Group items tagged

A series of posts on "What is….?" which are about concepts and practices relevant to working with communities written by Graeme Stuart, of Sustaining Community Engagement, whose work has been featured on the this blog a couple of times.

NCVO champions and strengthens volunteering and civil society, with over 10,000 members, from the largest charities to the smallest community organisations. There are thousands of voluntary sector organisations in the UK. There are millions of volunteers. Every day, across the country, people give their time, energy and money. And for over 90 years, NCVO has brought the voluntary sector's people together: to solve problems, address root causes, and inspire each other.

LLGA offers you a program to inspire your city, build international recognition, gain in-depth market intelligence, learn from other leading cities and create growth opportunities for local businesses. Every year we interview 300+ cities to select the most committed partner cities for the LLGA program. By identifying opportunities for improvements early on in the process and inviting a market response, LLGA delivers an average of 10 times more intelligence on inspiring new solutions. Pilots are proven to deliver an important learning experience to city leaders and other stakeholders.

Founded in 1991, Living Cities is an innovative collaborative of 22 of the world's largest foundations and financial institutions. In nearly 20 years Living Cities members have collectively invested almost $1 billion, helping shape federal funding programs, redirecting public and private resources, and helping communities to build homes, stores, schools, community facilities and more. However, our members are not simply funders. They shape our work and priorities by participating on the Living Cities Board of Directors, four standing committees and three working groups. In sum, our members contribute the time of 80-plus expert program staff toward improving the lives of low-income people and the cities where they live. - See more at: http://www.livingcities.org/about/#sthash.Wkj6TLk6.dpuf

Few Americans are aware of the steady build-up of innovative community wealth building strategies throughout the United States. Community-Wealth.org brings together, for the first time, information about the broad range of community wealth building activity.

Climate Interactive is a not-for-profit organization based in Washington DC. Our team helps people see what works to address climate change and related issues like energy, water, food, and disaster risk reduction. For example: We're long-time partners with the U.S. State Department and analysts for the Chinese government. Our tools have helped them assess and communicate the impact of their government strategies. We've helped NGOs and businesses improve their thinking and communication in the UNFCCC climate negotiations. We're helping development agencies in East Africa design better strategies to reduce the number of people displaced by extreme events and slow onset disasters, like droughts. We work alongside the scientific community to build an understanding of what climate change means for society and the impacts our actions have on finding solutions.

This beta version of the site is only the start. Over time, its functionality will be steadily enhanced. The cluster organization database will be enriched with additional information about those organizations who want to share their profiles and activities. Geographical mapping capabilities will be dramatically enhanced. A broad range of comparative data about regional business environments will be added. And the site will provide a growing library of resources and tools to enable practitioners to make the most out of the data available.

The time has come for policymakers to begin using innovative technologies to analyze data exhaust to protect communities from multiple slow-onset crises that threaten to reverse hard-won progress in human development

It's our mission to supply a live stream of continuous, accurate data and insight into what people are thinking and doing all over the world, all of the time, so that companies, governments and institutions can better serve the people that sustain them.

It's time for the arts to get the respect and the resources they deserve. It is becomingly increasingly obvious that the arts make major contributions to the quality of life of our communities and societies, but it is also clear to us that arts have a major role in helping us discover those innovative ways of operating and being with each other that will allow us to build a truly sustainable future.

Founded in 1991, Living Cities harnesses the collective power of twenty two of the world's largest foundations and financial institutions to build a new type of urban practice. Together, we are working with cross-sector leaders in cities to develop and scale new approaches to dramatically improve the economic well-being of low-income people. Our investments, research, networks and convenings catalyze fresh thinking and combine support for innovative, comprehensive, local approaches with real-time sharing of knowledge to accelerate and deepen adoption in more places.

Organisations all over the world are holding governments to account, challenging corruption, and demanding the right to transparency, and they are using digital technologies to do so. Why should every organisation have to write their software from scratch? By sharing code, we can make things quicker and easier, freeing up time for the important things. More about Poplus

Group model building (GMB) is a participatory approach that is widely used to build the capacity of practitioners to think in a systems way. However, it is a resource-intensive approach that requires high-level buy-in and the investment of time. We discuss the evidence, including a systematic review of the literature examining the effectiveness of GMB approaches across a wide range of contexts. The results of the review are generally positive and suggest that GMB improves problem understanding, increases engagement in systems thinking, builds confidence in the use of systems ideas and develops consensus for action among diverse stakeholders.

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Logistic Equation Generator

The Underworlds project is the first of its kind, and a proof of concept that cities can make use of their waste water system to do near real-time urban epidemiology and understand human health and behavior with a fine spatio-temporal resolution. Probably the most obvious first application of smart sewage technology is infectious disease surveillance, and the prediction of outbreaks.

About the Course: We have re-opened our popular introductory course indefinitely; all units will be open once the course is launched. You will be able to complete this course at any time of the year and receive a certificate. There will be a course instructor offering office hours and monitoring the forums to support your complexity learning journey. 

Development in the 21st century demands access to information. At a time of tight budgets, libraries offer a more efficient, smarter way of doing development. Most countries around the world, regardless of their size or level of development have public libraries. Beyond Access is starting a movement to make them all hubs for economic and social change. We believe that libraries power development.