing with complex issues in a changing and emergent environment; collective governance; shared value; and, exploring the development of a collective impact initiative over four phases of maturity. 
The word "innovation" conjures up positive imagery. We see it as something we want to be known for. It's creative, desirable, inspiring, and we sense that if we can do it, if we can achieve it, we will lift ourselves up above the status quo, not to mention those who are quite comfortable in the box of convention.
