Economics of Happiness - This website profiles a film that includes a broad range of leaders from across six continents in making the case that not only will a return to locally-based economies help address issues of climate change, they also suggest that embracing such an approach will not only heal the earth but it will also do much to enhance our own sense of well-being.
Celebrating Community Innovation - Nova Scotia’s Celebrating Communities Conference recognizes the creativity, innovation and entrepreneurialism of communities in Nova Scotia with awards in six categories. Visit the Celebrating Communities website here.
Social Enterprise & Social Innovation – UK’s Cabinet Office for the Third Sector argues that government needs a framework for social innovation in which social enterprise plays a critical role. This requires a social enterprise policy to be framed within a more comprehensive strategy for social innovation that is designed to deliver social impact by finding new ways to address unmet social needs, and identifies four ingredients to be included within that strategy. Read Social Enterprise and Social Innovation: Strategies for the Next Ten Years here.
Supporting Vulnerable Communities - A new research report released by the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) provides evidence that governments, by supporting the capacity of voluntary organizations in vulnerable communities, can bring about sustainable benefits to these communities and help improve their circumstances. Read the full report here.
Social Programs Stimulate the Economy - A just released paper by The Caledon Institute is calling for strong social programs to play a vital part in an economic stimulus package. Boosting three geared-to-income programs – the Canada Child Tax Benefit, refundable GST credit and Working Income Tax Benefit – would put additional money into the hands of lower-income households who are most likely to spend it immediately. Employment Insurance, which now serves only four in ten unemployed Canadians, must be restored and strengthened. Ottawa should also bolster its transfers to the hardest hit provinces and territories so that they do not bear the full burden of social assistance and other recession-linked cost increases. Read the full paper, The Forgotten Fundamentals, here.
Social Profits - This essay discusses the various dimensions of the social economy - a unique and burgeoning sector of the economy in which business enterprises and economic activity seek not only to generate revenue but also to advance social goals. This paper explores their many different forms and puts forward policy proposals to bolster social enterprises within the Canadian economy. Download the paper here. [Source: The Caledon Institute of Social Policy]
Get Ready for the Big One - The baby-boomers retiring from business require a new approach to succession planning - one that recognizes how social enterprise can express an owners' commitment to family, neighbourhood, and community, as well as good financial returns. Read the article here. [Source: Making Waves]
Sustainable Planning & Community Development - Infrastructure Canada has released an online resource centre for sustainable community planning and development. Access the resource centre here. [Source: Infrastructure Canada]
Engaging Communities for Local Development - The Community Employment Innovation Project (CEIP) is a demonstration project that is testing an alternative form of income transfer payment for the unemployed, which simultaneously encourages work and supports local community development. The latest in a series of reports released by SRDC presenting the results of CEIP, looks at the effects on communities. It indicates that communities can play an important part in improving local development and helping populations at risk of social exclusion. Read the full report here. [Source: SRDC]
Constructive Failure Provide Insights - A new "Mistakes, Learning, and Adaptation" project compiles stories about constructive mistakes that are relevant to the practice of community economic development. This project calls into question key design assumptions about problems, strategic interventions, implementation, partners, and even methods of documentation and evaluation. Most importantly, it provides invaluable insights into problems and solutions. The project continues to solicit articles and has issued a new "Call for Papers" for a second round of submissions. Learn more here. [Source: Annie E. Casey Foundation]
Community-based Work Improves Skills - Can community-based employment help the unemployed develop their transferable skills and social capital? A major Canadian study released by SRDC reveals promising results in that respect. "Improving skills, networks, and livelihoods through community-based work: Three-year impacts of the Community Employment Innovation Project" presents interim results from the Community Employment Innovation Project (CEIP), a program designed to encourage the longer-term employability of participants while supporting local community development in regions of continuing high unemployment. Download the full report here. (francais) [Source: SRDC]
Anatomy of Success - Two expert community development practitioners, Anita Miller and Tom Burns, have written a new guidebook on comprehensive community development. Going Comprehensive: Anatomy of an Initiative that Worked examines the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program (CCRP), a groundbreaking community building program that launched in 1992 and operated for more than six years and helped produce one of America’s most remarkable urban turnaround stories, that of New York’s once-stricken South Bronx. Learn more here. [Source: LISC enewsletter]
CED & Social Inclusion - As part of the Canadian CED Network's Social Inclusion action research project, practitioners were asked to share tools and resources they found useful in developing integrated approaches to improving social and economic conditions. These have been compiled into an online, searchable toolbox in both English and French. Search the toolbox here. [Source: The Canadian CED Network]
Building Community Wealth - Fully revised after extensive field testing, this manual from the Centre for Community Enterprise, is packed with the information your non-profit or charitable organization needs to launch and maintain a viable social enterprise. What does "ready" look like? How do we get there? What should we do now, next year and the year after that? Learn more here. [Source: CEDworks!]
Communities Under Pressure - How can organizations help individuals and communities respond to and benefit from globalization? Why should governments support some organizations but not others? How can research inform the development of best practices? This synthesis report provides some answers and suggestions for future research. Download the report here. [Source: Public Research Initiative]
Peak Oil, Marginal Communities, & You - If you don't think that our way of life will take a serious hit from the increasing cost of oil, dream on. If you do, it's time to think through how expensive energy will reverberate through the various sectors of our intricate economy. Read this article here. [Source: CEDWorks!]
Federal Investment in the Social Economy - This discussion paper, prepared on behalf of Social Development Canada, discusses the nature of the social economy, identifies issues and challenges involved in evaluating its activities and proposes a learning-oriented approach to its evaluation. The paper also presents a logic model for conceptualizing the work of the social economy, including the broad societal objectives it seeks to achieve, major types of investment and support to sustain this activity, and results for households, organizations, communities and the social economy sector as a whole. Download the paper here. [Source: Caledon Institute of Social Policy]
Women & CED - This special edition of Making Waves offers reports from across Canada (and south of the line) about the impact that women are having on community-based action. CED by and for women is re-asserting values of creativity, inclusiveness, and sustainability in economic decision-making. Each article is available in PDF here. [Source: CEDWorks!]
Break-on-Through - A study from the Crossing Boundaries National Council (CBNC) shows how smart people, smart planning and smart government can help disadvantaged communities reach the global marketplace. According to the report a "community-directed approach" to economic development could help communities who feel left out of the New Economy to participate more fully in it. Download the full report here. [Source: CBNC]
Tracking Social Impact of Solidarity Co-ops - In addition to goods and services, our "post-modern" societies seem able to generate social exclusion at an unprecedented scale. This may place the co-operative, and especially the solidarity co-operative, at a strategic nexus. As an organization that reconciles enterprise with association between diverse local actors, is the solidarity co-operative an effective way to strengthen social cohesion? Read this article in PDF here. [Source: Making Waves: Canada's Community Economic Development Magazine]
Social Purchasing Portal - An innovative partnership between merchants, suppliers, and nonprofit agencies is adding social value to everyday business purchases in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The Social Purchasing Portal closes the loop for employment development programs by building local demand for the goods and services of firms that employ their graduates. Read this article in PDF here. [Source: Making Waves: Canada's Community Economic Development Magazine]
The High Road - On the strength of 23 years with the Center for Labor and Community Research (Chicago), Dan Swinney calls upon practitioners of CED and social economy to contend for power as strenuously in the marketplace as they do in the political arena. There is now a great need to defend and develop the productive capacity that Low Road business practices have so cavalierly undermined. Access issues of The High Road here. [Source: Making Waves: Canada's Community Economic Development Magazine]
Small Business & Microenterprise an Opportunity - A brief from the Urban Institute examines small business and microenterprise programs and subsidies, and offers recommendations to improve the evaluation and administration of these programs. Small business and microenterprise are important because of their role in the economy, their role in the American dream, and their economic development and self-sufficiency objectives. They are attractive because they create more economic development and self-sufficiency than income redistribution or meeting a minimum consumption level do. However, small business and microenterprise subsidies are often criticized because they are directed toward a narrow, entrepreneurial segment of the population that is not necessarily disadvantaged. Download the report here. [Source: Handsnet Webclipper]
Strategies for Community Investment - A new resource guide from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Community Investments for Family Economic Success, offers strategies that can work to level the economic playing field for low-income families by helping communities and neighborhoods to plan, secure and direct new investment. The guide provides community leaders with a set of tools and resources for planning, implementing, attracting and financing new investment, with the goal of better connecting a community to the regional economy. Read the guide here. [Source: Annie E. Casey Foundation Family Economic Success Quarterly Newsletter]
Community Investment Study - From March to September 2003, the Social Investment Organization, a national non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of socially responsible investment in Canada, and the Riverdale Community Development Corporation, a local community economic development organization, conducted a national study of the current state of community investment programs in Canada with a view to learning how to expand the scale, size, sustainability, and effectiveness of community investing for Community Economic Development. The Final Report of the Community Investment Study and other community investment information is now on the Social Investment Organization's website. Learn more here. [Source: elist contribution by Susannah Cameron, Riverdale CDC]
Bell Canada economic development donation - Bell Canada announced a $1 million gift to Carleton University's Community Economic Development Technical Assistance Program (CEDTAP) to undertake the management of the Bell Community Economic Development Fund. The contribution will be matched by CEDTAP and the J.W McConnell Family Foundation for a total of $2 million. "This is the first time that the private and public sectors have partnered at such a high level in the field of community economic development in Canada," said Katherine Graham, Dean of the Faculty of Public Affairs and Management at Carleton. "Drawing on the different strength of the various partners, CEDTAP will mobilize this knowledge to strengthen government policy and replicate community-based models of economic opportunity and social fairness." For more information, visit the Bell Canada website here. [Source: Charity Village]
Back to top. |
