The Case for Place-Based Change

The are three significnat reasons to avoid community driven, local efforts to tackle stubborn societal issues. But the seven reasons to embrace the approach are far more powerful. This resource explains why.

How Field Catalysts Accelerate Collection Impact

A look at how the Tamarack Institute, one of Canada’s largest intermediary organization to support place-based change, played a role in supporting local collective impact initiatives across Canada to accelerate systems change in support of a living wage.  Check out the article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_field_catalysts_accelerate_collective_impact  …

Evaluating Social Innovation Prototypes: A Guide

Social innovators now routinely turn to the process of prototyping as a low cost, low risk and fast way to develop and test complex challenges While there are an increasing number and variety of resources  available on how to create prototypes, there are relatively few thorough resources on how to…

Developing An Evaluation User Profile

Evaluations are more likely to be ‘used’ if they are designed to address the questions of interest to the primary users of the evaluation in a way that they find credible and timely. Putting together a ‘user profile’ of those primary users is first step in making that happen.

Quality Improvement

The process of improving the relevance, quality or efficiency existing model, program or strategy is a form of incremental innovation that all change-makers should be capable of integrating into their work if and when their aim is truly ‘incremental’ innovation.  This short piece summarizes the basic ideas of ‘continuous improvement’…