The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence for the Social Sector, by M.K. Gugerty and D. Karlan. Oxford University Press. New York, 2018; 312 pp: ISBN 9780199366088 Mary Kay Gugerty and Dean Karlan’s The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence for the Social Sector is a book that all social, public, and impact investing sector stakeholders should read….
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas. Knopf. New York, 2018; 304 pp: ISBN 9780451493248 Juniper Glass: I didn’t think I would like this book. I had a knee jerk reaction to the slickness of both the title and the author’s hairdo.[1] And, I must admit, by how much…
Later this year, Canadians will vote in the 43rd federal election. Many non-profit organizations, networks, and coalitions see elections as a critical opportunity to raise relevant public policy issues. Recently, the rules for charities engaging in public policy have become a prominent source of debate and discussion in government and the sector. As we countdown…
In November 2018, Mowat NFP and the Community Safety Knowledge Alliance hosted Innovation in Evidence, a conference on evidence-informed policymaking. Internationally, evidence institutions like What Works Centres have been transforming how evidence is used in the policymaking process to address “wicked” social problems, ranging from social isolation among seniors to policing interventions for crime reduction….
The internet has changed how we consider information: vast amounts of it are available, information accessibility is amazingly rapid, and digitalized information is immediately ready for machine use (Lenczner, 2012). Companies are directed to view in-house data as critical to achieving “a sustainable competitive advantage” (Niemi, 2013, p.1). The internet and emerging technologies facilitate and…
Cap in Hand: How Charities are Failing the People of Canada and the World, by Gail Picco, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-927375-41-9 The Canadian charitable sector impacts all of us through the messy business of living and dying in the shifting political, religious, business, family, and social contexts of this 21st century. Any…
Ottawa has become a source of optimism and opportunity for the nonprofit sector. It’s worth re-reading that sentence and thinking about how different the situation was a few months ago. In the wake of controversial charity audits and questionable funding announcements, the relationship between the sector and the federal government was tense and lacking in…
Summary: Since the 1960s, the field of evaluation has struggled to develop concepts and methods that are useful for the complex work of community change. The ambitious nature of the latest iteration of community change approaches, Collective Impact, amplifies this challenge. This article describes five simple rules that have emerged out of 50 years of trial…
Summary: Liz Weaver from the Tamarack Institute was able to catch up with John Kania and Fay Hanleybrown from FSG at the Champions for Change—Leading a Backbone Organization for Collective Impact conference held 1-3 April 2014 in Vancouver, British Columbia. John and Fay share their recent experience and latest thinking about Collective Impact in this interview…
Summary: Shared Measurement is a critical, and some think challenging, component of Collective Impact and in this article Lee Rose argues that we already have significant community knowledge, but that the power of community data to support and drive change lies in how we need to look differently at how we use and share these resources….