Group items tagged

The Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) is a package of resources and activities that enable groups of people anywhere to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for problems impacting their community. The toolkit provides a dynamic framework that integrates knowledge and action to solve challenges. Designed to harness the benefits of group action and the power of open sharing, the activities draw on each participant's strengths and perspectives as the group works to accomplish a common goal.

We're innovators. We're curious. And we're dissatisfied with the status quo. We're dedicated to strengthening the field of practice that bridges health and communities. Bridging Health & Community aims to transform how we approach health so that it goes beyond health care and public health to include fostering community agency. Based in Seattle, WA, with an office in London, UK, we do our field-building work through convening and coaching. We share the fruits of our work with a view to further describing and strengthening the field of practice that bridges the health sector and those that foster community agency. We met through the Creating Health Collaborative, an international group of innovators exploring health from the perspective of communities. By sharing our work through the Collaborative, we learned of the critical link between a community's ability to make purposeful choices and its health.

With his very honest, stark, and poignant perspective, Chuck deconstructed our nation's infrastructure maintenance deficiencies and compared our current pattern of development to a bonafide Ponzi scheme. For example, California needs an additional $37 billion per year just to maintain our existing highway system. Like experiencing Springsteen's "Nebraska" or Boston's City Hall for the first time, Chuck's message weighed heavily on the audience as he painted a bleak picture for our economic, social and cultural landscape.

If you read the headlines, listen to the pundits and the president, you would think that we are about to enter into a manufacturing renaissance in this country. Suddenly, it has dawned on many companies that this country might actually be a pretty good place to make things after all.

ABOUT THE KETTERING FOUNDATION The Kettering Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan research organization rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Everything Kettering researches relates to one central question: what does it take for democracy to work as it should? Or put another way: What does it take for citizens to shape their collective future?

The foundation explores ways that key political practices can be strengthened through innovations that emphasize active roles for citizens. Kettering's research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people collectively can do to address problems affecting their lives, their community, and their nation.

Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule." Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras. What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler (by an order of magnitude as determined by a metric called Situational Complexity Index) situations of that bygone age. The Information Age challenges us to make participative democracy a liberating force in the world today. Research and proven methodology, aided by networked computing, has resolved at least one basic dilemma of democracy:   How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, make collective sense of them, and reach decisions and act on pressing issues? The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). The Agoras Institute convenes these dialogues as Co-Laboratories of Democracy. This process is a fusion of the theory of Generic Design Science and the consultative practice of Interactive Management, both developed over the last 30 years by Dr. John Warfield and our founder, Aleco Christakis.

The Center for Active Design is a nonprofit resource for design professionals, policy makers, real estate developers and community advocates, committed to promoting and expanding the Active Design Guidelines published by New York City in 2010. We maintain a multi-disciplinary perspective in the translation of health research into design solutions that amplify the role of architecture and urban planning in improving public health and well-being.

The Social Innovation Labs started in 2012 in partnership with the Bush Foundation. In the past two years, more than 1,200 community change makers have participated in 11 lab events. Each lab has had a different theme, but all of them focused on the following overall goal and strategies: Our vision: All Minnesotans thrive in a socially just, ecologically sound, and economically sustainable ecosystem of social innovation. More about our vision: The fruits of the ecosystem and the cultural soil that makes it possible: visioniconStrategies to move toward this vision: 1. Learn new tools and ways of seeing things 2. Advance innovative projects 3. Connect with other change makers Simple rules for the Lab: 1. Bring an open heart, mind, and will  2. Listen to the part, whole, and greater whole 3. Attend to difference, privilege and disparity 4. Tango with different perspectives to seek unexpected sparks 5. Invite a balance of creativity and structure 6. Honor commitments

OK, this post is already way too long, but one final thing. Physicists, I think, become even more drawn to economics when we look into economics and see broad resistance to research pursuing this "complexity" perspective. It seems instead that most of mainstream research tries to get around system complexity with mathematical tricks, rather than facing up to it. I'm thinking about ideas like representative agents, or rational expectations. The assumptions make it possible to build models without having to deal with the complexity of interactions and the emergent structures they create; but the resulting models, naturally, look very pale and questionable as models of anything real. When physicists see that a small minority of ("heterodox") economists also find the standard approach hugely limiting, they feel an urge to help out. And they believe that some of their ideas can help.

Grassroots Grantmakers is a network of place-based funders in the United States and Canada who are working from a "we begin with residents" perspective - supporting active citizenship and building civic capacity at the block level in their communities with scale-appropriate grants, a highly relational style of grantmaking, and a learning orientation. Funders in our network are working to strengthen resident-controlled associations, and help people that come together because of a shared interest in improving their block, their neighborhood, or their community to be a stronger voice for change and community vitality.

I love systems thinking - it's one of the best tools we have to develop a more detailed, dynamic and divergent perspective of the way the world works. I hope that these words and insights from my years of working with and teaching systems, sustainability and design can help you develop a systems mindset as well.

SFI's Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research effort is creating an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative synthesis of organizational and dynamical aspects of human social organizations, with an emphasis on cities. Different disciplinary perspectives are being integrated in terms of the search for similar dependences of urban indicators on population size - scaling analysis - and other variables that characterize the system as a whole. A particularly important focus of this research area is to develop theoretical insights about cities that can inform quantitative analyses of their long-term sustainability in terms of the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption and the make up of their social and economic activity. This focus area brings together urban planners, economists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and complex system theorists with the aim of generating an integrated and quantitative understanding of cities. Outstanding areas of research include the identification of general scaling patterns in urban infrastructure and dynamics around the world, the quantification of resource distribution networks in cities and their interplay with the city's socioeconomic fabric, issues of temporal acceleration and spatial density, and the long-term dynamics of urban systems.

The Laundromat Project believes art, culture, and engaged imaginations can change the way people see their world, open them up to new ideas, and connect them with their neighbors. When artists have the opportunity to build and contribute their unique skills and perspectives to the needs of their neighborhoods, they can be invaluable assets in furthering community wellbeing. 

At IDEO, we're often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We've developed this website in response to that request. Here, we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You'll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution.

Design, implementation, and evaluation are typically treated as separate functions dealt with sequentially by different people with different roles who don't communicate with each other. At the heart of the Blue Marble perspective you'll find a pattern of breaking down silos, integrating separated functions, connecting people and places, and creating linkages across time. In that spirit, Blue Marble evaluation focuses on integrating design, engagement, implementation, and evaluation of programs and interventions of all kinds, especially initiatives working on making global systems more equitable and sustainable.

We build capacity among individuals, teams, communities to deal with the complexity of day-to-day existence. In public and private Adaptive Action Labs, we guide clients through innovative design, implementation, and assessment cycles to find breakthrough responses to intractable issues. In research and writing we create and disseminate perspectives, models, and methods for thriving in the 21st century.

"Economics in universities is narrow, uncritical and detached from the real world. It is dogmatically taught from one perspective as if it is the only legitimate way to study the economy. There is no room for the critical discussion and debate that is essential for any student to engage with real world economic problems. Seminars are focused on memorising and regurgitating academic theory, whilst exams test how well students can solve abstract equations.

This blog is part of the economics project of the London Mathematical Laboratory. We're re-deriving formal economics without making the ergodicity assumption. That means questioning 350 years of scientific history, and of course much it is quite technical. But beyond the technical side, we've found that this generates a broad perspective, a culture maybe, that seems worth sharing.

To succeed, organizations must blend digital and human capabilities. BCG's diverse, global teams bring deep industry and functional expertise and a range of perspectives to spark change through leading-edge management consulting as well as data science, technology and design, digital ventures, and business purpose. We work in a uniquely collaborative model across the firm and throughout all levels of the client organization to deliver results that help our clients thrive.

But here's the paradox: the immune system that has given large institutions extraordinary resilience in the past may be the very thing that makes these institutions so vulnerable today.