Building and leveraging capacity for collective change
Our Approach
Our primary activities are: mapping community assets, connections, and stories related to community resilience; and building relational capacity by cultivating dynamic forms of governance, systems thinking, and increased awareness.
We aim to build community relationships around the shared interests and common goals that emerge; and to organize the networks, partnerships, and working groups that form into a collaborative Guild.
Our goal is to use the connections and capacities within the Guild to co-create prototype initiatives and “labs” that gather feedback and deepen understanding of systemic issues through participatory action research and collective impact.
The CRG will provide the organizational structure and resources necessary to grow these actions into vibrant and sustainable communities of practice committed to strengthening local resilience.
“Often it is relational innovation, not intellectual, that it is important, because otherwise you would often think that what is needed are new ideas. New ideas are not in short supply, but what is in short supply is coalition, people who are willing to work together to implement the ideas.”
– Adam Kahane
Services
Mapping
Working with stakeholders to understand the systems in which they work “connecting the dots” which may include:
- identifying different stakeholders working on common causes;
- organizing, and making readily accessible resources that exist
- developing resource guides; and
- examining and making visible relationships between issues – how they impact one another (circular causality) – to enable broader and deeper understanding of key dynamics within a given system.
Assessments and Research
Leading processes of participatory action research that: convene stakeholders working on similar issues; identify and articulate current challenges; and develop strategies for addressing them. The focus of this kind of research is first and foremost on producing actions that seek to achieve concrete changes while also ensuring a process of systematic inquiry that results in learning and enhanced institutional capacities for sustaining the work.
Network Building
Convening stakeholders and providing backbone support for collaboration on systemic issues across sectors and disciplines.
Capacity Building
Promoting tools, trainings, and capacity building processes that seek to strengthen individual and institutional capacities.
Process Design and Facilitation
Designing events and processes for bringing together stakeholders working on similar or related issues to explore possibilities for networking and collaboration.
Identifying and catalyzing new and emerging initiatives
Where opportunities are detected to support new initiatives, we seek to facilitate funding and provide platforms for innovation – sandboxes of collaboration and experimentation that we sometimes refer to as “prototyping labs”.
