Day Four of the Communities Collaborating Institute
Today was our last teaching day with the Communities Collaborating Institute. We focused on large-scale collaborations to address big endemic community problems such as poverty. Wednesday evening Mayor Naheed Nenshi announced an initiative to reduce poverty in Calgary.
There are several such initiatives in major cities across Canada, and this morning we heard about a collaboration in St. John, New Brunswick that has been working for seven years to eliminate poverty there. In the first four years they were able to reduce poverty from 27% to 20%, but they don’t yet have the statistics for the past three years that will measure their overall progress.
Tom Gribbons emphasized the importance of having clear problem definitions and outcome measurements. He told us the specifics of how they define poverty, how they measure results, and how government, business (he focused especially on the business involvement) not-for-profit and civilian sectors were all involved. He mentioned that we often limit the involvement of the business community by seeing their contribution primarily as funding initiatives. However, the business sector can also provide expertise and hands-on help such as mentoring.
In large-scale change, no one sector can make a significant impact without the other sectors’ participation. Hard work, commitment and strong, collaborative leadership are essential for these big initiatives to make progress. They take many years to get established and to begin to show results. A long-term plan is vital to success.
The plan to end homelessness here in Calgary is a 10 year plan. I do not know how many years it took before the plan even got established, and this is a very significant part. Finding the right people who have influence in the community and a passion for the project is essential. Then these people have to commit to spending time together to get to know each other, learn about the issue/problem (make no assumptions), involve the experts (the homeless who know about the problem so they can teach the team developing the program) and then learn what is working and what is not. One of the presenters this morning said, “If you end up implementing the initial plan you have not learned anything along the way, and have probably not succeeded in doing the right things”.
Community engagement is what this institute was all about. We do not just do something to people or something for people; we participate with people to create a better community for all of us. In Calgary a multi-faith alliance is just forming. Their approach is to invite people to join the alliance as participants. They invite you to get to know your neighbours and the other participants. First we need to find a community of people who are interested and committed. After that we will search out what we can do together to make our communities flourish.
While we may think that our city is already a wonderful place to live, if we look closer we will see people suffering and not being supported in their struggles. And we will also understand that the gifts and strengths we enjoy are vulnerable too –unless we intentionally share our own gifts with others. Community engagement is not just sharing with our friends or a group of like-minded people; it is finding ways of getting to know others and building bridges across boundaries of class, race, religion and or age so we support the diversity of our community.
Spiritual Directions is an inclusive personal and spiritual growth centre that is developing plans for training and supporting leadership that can transform communities. If you would like to know more please contact John Griffith at john.griffith@spiritualdirections.com .
