The morning started at 8:00 with a session on community planning processes and tools where Tamarack coach Garry Loewen gave us some excellent information and tools for future work.
This was followed by a dynamic presentation by Brenda Zimmerman on "community, complexity and collaboration." Brenda teaches at the Schulich School of Business and is the founding Director of York’s Health Industry Management Program. As well, she is one of the co-authors of Getting to Maybe: How the world is changed.
The evaluation workshop I attended in Calgary in June featured the other two co-authors, so I feel very fortunate to now have heard each of them speak. They have tremendous messages for practitioners, funders, and evaluators, on how we need to change how we approach complex problems like poverty, homelessness, etc. Read more on the link above.
In the afternoon, I attended a second session by Garry on "comprehensive strategies for renewing communities," which again yielded good information and some useful aids. Garry brings a wealth of community experience and practical help for community development work.
I was sorry to miss the concurrent session by Mark Cabaj on "capturing and making sense of collaborative outcomes," but managed to get the handouts and will confer with others who attended. Mark lives in Edmonton so I might have the opportunity to hear him another time. And as an evaluator, I have worked on this issue of how to work with complexity and uncertainty and to surface and document the really interesting parts of a project while attending to measuring the outcomes it was supposed to attain. This all has application to the work done by municipalities when they develop or participate in collaborative efforts.
The days are long but the sessions and conversation are highly stimulating. With these long days packed with so much learning from the sessions and from other participants, it reminds me of the modules I attended during two years as a SEARCH participant--exhausting but invigorating.
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