In 2019, The New York Times published an opinion column entitled "Winning the War on Poverty. The Canadians are doing it, we're not." In the column, they note that Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20% from 2015 to 2017. This accomplishment brought its poverty rate to its lowest in recorded history. My guests today, Liz Weaver and Mark Cabaj were part of this societal transformation. Their leadership and use of methodologies such as Collective Impact and Field Catalyst brought people living in poverty together with business, nonprofit, and government partners in hundreds of communities across Canada. By building authentic relationships, each community would learn from one another and build a shared understanding of what was at the root of their poverty. So how might we learn from Canada's transformation so that we might empower communities to overcome poverty or child neglect, and build wealth and child and family well-being? I invited Liz and Mark to have this conversation today to share their wisdom and why these approaches are so vital to community and systems change, how they should be and shouldn't be used, and what they look like in real life so that we may create transformational change for our children, families and our communities.
ICFW Podcast - Overloaded: Understanding Neglect – Season 2
Show Notes: Catalyzing Community Change - Episode 2 - with Liz Weaver and Mark Cabaj
Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
:00-:08 – Mark Cabaj – “Programmatic interventions help people beat the odds. Systemic interventions change their odds.”
:09-5:17 – Luke Waldo – Introduction to Collective Impact and Field Catalyst
5:18-6:27 – Liz Weaver – Community is at the center of everything in my career.
6:28-8:02 – Mark Cabaj – “Programmatic interventions help people beat the odds. Systemic interventions change their odds.”
8:03-8:53 – Luke – What role does Tamarack play in an initiative like Vibrant Communities Ending Poverty?
8:54-12:49 – Liz – Collective Impact: Context matters. Relationships and ambition within communities to make changes to complex problems like poverty matter. Developed a learning community within 12 communities. Process of reflection to develop a poverty matrix to understand the depth and experience of those living in poverty in a learning community.
12:50-13:43 - Luke – Taking lessons learned and frameworks from previous efforts like Vibrant Communities Ending Poverty to drive new efforts to address complex issues like climate change. What role does Here to There play in community change efforts?
13:44-17:57 – Mark – Why is clear, but how is not. Scaling. How do we take all this complexity and put it into a 10-year plan?
“Plan the work, then work the plan.” Learning by doing. Align distinct actors.
Michael Quinn Patton: “Traditional evaluation can be the enemy of social innovation and change.” Introduced us to Developmental Evaluation, real-time feedback to affirm your direction or change it.
17:58-19:06 - Luke – Putting a pin in the Developmental Evaluation conversation to revisit the challenge of meeting the urgency of the moment while also being able to take the time to evaluate what is working and what is not.
19:07-20:53 - Luke – How do we translate Collective Impact 2.0 and Lived Experience into more approachable language?
20:54-28:56 - Liz – How do we engage the people that are closest to the problems, and authentically hear the barriers and systems they have to navigate? In the Hamilton roundtable, they learned that for anyone receiving financial benefits, there were “982 rules that regulated your life.” “That’s a lot of rules to get a little money.”
Communities Building Youth Futures – Youth-led movement still requires strong allies who ask themselves how they are part of the problem and how they can be part of the solution. No blame, all accountable standard. Lived Experience Equity - 50% table of Lived Experience, 50% allies.
28:57-30:24 Luke – To address the power imbalance, we must aspire to power balance. Story about not building capacity for Lived Experience partner, giving them the language to effectively participate in the process. Balance is not achieved solely by having the same number of people at the table.
30:25-31:26 - Liz – Build Lived Experience capacity, compensate them, and create opportunities to build relationships outside of the project itself. How might we change?
31:27-31:32 – Luke – Anything to add, Mark?
31:33-34:38 - Mark – Collective Impact. It’s often a How problem.
1. Those most affected, know the most about it.
2. Ownership to create allies.
3. Nothing about us, without us.
Saul Alinsky. Human-Centered Design.
34:39-35:20 – Luke – Human-Centered Design led us to the Tamarack Community Change Festival. The ICFW initially learned from IDEO, George Aye, and the Greater Good Studio.
35:21-37:44 - Mark – Why is it important to be participatory in an authentic way to address issues of power? Participatory evaluation. Ripple effect mapping. “Practices have to be developed to meet the unique context” of our communities.
37:45-38:03 – Luke – Does “Nothing about us, without us” sound as good in Polish?
38:04-38:43 - Mark and Luke – Back and forth on the Polish translation.
38:44-40:06 - Luke – How do you define Critical Pathways, and why are they important in community change efforts?
40:07-43:45 – Liz – Critical Pathways. Access to affordable transportation in Calgary, which led to the provision of public transportation passes to low-income individuals. Each community picks the Critical Pathways that are most relevant and pressing for their community. For example, one community might prioritize affordable transportation while another focuses on affordable housing.
43:46-48:14 – Mark - What are we trying to achieve, and how can we make it explicit? What does winning mean? What is our pathway in getting there?
Pathway to employment case study, which utilized the iterative process of human-centered design. Solving one systemic problem can reveal new problems.
48:15-51:31 - Mark – Solving one systemic problem can reveal new problems. Zoom in, zoom out.
51:32-53:06 - Luke – What is a field catalyst?
53:07-53:53 – Liz – Introduces Mark’s work behind the idea of field catalysts and Tamarack 2030 plan.
53:54-56:12 - Mark – Field catalyst serves as an intermediary to move a field along from front-line work to collective impact efforts, from public awareness, to practice building, and advocacy.
56:13-59:27 - Liz - Field catalyst. How do you support the work evolution that is happening on the ground while also bringing that work up into the system?
How do you bring awareness to the system what is working and not working on the ground? This is how my work connects to the systems-level work. Making sense of the patterns to increase and accelerate impact.
59:28-1:01-48 – Luke – Reaction to Mark and Liz’s field catalyst comments. What are the challenges to community change?
1:01:49-1:05:36 - Mark – When working on systems change, the best we can hope for is maybe. Most systems' challenges are uncertain, complex problems like raising a kid. Normalize challenges and failures. Challenges or failures might be rooted in scope by trying to accomplish too much without the capacity, and/or lack of buy-in from communities as leadership comes from the outside and lacks trust.
“It’s a vocation, community change, not a recipe.”
1:05:37-1:08:53 – Liz – If we aren’t stopping to learn after each failure or success, we are missing out on an opportunity for future improvement.
1:08:54-1:09:35 – Luke – What are the key strategies or core principles of community change?
1:09:36-1:11:25 - Liz – Adapt a set of principles and tools to your context. Readiness. How deep you dive into the complexity of the challenge. Approach. Co-design.
1:11:26-1:13:42 - Mark – Self-care. We are in a systems transition, so we need to take care of ourselves, do the best we can, and hand off the baton to those who come after us.
1:13:43-1:16:37 – Luke – Closing thoughts and 3 Key Takeaways
1:16:38-1:17:34 – Gratitude and closing credits.
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Mark Cabaj 00:01
Programmatic interventions help people beat the odds, systemic interventions change their odds.
Luke Waldo 00:18
Welcome to Season Two of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore the critical pathways that lead to child and family well-being and reduce family separations for reasons of neglect. Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children's Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
Luke Waldo 00:47
In 2019, The New York Times published an opinion column entitled "Winning the War on Poverty. The Canadians are doing it, We're not." In the column, they note that Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20% from 2015 to 2017. This accomplishment brought its poverty rate to its lowest in recorded history. My guests today, Liz Weaver and Mark Cabaj, were part of this societal transformation as Co-CEO of the Tamarack Institute, and Executive Director of Vibrant Communities Canada. Their leadership and use of methodologies such as Collective Impact brought people living in poverty together with business, nonprofit, and government partners in hundreds of communities across Canada. By building authentic relationships, each community would learn from one another and build a shared understanding of what was at the root of their poverty. Then as the column describes, they launch a different kind of conversation. "First, they don't want better poor, they want fewer poor. That is to say, their focus is not on how do we give poor people food so they don't starve? It is how do we move people out of poverty? Second, they up their ambitions. How do we eradicate poverty altogether? Third, they broaden their vision. What does a vibrant community look like in which everybody's basic needs are met? After a year they come up with a town plan. Each town's poverty is different. Each town's assets are different. So each town's plan is different." So how might we learn from Canada's transformation so that we might empower communities to overcome poverty or child neglect, and build wealth and child and family well-being? I invited Liz and Mark to have this conversation today to share their wisdom and why these approaches are so vital to community and systems change, how they should be and shouldn't be used, and what they look like in real life so that we may create transformational change for our children, families and our communities. Liz Weaver is the Co-CEO of Tamarack Institute and leads the Tamarack Learning Center, which advances many community change efforts by focusing on five strategic areas including collective impact, collaborative leadership, community engagement, community innovation, and evaluating community impact. Liz is well known for her thought leadership on collaborative leadership and collective impact. And is the author of several popular and academic papers on this topic. She is a co-catalyst partner with the collective impact forum. Liz is passionate about the power and potential of communities getting to impact on complex issues. Liz joins us today from Hamilton, Ontario. Mark Cabaj is president of the consulting company Here to There and an associate of Tamarack. While studying the Solidarity movement in Krakow, Poland in mid-1989, Mark experienced a variety of tumultuous events that signaled the end of communism in Eastern Europe, including walking on the Berlin Wall with a million people the week it came down in November 1989. He worked in Poland's Foreign Investment Agency in Ministry of Privatization and served as the mission coordinator for the creation of the United Nations Development Program's first regional economic development initiative in Eastern Europe. Back in Canada, Mark was the coordinator of the Waterloo region's Opportunities 2000 project, an initiative that one provincial, national, and international awards for its multi-sector approach to poverty reduction. He served as executive director of the Canadian Community Economic Development Network before joining the Tamarack Institute and becoming executive director of Vibrant Communities Canada. Mark's current focus is on developing practical ways to understand, plan, and evaluate efforts to address complex issues such as poverty and homelessness, health and climate change, and their underlying systemic roots. Mark joins us today from Edmonton, Alberta. I would like to thank you both for all you have given to our team over the years and for the inspiration and guidance that you have given most recently to our current initiative.
Luke Waldo 05:06
Liz, in our introduction, we shared that your work focuses heavily on community and systems change. Can you share with us how you arrived at those areas of interest?
Liz Weaver 05:18
Hey, thanks, Luke. And it's a real pleasure to be in conversation with you and Mark today. Um, yeah, I think that for me, community has always been at the core of my career and my work. I've worked in a variety of different roles, you know, executive director of a Volunteer Center and at a university in the alumni department, which is really the department of community. I also worked in Hamilton for the Hamilton Roundtable for poverty reduction. And that actually led me to the work with Mark Cabaj and Tamarack. So. Yeah, it seems to me that there is so much power and potential in community, and when, and that can be both geographic community and communities of interest. But when we come together, collaboratively and say, Hey, this is something that we care about, and that we're willing to put some effort behind, you can really, you can move the dial on things. And I've seen that in real time in the work that I've done.
Mark Cabaj 06:29
Thanks, Liz. And I want to repeat a thank you to Luke and your team, for being practice leaders and thought leaders and increasingly field builders. It's great to be on this call with your team and Liz. Liz, my answers, are possibly quite the same, you know, in part informed by the good work you were doing in Hamilton when we first met. I might summarize it in a phrase I heard once, I think while at Tamarack, and that is "Programmatic interventions help people beat the odds, systemic interventions change their odds." And we all know there's tremendously good programmatic work going on everywhere. I don't, in fact, sometimes think we can do much better programmatic work. But I'm always surprised at how much we can do better. But if we want to generate deep and durable outcomes at scale, the only way to do that it's not through programs. It's through systemic change. And maybe I'll use one more phrase, Liz, you and I have both been fans of a framework. Luke, I think we've chatted about this called the Sustainable Livelihoods framework. And they say, programmatic interventions, again, help people cope with day-to-day things and improve outcomes for some, but strategic intervention, systemic intervention has changed the systems that make people vulnerable in the first place. And so that's it's really that simple for me. And I think for you, Liz, and Luke, I think for your team as well, you know that we have to zoom in on programs and zoom out on systems.
Luke Waldo 08:03
I appreciate you both sharing how you got here, our team has learned so much from both of you, over these past at least five years, in some cases, probably closer to a decade now with your work mark on the Change in Mind Institute. But it's often times a single phrase as you shared, the programmatic interventions and systemic interventions. So single phrases oftentimes can change how we think and so I really value your perspectives today. And so with that, I'd really like to start moving into the work that you have both done. And so I'm gonna start with you, Liz, can you tell us more about the role Tamarack plays in an effort like Vibrant Communities Poverty Reduction initiative that I mentioned in the introduction?
Liz Weaver 08:54
For sure. I mean, Mark could tell this story as well, because he's equally embedded in the work, he drew me to Tamarack and was part of the Opportunities 2000 work, was really experimenting with collective impact before collective impact even became a thing. And I know, we're gonna talk about that a little bit later. But in this case, Tamarack was engaged with two other partners, the McConnell Foundation and the Caledon Institute for Social Policy, in really undertaking an action learning experiment. That's how it was framed back then. And the idea was, could we from the perspective of taking a place-based approach and engage a multisector roundtable and really begin to change the experience of poverty in a bunch of places. And so we started with 12 places, and deeply, deeply learned from that experience of those 12 places and really unpack that complexity of poverty, we really learned that context matters. So that context of the community is an important one, the relationships between people in that community and the ambition of that community to undertake poverty work, all these things really mattered. One of the greatest gifts I think Mark and the team at Tamarack at the time undertook was they said to us in each of the communities that we had to undertake a poverty matrix, and a poverty matrix, what matrix was really essentially looking at the data in a disaggregated way to really understand the depth and the experience of people living in poverty in our communities. And, you know, we really can't design anything until we have that deep understanding of it. And so we started off with this action learning experiment, we had 12 initial communities that were on this journey together, we were brought together as communities in deep learning and engagement. So we were a learning community. And then the folks at Tamarack, Mark and Paul Born and Eric Leviten-Reid and others really took us through this process of reflection and thinking and considering what we might do both in our communities and then together and wove all of the pieces together. So, you know, for Tamarack, I'm now at Tamarack. So I'm now further down the road. But for Tamarack, this notion of ending poverty has been in the DNA of our work. Since the very beginning, since our inception, way back to Opportunities 2000 in the work that Mark and Paul were engaged in and continues to be kind of the biggest driver of what is now you know, diving into some related areas, including navigating climate transitions, and Building Youth Futures and Building Communities of Belonging, all of them. Our theory of change is that all of them, people who will be impacted first and most severely, are often going to be people with low, limited and no resources. And so when we think about you know, how a community navigates climate, for example, the folks on the front line in the climate crisis are going to be people without income, or with low income, or might be homeless or experiencing some marginalization in the community. So all of our work ties into this biggest idea, which is how can we, as a country truly work towards ending poverty?
Luke Waldo 12:50
Thank you, Liz, super powerful, the work that's already been done. And as you just mentioned, how you can take kind of the lessons learned, the frameworks that have shown in the past to work in the context of poverty reduction, how that framework can then be applied to the new challenges that our communities are facing, such as climate, climate change, and so on. So thank you for sharing that and kind of setting up the conversation, in many ways, today. So I'm going to turn to you Mark, and would like to ask you about your role as president of your consulting firm, Here to There, and give you the opportunity to share a bit about how you see your current role in influencing some of these community and systems change efforts.
Mark Cabaj 13:44
Sure thing. Thanks, Luke, in fact, I'm trying to draw a line of sight to our shared stories, Liz, and I think I found one between the work that you were doing in Hamilton, when we met and the work that I'm doing now. One of the things we found, Luke, when we were, we had this hunch that we could organize on a bigger scale, and it had these clumsy features like multi-sectoral and being comprehensive, etc, that we thought we think the why is clear, but we don't know the how we would do this. And that's why we engaged with innovators like Liz and others doing it on the ground, just to see what it looked like. Was this idea of what are the practices that we employ currently? The same ones that we have to employ at a big scale, like collective impact? Is it like the old practices on steroids? Or are they new practices? And Liz, I don't know if you remember, but when the time you were finishing the discovery, the preparatory stage to developing your strategy and you were quite stressed one night, when we were chatting about this, and you had asked how do we take this complexity and put it into a 10-year plan? And right the where the assumption was that if you did all this work, what we should be able to do is to plan the work and work the plan and come up with pretty rigid indicators, and then just focus on implementation, etc. So it was really like the old stuff on steroids if I could frame it that way. And I don't think it happened in one call, but you ended up and Hamilton doing something, it was really important for us as a movement. Thinking about this work, you said, actually, what we need is a framework for change with a set of starting point strategies. And you didn't use this language, but I thought of this later is kind of like a chess game of opening moves. And you need to be directionally correct, roughly, right. And you just have to start doing things, learning by doing and you would adapt to new learnings and shifts and contexts on the way and for me that revealed that there's something between this work is chaos. And or it's a consistent, traditional plan, it's somewhere in the middle, we need a coherent direction, forward around which a whole bunch of diverse actors can align, to, to achieve something together. That's you, that was an example isn't what you did. And around the same time, a fella named Michael Quinn Patton, who is a very big evaluator, he's from the States, he's very close to you, Luke, he's in Minnesota. He was also talking a little bit about how traditional evaluation can actually be the enemy of social innovation and change. And with this idea that you have to have a logic model, and fixed and rigid design features and that you want to judge from an external point of view of whether something is successful or not. And these, this deep code around traditional evaluation was actually problematic. It did, in fact, become the enemy of innovation. In the same way, Liz, that you experience, the traditional planning becomes the enemy of social innovation and change. And Michael introduced us to this idea of developmental evaluation, where the purpose of evaluation is to reflect the emergent, developmental and adaptive nature of trying to solve tough problems on scale. And it is the mission is to provide innovators like Liz and you, Luke with real-time feedback, and asking you questions that help you affirm your direction or, or cause you to change your direction, because what you're doing is using data to test your hunches on the complex work of making change. And so there's a lot to be said about developmental evaluation. And maybe we'll talk a bit about it a bit further throughout the rest of the conversation. But this different orientation to evaluation I thought was important. And what we pursue a little bit more at Here to There consulting, because if we can actually helped with that one barrier to good change work, and that is reorienting evaluation to the 21st century of solving systems. That is one part of the necessary part of the change process. So that's what we focus on mostly, developmental evaluation.
Luke Waldo 17:58
I think that one of the challenges that we often see in in our work, and I'm sure you've seen it all, in your work as well is the culture within many of the systems that we work with, directly or indirectly, child welfare, anti-poverty, work, housing, climate change, and so on. There's such an urgency in the work, that too often, those that are doing the work, don't feel they have the time to stop and do the kind of evaluation that is necessary to determine what's really going well, what's not going so well. What do we need to change? What do we need to do and do more of right. And so I'm curious as we get into some of the conversation about kind of the successes that you've seen in some of these systems and community change efforts, as well as some of the pitfalls, right, if that comes into play for either of you. So I'm going to put a pin in that we will come back to it. But I do think it's a really important point and in a significant challenge, that that we see all too often in this sort of work. So. So with that, I do want to shift into part of the purpose of today's conversation is that you all have brought to us these really powerful and impactful frameworks or methodologies, like we've mentioned. And what I'm hoping to do today is really kind of translate things like collective impact or translate field catalyst, right? So that those that are doing significant community change work, but don't necessarily live in maybe, you know, systems change kind of matrix that that we can we can make it make sense, right? And we can make it approachable because that's what you two have done so so effectively for me and for my team. And so I want to start with collective impact and particularly collective impact to point out because we are further down the road now, and I've learned a lot about the framework itself, I mentioned the role of collective impact in reducing poverty across Canada. So while I have seen a shift in our work within the child welfare system, for example, to include the voices of people with lived experience, there's still often a power and decision-making imbalance, right? They may be at the table. But there's oftentimes this kind of disconnect when it comes to the actual decision making, right or influencing of, of, you know, policy change, practice change, and so on. And so I'm curious from both of your perspectives, and I'll start with you, Liz, how can we lean more into the power that everybody brings to the table into the community change effort? And then secondly, how can we truly authentically engage with them, and include their ideas and solutions?
Liz Weaver 20:53
You know, it is a bit of a mindset shift, right? I think, you know, the thing that I've come to realize is that people that work in let's say, largely, the nonprofit or the health sector, or in other sectors, we are paid to be problem solvers, right? And so, we have this kind of mindset when we go into collective work, and we want to solve the problem, like Mark said, plan the work and work the plan. And that was the dilemma that we saw in Hamilton, these many years ago, and yet was a complex issue, really, it must be emergent strategy, right? You really have to be open to all opportunities within the framework that you've designed. And so collective impact when it appeared on the screen in 2011. It's an idea by John Kania and Mark Kramer, FSG Foundation Strategy Group, and they were really looking at examples of how community change happened. And they landed on a different way, right, which is the premise of that first article was that, you know, if you have these three preconditions, and the five conditions of collective impact, you know, common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activity, to continuous communications, and a backbone infrastructure that you could collectively use, and engage the power of community, whatever kind of communities that looks like to get to deep and durable change that population level change was the hope, coming out of the collective impact framework. And they, in their first paper, they identified a couple of approaches. And the one I remember the best is the Elizabeth River Project, which was a river I believe, in New Jersey. And collectively, they were able to turn around a very unhealthy river to a river that was regenerated, and fish came back and the ecosystem came back into place. And it was each group doing their part, right? So the biologists did their part, the business leaders did their part, the activists did their part. But everybody had to play a role in order to turn that river around because it was a fractured ecosystem, and it needed everybody playing their part, or using the lever, I use the language of levers, right, using the lever that they could move in one direction or another. So what this says about your question is, you know, how do we lean into people who are connected most directly with the problem and really authentically hear their voices? And this was what we were trying to do at Tamarack in the early days of Vibrant Communities was to really engage with people with the lived and living experience of poverty and trying to understand from their lenses and from their perspectives, the barriers that they were navigating around, or the systems that they were navigating around in order to be able to exist in a community. And I'll tell you one story. So one of the things that we learned in Hamilton in the early days of our roundtable was that if you were a person who was receiving social assistance in Ontario at the time, and in Hamilton at the time, you had to obey 982 different rules. So these were rules that had been set up by the federal government, by the provincial government, by the local government, by agencies in the community who were delivering programs and services. Some of them had more recent but some of them had a history of 20, 30, 40 years and might not even be relevant, but those 982 rules really regulated your life. And so that for us was a big aha moment. Right that, wow, that's a lot of rules to get a little bit of money and why were they even there? And were they still relevant? And you know, who made that rule? And could we change that rule and what might happen if we tried to change the rule who needed to be engaged in the conversation, and that notion of these 900-plus rules came from people with the lived experience of poverty, and some allies who had done some research, they had some allies at the university, and they started to uncover that. And I, I think, you know, when we start to engage in conversations with people who have lived and living experience, whatever that experience is, we start to understand more directly, how they navigate community and what they find in community and what frankly, doesn't work for them. And I think you need that 360 lens. So you know, we more recently did some work around Communities Building Youth Futures, and it was youth-centered work. But what we learned in that process, which is kind of interesting is when you put youth at the center, sometimes the allies move around, move away from the table, because they want it to be youth-led. And I think that, you know, in order for true change to happen, you need to have, you know, Mark talked about this multisector approach, but you do need to have both the individuals who are experiencing deeply whatever it is you're trying to shift, but you need the allies surrounding and supporting and engaging, and asking themselves, how they are both part of the problem and part and can be part of the solution. So, you know, I think that it's a mindset shift for everyone. In this case, you asked for a really practical solution. And at the Hamilton roundtable, one of our values as a roundtable is that we are a no-blame-all-accountable table. Because the reality is that when you're dealing with a complex issue, like poverty, the blame game can go around to every person around the table. Government doesn't do enough, businesses don't have job opportunities, the nonprofit sector has all these restrictions because of funding people who live in poverty, etc. So everyone can be blamed. But we're not here to blame. We're here to hold people to account. And that's where solutions kind of come to the forefront. So yeah, those are, those are some of the things that we explored. When I think Mark and I wrote the paper Collective Impact, we call it 3.0, actually, where we were saying, hey, it's it's authentic engagement is such a critical part of this work. And it's beyond continuous communications. It's really about authentic engagement and hearing the voice. And the way we did that practically in Hamilton was our table was set up with 10 people with lived experience, 10 business leaders, 10 government leaders, and 10 nonprofits. And that shifted the nature of the conversation. So often communities will invite one or two people in with lived experience. And that's not enough. And Jay Conner, a person that Mark and I both know, would argue that actually, you should have a 50% table, 50% of people with lived experience and 50% of allies to really get the right balance. We didn't get quite that far in Hamilton. But we did through this kind of breakdown of the four sectors we did get significantly further ahead in the conversation.
Luke Waldo 28:57
So what I'm hearing, Liz, is that to address the power imbalance, you in fact have to aspire to actual balance. Yeah, pretty, pretty novel concept, this idea of let's make sure that we have as many people at the table with lived experience as those who are coming from professional or business or governmental lens. Right. And like you mentioned, I think a lot of systems work right now at least here in the United States, or more specifically here in Wisconsin. That's still an uphill climb, right? We are still just getting, I think, not necessarily comfortable but maybe more confident with the efforts to, to make sure that the playing field is level. We recently hosted a series of roundtables and invited our lived experience partners and I've gotten feedback from one in particular that she didn't have the language for the breakout room that she was in, we had not supported her in building that capacity to, to be able to speak the same language as she pointed out and right if we are not taking the time to empower our partners to be able to bring their own voice to the table, it doesn't matter if we have, you know, an actual numerical balance or not.
Liz Weaver 30:24
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that Luke, and it was very brave of her, that person to share their perspective with you. I think what we've learned along our journey is that there's also things like preparing people in advance for the conversation, compensating them for their time, their wisdom, their expertise that they are bringing to the table, being very thoughtful about what other opportunities you might provide for training and deeper learning, creating opportunities where we get to know each other as people, not just around the process, or the product that we're aiming towards. So all of those things, we have to kind of build into this work, have community change. And really be quite thoughtful about it right and think about okay, so how might we change as a result of, you know, trying to do this work a little bit differently in our communities?
Luke Waldo 31:27
Thank you for that. Mark, would you like to add anything to what Liz has shared?
Mark Cabaj 31:33
We've chatted about before, the collective impact, in some ways is a set of principles, more than anything, and rather than a concrete set of practices, and part of the reason I think, Liz, that we wrote 3.0 is to encourage people not to get locked into a certain manifestation of the practices that they were seeing in the world, but to think about the principles and that the principles themselves could evolve. So in some ways, Liz, I remember saying, it doesn't really matter what we write, really, I mean, we have to write something good. But we just want people to keep thinking about principles, and to not just think for cookie-cutter solutions. And that's sort of how I think about this issue, Luke. Number one, we have to frame why participation in power changes matter. And then saying, and then there's a whole bunch of how problems it's not easy to do, but the why is not going away. So when we blow a tire on how and we do all the time, it's not such a wide problem, it's a how problem, we have to just keep working at it, because it's not that easy to do. And Liz touched on some of the why why, number one, on a complex issue, no one can impose a solution on their own. And those who are most affected by it, number one, have the most insight and empathy into what the nature of the problem is and how it manifests itself and what the solutions might be. Number two have to feel some kind of ownership of the issue because they can quickly become enemies, not allies, or change champions. And number three, that age old principle that is actually from the Polish Constitution in the 1500s. Nothing about us without us. That's a very old political statement from at least 500 years old. So the why of this, there's a whole bunch of whys and the how that we employ the principle being participatory and sharing and disrupting of power. That can change quite a bit. And this is where people have to use their expertise to say, here's our context on the ground. And what's the best way to manifest this. Liz gave you a really good example, Liz, of how you manifested this at a stewardship level on your collective impact table. And I know that we've all had other moments where sometimes that doesn't work as well. It looks formulaic, right? And then you're saying, well, you're inviting businesses and people with lived experience into a nonprofit/governance modality and they don't like the language and it doesn't feel good. Sometimes that's true. But that's not the only way to manifest the principle. It might be. I know that there's different traditions for empowerment, and participatory models. Luke, we Canadians, learned quite a bit from Americans, including the history of Saul Alinsky around community organizing and community mobilizing, saying we will absolutely empower those most affected by it to do a power analysis and to talk about issues that matter to them and to organize to pressure the systems that are generating exploitation in the first place to respond. That is a tradition. Many people also employ concurrent to and they're not mutually exclusive, an orientation to human-centered design. And Luke, have you worked, have you used some of that in your work?
Luke Waldo 34:40
We have and in many ways, it's what led us to the first Tamarack Community Change Festival years ago in in Toronto, where I first met Liz. We had started to explore human-centered design, from the IDEO and George Aye days. And then of course, we met George in person for the first time in Toronto, although he lives just south of us in Chicago. But yes, it was really in many ways, kind of the, the entry, the entry into more work with Tamarack was through the human-centered design approach.
Mark Cabaj 35:20
Well, I thought so, Luke, maybe I'll just use that to illustrate the way I think about this. Let's remind ourselves of the why, why is, why is it important to be participatory in an authentic way? And to deal with issues of power, there are principles about how to do that, that are all over the place. There's lots around diversity, equity, and inclusion. And there's a whole manner of different manifestations of practice that require one to be thoughtful about which ones would work and what combination here there's lots of different practices. So why principles and then illustrate our practices. But there's lots of ways of getting at this. And we've all got lots of examples of how those practices work and don't work. Actually, maybe Luke, if you don't mind, I'm going to give you one example of how this manifests itself in evaluation. So it's very easy to say let's be participatory in the evaluation. And in fact, if you pay attention to the evaluation process, you can probably all the way from the scoping of an evaluation initiative to design in the testing of the methodology might use to the implementation of the methodologies to making sense of it, you can find innumerable places for highly participatory methods. And, you know, let's just pretend it's around the act of gathering data. Well, I know you've heard about ripple effect mapping, ripple effect mapping is based on the idea that when you intervene into a complex system, you get a splatter of effects. And the word splatter is deliberately used, some of them are intended, some of them are unintended, there's no way in heck, that you as an innovator, and or evaluator can see them all. So you have to go talk to diverse stakeholders, particularly people on the frontline and experiencing this, to understand what the ripple effects have been, and to reconstruct the ripple story, most significant change, outcome harvesting, etc. These are all participation-oriented methodologies that are firmly rooted in the why you can't do good evaluation without 360-degree view intelligence, you better generate ownership for the findings, and the conclusions rests, no one's going to use it. And it is simply a right for people to say nothing about us without us. So principles, and why are important practices have to be developed in a way that fits the unique context in which people operate.
Luke Waldo 37:45
Nothing about us without us, you know, certainly has become a core principle I think of of the work that we're doing, again, easier said than done. I guess the biggest question is, does it sound as good in Polish as it does in English?
Mark Cabaj 38:03
You let me show off. That's what I'm asking. And I know, I know where you live, you have a lot of Polish immigrants. It's called "Nic o nas bez nas". "Nic o nas bez nas", nothing about us without us. And it was all from Polish democracy. 10% of the people had the vote. And they said to the king, you cannot enact legislation without asking us and getting our input.
Luke Waldo 38:28
And it does sound just as good. It may even sound better. Awesome, thank you. Thank you for sharing.
Luke Waldo 38:44
All right, well, we're going to shift lanes a little bit, because and this is not necessarily a framework, or a model as tidy as as some that we've discussed. But it's been really important in how we are organizing our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities Initiative. And that's this idea of critical pathways. And so last year, our team spoke with both of you to share our progress in our first year or first phase, which we call the building a shared understanding phase. And we asked you how we might organize what we learned in a manner that would empower our community partners to come together to focus on and develop collective solutions. Liz, you shared this idea of critical pathways that had been kind of integral in the Vibrant Communities Ending Poverty initiative. And so I'm curious. First and foremost, how would you kind of define in a, in a practical sense, critical pathways and why are they important in community change efforts? And I guess more specifically, Liz, if you want to, again, lean into some of these examples, how did some of your local initiatives or national initiatives like Cities Ending Poverty, utilize critical pathways to kind of increase their impact?
Liz Weaver 40:07
I think this really comes from that evaluation and learning work that Mark and Eric Leviten-Reid identified many years ago with the formation of Vibrant Communities and Communities Ending Poverty, or we call it at that time Communities Reducing Poverty, and then we got bolder. But it really as you looked across the experiences of multiple communities, what were the pathways that kind of came up over and over again, and the, the kind of theory was that if we could explore these pathways, maybe it would look different in different communities. And not every community would adopt that pathway. But they might be able to do things in their own community that move the needle on that pathway. And I think a really good example of that, in the early days of vibrant communities was came out of the city of Calgary where they identified affordable transportation, access to affordable transportation as a pathway. And we're able to encourage their municipality to provide bus passes, low-income bus passes, right, or low-income transportation passes for folks who live with low and limited income. And so transportation has always been one of those kind of areas that if you can't get around your community, you've experienced more barriers to engagement with an of your community, whether it's around employment, whether it's around health, whether it's around access to services, that kind of thing. So Calgary was able to do that. And then that had, as Mark just talked about the splatter effect, right, the splash and ripple effect across other communities. There are eight pathways that have now been kind of really focused on the last number of years. Income is of course a pathway, transportation continues to be a pathway, food and food security and access to healthy and nutritious food is a pathway. And so while every community picks the ones that are most relevant to their context, they're those pathways are pretty predominant. And every year, the Vibrant Communities, Communities Ending Poverty produce a report that really illustrates the pathways and the work that's being done at the local level, but ties into the National Poverty Reduction Strategy and some of the net less goals that we have observed happening at the at the federal level, but also at the provincial levels as well. So it becomes a really useful frame for communities to think about how their work unfolds in their own community. And Mark has such a great story about how a pathway might also uncover different things that are related. So a pathway around employment for homeless individuals, uncovers and reveals in a system, some of the barriers within the system. I don't know, Mark, if you want to just share the story that you share a lot with, with folks about the employment pathway.
Mark Cabaj 43:45
You want me to get into that story. And in fact, Liz, I think a version of it is in a book that you helped write with me and some others called Cities Reducing Poverty as one of the case studies. Actually, as I share that story, Liz, maybe I'll also confirm from a different angle, the evaluation angle loop that we've chatted about before about why getting clear about your pathway is important. And we've used that phrase before that a quote that we got from Jay Conner, a story about Francis Ford Coppola, when he was asked, What's the difference between a bad movie and a good movie? Because he's made both he referred to goes Oh, you probably the chances that you make a good movie are improved when everyone on the movie set is making the same, the same movie. And what happens when you have complex change initiatives with lots of stakeholders is you actually have a lot of people making different movies. They're all showing up at the movie set, but they have a slightly different understanding of what they're trying to achieve and how it's implicit. It's fractured. It's all over the place. And it's actually quite wobbly when you look at the composite of what everyone's doing and part of the job of developing good strategy and evaluators remind you of it. If it's not there is, what are we trying to achieve? And how can we make it explicit? And Simon Sinek has said something similar recently in his book, The Infinite Game, where he gives us the metaphor that unlike a lot of the way we're trained in, in our professions to think about, here's the game where we're playing. And here's what winning means, and who the actors are, when you're dealing with the kind of stuff, Luke, that you're dealing with you and your team and Liz that Tamarack is engaged in trying to address we're playing something called an infinite game. There's a lot of people playing different games, trying to achieve different things with different rules and actors that come and go. And when you're curating a change process, you actually have to assume leadership for helping people to come to some conclusion of what does winning mean, and what is our pathway to getting there. And to making that explicit, and people need that kind of shared narrative to move forward, and Liz, we've talked lots about this and collective impact. That's why that phrase backbone function, doesn't seem hardly enough. It's really a convening and a stewardship and a curation of a change process that is required. And part of that mission is, can we agree what winning means and how we're going to get there. So Liz, you've got so many of those stories. So do you Luke, about when you have and when you don't, maybe I'll just touch on it ever. So briefly, given I used up a bit of time, reconfirming why I think pathways is so important. The process in Surrey began with the pathway that focused mostly on reducing homelessness, and through a process an iterative process that was guided by now what we would call now call human-centered design. They develop their own pathway, by learning by doing rather than setting it out in advance. And the method they used was what we would now call human-centered design, because they said, there's 250 homeless day laborers in Surrey, let's actually find out, get a worm's eye view about why they're homeless and get insight and empathy with about what the conditions are that are preventing them from achieving homefulness, they called it and then zoom out and deal with the systems that caused that homelessness in the first place. And they actually went through a process of 18 months a process of solving one problem, systemic problem, which then revealed the nature of another systems problem they had to address. So they began the journey by saying, let's just go talk to people about why they're sleeping rough. Turns out that most of the people that were sleeping rough were actually employed already during the day, and they actually had night jobs that prevented them to get into the shelter on time. There were actually many of them working in the construction industry, doing cleanup at construction sites late at night. And so by the time they got to the shelters, the shelters were closed and be required demonstration of a welfare receipt to say that they were vulnerable. That was their proxy for eligibility. Well, they were working, they don't have a welfare receipt, and they're coming in late at night. So the group pulled together a bunch of shelters and said, Hey, here's a systemic policy problem for different shelters. Here's, here's the nature of being a homeless day laborer. And here's the friction with your policies, would you change them? In that one meeting, all four shelters changed their policies and regulations. So then they said, let's keep going and finding out what we can learn. And it turns out that homeless day laborers actually worked for temporary construction companies, who at that time in 2005, ish, we're getting 18 bucks an hour for hiring these folks. But the folks were getting nine bucks an hour, they were getting roughly 50% of the take. So the group said, this seems pretty good. Let's zoom out and solve the system's problem. They convened a meeting again with some of the temp agencies, and they asked them the same thing. Could you change your practice? Well, the evidence was, and I was there for this, they showed us their books. And the data said, not only is it a predatory practice, they're taking 50% of the wages. It's also a crappy business, because their books were quite weak, even using predatory behavior. They had a marginal business. So we learned something that's developmental evaluation, we learned more about the systems that we're trying to change and the system, systemic patterns that keep them in place, and replicate the problem. So we said we can't reform this part of the system, let's do a workaround. So we actually called a lot of the company, the companies that were using temp agencies, and they said, would you use nonprofits who are already providing employment services to fulfill the intermediary function, and they're not going to take a 50% cut all the way just go to the employees? They said yes. So that was part of the innovation. It unfolded, we didn't anticipate that it was like peeling away an onion, we uncovered something new, which led to a tremendous improvement in wages for a good number of people. That was terrific, but Liz knows this story. we inadvertently by solving that complex issue created another one, because companies wanted to pay with automatic deposit. And if you're a homeless day laborer, you actually don't have a bank account, because you don't have an address, a fixed address, etc. So, third time around, we zoomed in and got that worm's eye view of what it was like to be a homeless day laborer and their day-to-day experience, zoomed out and tried to solve that systems problem and actually held a meeting with mainstream banks to show them the problem. And they were quite empathetic. But they said, they don't have enough autonomy to change their banking practices, because Canadian banks are centralized, we don't have a lot of the regional autonomy that US banks do. So they had to go to the credit unions. Another workaround and the credit union said, we'll do that. And they together created a suite of project financial products for those who are homeless and vulnerable and working poor. And this process goes on and on and on, as Liz knows, and so it was sort of a process strategy, wasn't it, Liz, let's zoom in and zoom out. But the pathway itself actually emerged over time. And now there's a lot of groups who are actually using that pathway with homeless day laborers, the homeless day laborer pathway is to create patched income, ensure access to financial services and banking and provide a continuum of housing, including housing first, but also shelters for those who are not yet ready to go into the housing first modality. A pathway was created by using the emergent strategy that was talked about earlier.
Luke Waldo 51:32
Thank you, Mark, for sharing that. I think it helps illustrate the infinite game oftentimes, as we solve some problems, we may discover new problems or in some cases, as you've pointed out, maybe creating some new challenges that we didn't anticipate. I think it's important. Well, while it may, may be frustrating to some listeners, that when we solve problems, we we discover or create new problems. It's it's a reality that we we certainly have to face. So thank you for sharing that. So I want to tackle another newer concept that you both introduced us to this past year. And so going back to those conversations that we had, as we were reflecting on how to transition can from this first phase of building a shared understanding into these critical pathways, we had a lot of questions about what our role would or could be, to bring together all of these different kind of collective impact efforts, these community-based efforts that were happening across our state of Wisconsin, and you brought up an article that you had co-authored very, very recently about a field catalyst. And you had, you had coauthored this article, How Field Catalysts Accelerate Collective Impact in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. And so I asked either of you to just share what a field catalyst is, and what role it plays in a systems or community change effort.
Liz Weaver 53:06
So we had been working on our Building Youth Futures work. And Mark was commissioned by the Government of Canada to kind of think about, you know, the contributions of a variety of different organizations around changing futures and outcomes for young people and field catalysts work was kind of implied in there. And it's something that I think, you know, we've also been thinking that at Tamarack as part of our Tamarack 2030 plan, which is our strategic plan, but again, brought to us by Mark in terms of engaging us in that thinking process. So Mark, why don't you start and I'll add.
Mark Cabaj 53:52
Sounds good, Liz. And what I'll do is I'll just frame the general idea, and then allow you to share what it means practically for Tamarack, which is one of many field catalysts in the in the field. And Luke this is an interesting conversation, because I think, this idea, the idea here is that in order for change to happen, there's multiple scales of activity that have to happen all the way from really good frontline work in programs and services, then creating collective impact efforts at another scale that address systemic issues that no one organization or program can deal with on their own. And if you think about the field, there's a lot of people doing frontline work that can often use the support of an intermediary. And an intermediary organization is that kind of organization that intermediates provide support functions to all those changemakers on the ground, kind of like a chamber of commerce, if you will, for a business except a lot more intense than that. And the US has a very long history of intermediaries. local investment is listed. But there's financial intermediaries. There's research and development intermediaries etc. A field catalyst says not only are we are we going to provide direct support to local organizations doing this work like Tamarack did for 12 or 15, or now, how many is it 70 collective impact initiatives across Canada, Liz, but also takes responsibility for moving a field along. And doing whatever it takes to catalyze the ecosystem to make it easier to do that work on the ground. That could be public awareness, practice building, advocacy, etc. And so what we're wanting to do is celebrate the fact that most change-making happens on the ground in a place-based space, at least in our field. But in order to do that, we need this sort of background infrastructure to animate and amplify all that work going on. And the reason we did that for Tamarack is we thought, well, not only that, is that what Tamarack does, but you actually have to understand the role of that really well in order to better evaluate and to better fund it and manage it. And so, Liz, over to you, it was a lens of thinking, what does it what do we see when we look at Tamarack as a field catalyst? And you had a whole bunch of insights about that?
Liz Weaver 56:12
Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I mean, I think it provided for us clarity around the work that we were doing. And we're in the process right now of exploring it even deeper, when you're following the work of the Bridgespan Group in the US around, you know, how they think about field catalyst. But you know, there is something unique at Tamarack, right? It's this kind of how do you support the evolution of work that is happening on the ground, but also bringing that work up into the system and saying to the system, hey, system, here's a barrier you might have, or here's an opportunity for you to explore something new. And we really see it, you know, from Tamarack's perspective, we see it more as a movement building catalyst, right, that there's an inward focus on our organization's button, and our partners, but not enough to the exclusion of others. And so that's probably why we've had conversations with you, and so many others, Luke, about field catalyst, because we do believe that, you know, it's not just Tamarack's work, right, there are so many others that are in the field catalyst space, and the more that we can begin to share language and share ideas around this space. And, you know, the more we can look at both holding, and helping and engaging communities in the conversation, and then looking to the system to shift the practical systems, opportunities that might exist, more impact we can have, individually and collectively. And I think, you know, for us, that's, that's the power of field catalyst. It's also I think, been very helpful for us and our staff team, to say, hey, oh, this is how the work that I'm doing, when I'm connecting with the community on a daily basis, this has helped my work connect into the system's level work, because so often we can have the downward view but not necessarily the upward view as a system. And so it's a it's a kind of a cool way of thinking about, Oh, okay, so I'm hearing from Calgary and from Nova Scotia and from Yellowknife, these patterns that are the same and so there's obviously something in the system that is either a barrier or an opportunity. And it's, it's kind of being in tune to that learning and sense-making that we started off with, at the beginning of this call, right, that whole notion of kind of making sense of the patterns, and then thinking about how the patterns might be utilized in a way to get an even deeper impact. And that, for me, is the kind of core of the field catalyst and I think is the thing that we're exploring, as we engage in conversations both internally at Tamarack with our team and our members, but also with other people like yourselves and the work that you're doing, you know, for children and families in Wisconsin.
Luke Waldo 59:27
Thank you both. I think that gives me certainly a much better sense as to the role of field catalyst can play but also the, as you pointed out, Liz, the the importance of building right more and more kind of field catalysts around us right that that not one single organization can kind of shoulder that burden, right? And do so successfully. So I think it's a good transition into my last couple of questions was kind of, you know, summarize at some level, because you've told many, many, I think, really important stories today that illustrate both the potential, the successes that come from these models, as well as some of the real challenges. And I want to start there with some of the challenges, particularly those that I see us already facing in this initiative that is, you know, still quite young. And we were, we're trying to remind ourselves to be patient that this sort of statewide change does not happen in 18 months. The other other challenge that I note, right now with the field catalyst role is not just those that we're partnering with, in taking the time to evaluate their progress, or evaluate where things have gone awry, but also are kind of limited capacity as a small but mighty team, of being able to really kind of archive, and more importantly, share those lessons learned with partners across the state. To your point, Liz, right. Like, you know, if if something fantastic is happening in Black River Falls, which is a small rural community in western Wisconsin, that could be leveraged down here in Milwaukee, in the big city Milwaukee, we have to find a way to not only one capture what has been done in Black River Falls, but also effectively share it with those change makers here in Milwaukee and across the state. And so I'm curious from your perspective, you can riff off of what I just said, or you can go in a totally different direction. But I'm, I'm curious what kind of what causes community change efforts to stumble or fail?
Mark Cabaj 1:01:48
Luke, I want to maybe normalize this idea of challenges and failure. I think you read the book, you know that we refer to a lot a book called Getting to Maybe: How the World Has Changed. And it's a book on social innovation. And it's a book about sort of charismatic leaders doing social innovation, not necessarily full communities, but they have some really important principles there. And they're contained actually, in the title of the book, when, when you're trying to solve a complex problem, the best you get is maybe you do it, there's nothing guaranteed about it, there's nothing you can do. In fact, they use the metaphor of complexity as raising a child, as you know, Luke, and the kind of the anecdote goes, who's got kids. And you know, a lot of people do have kids. And then you say, how many people have a strategic plan for their kids? And people laugh, because it's some people usually say I have one, but it's not working. And then you'd say, what do you have, instead of a plan, you say, I have a whole bunch of principles, and I have a commitment to raising a good child, and we have relationships, and I keep trying different things, that even when they work, they don't work forever, because I change my kid changes and the context changes. And so what they're really focusing on is the idea that you have intent, relationships, do you do the best you can. And just like raising a kid, you can do everything right, and the uncertainty of the outcome remains. And you can actually do a lot of things wrong, and you still get good, good, good outcomes. And so for me, the reason I like that metaphor is, all we do in this work is getting to maybe and it's endemic, with things that don't work out. There's innumerable challenges. And so we shouldn't be wigged out by that. That's just the work. And so I know that Liz, when we were doing Vibrant Communities Canada, we in the first decade, we were trying to normalize this, and we actually had, Luke, we had a little section called sad stories. And we did them with the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. And we were actually trying to normalize when you're doing collective impact efforts. What were some of the things that you that kind of help that led people to blow a tire and not being able to proceed, and one of them was, one group was trying to be comprehensive in their work, and they had 63 priorities. And they had community voting on those priorities. They had tremendous ownership. But the challenge was, it was so comprehensive that the initiative imploded under its own weight. You can't manage that many people working on that many things over time using conventional methods, there was too many people, and their structure wasn't good. So it was really traditional planning on steroids. And so that was a challenge. There was another group and another part of Canada that had a very good plan and strategy. But they were not from the community or the neighborhood that they were trying to help mobilize, which was very sensitive to outsiders coming in. And so they weren't considered credible conveners. And so everything was right. Except they were not from the inside. They did not empower the community, and therefore, the thing didn't work out. It didn't even get off the ground. So there's another challenge. I'll give you another one. We had a group that had done one or two cycles for your campaigns of poverty reduction work, and they tried to do it again. But they actually didn't spend enough time developing buy-in on the new strategy. And so the new strategy looked like a lot like the old one. And it wasn't compelling enough. And it wasn't reflective in the new context in which people were working. And they lost credibility in the community and buy-in and ownership relatively quickly. And they had to fold for a while. And so I don't know, if I can give you a list, and I think Liz, you've got your own list, but there's gonna be challenges, they're not going away. And our job is to improve the probabilities that we can get around them. And when we stumble in and you get up again, and you keep going. It's a vocation community change. It's not a recipe.
Liz Weaver 1:05:37
Um the only thing that I might add is another kind of piece of wisdom that has been really helpful in the work that I've been doing. And this is to look at things like ecocycle or an adaptive cycle, right. And mostly, we think of things as linear, you start, you grow, and you get to success, or you get to some kind of outcome. But in fact, it's much more of a circular journey. If you think about an eight on the side than the figure eight, but turned on its side, forget what they call it, there's some you probably know that Mark, but it is thinking about, yeah, we start things and they go up the performance curve as Mark likes to refer to them. But then they get a shelf life, right, then you get to the point where even if you work harder, even if you get a little bit smarter, that you're still going to hit that the top of the performance curve. And then you have to do the backwards curve, strategy, which is, you know, creatively disrupt or go into renewal of something, and then that creates a space for ideation or new ideas to emerge. And so the backwards loop is as important as the frontwards part of the loop. And I think, so often what we do in this work is we only focus on the front part of the loop the performance curve, we don't focus on the renewal part of the curve. And we you know, the other things that we've learned is that there are traps in in between each of those four stages of work. And, you know, there was one call, I think Mark referred to it earlier, when I was in Hamilton. And I said to Mark, oh, my God, I'm in this endless cycle of planning, planning, working the plan, developing a plan, thinking about the logic model for complex problems, like poverty, and, and the only way that we could get out of that trap, it's called the scarcity trap, the only way we could get out of that trap was to say, here's our good enough starting point strategies, right. So there are ways that you can get out of these traps. But it's also very helpful to know that this work is more circular than it is linear. And that, that having an understanding of that, and the traps that are embedded in each of the parts, gives you hints, but not necessarily the paths forward but gives you ideas and helps you kind of maybe prototype and think of your path forward. So I agree with Mark. And the only other thing I would say is that if you do hit a challenge, or if you hit a wonderful success, if you don't stop and say what are we learning from this challenge or the success that we've encountered, and you're just, you're missing such an incredible opportunity for, you know, that continuous improvement or for that next thing that will come along. And so, I know it takes time to stop and learn, but it's pivotal to this work.
Luke Waldo 1:08:52
So I think that's a great final transition into essentially the distilling out of all that has been shared, if you did have to kind of distill out the kind of key ingredients, right, are those core principles, as Mark has discussed earlier, that you believe are really critical to systems change, community change success? Right. And I know that, that that is a loaded term, right? But when we feel like we are making that progress, what does that look like? What are what are those core principles? What are those kind of key strategies that you've learned over the years in doing this work?
Liz Weaver 1:09:37
I think that thinking about frameworks as principles is a really essential one and probably stealing that one from Mark, but I believe it right collective impact is not a process. It's a set of principles and its principles adapted to your environment. So I think it's principles but adapted to your client Texas a really important thing that I think about all the time, I think a lot about readiness, because not every place that where we think change should happen is ready at the way that we want it to be ready, right. So we really have to consider readiness. And then another thing I think I think about a lot is, depending on how ready places are, it's really how deep they dive into the complexity of the challenge. So as collective impact has a set of preconditions and conditions, when we think about community change at Tamarack, we think about readiness, context, complexity, and then approach. And those are kind of framing for us around this work. And then, you know, we put out there a lot of tools, but tools are really, you know, does this tool work for you in your context, right. And so we'll never say there's one framework or one tool or one approach, it's really, here's a bunch of things that we've experimented with, here's where they have worked, here's where they've stumbled. But what might work in your context is, I think, the best way is that we enter into the space and always in a co-design modality. So over to you Mark.
Mark Cabaj 1:11:26
Well, I won't be able to match loses ability to summarize a lot of the kind of key features of good change processes, nor the volume of material on the Tamarack website, Luke, but maybe, for me, it's an orientation. That's possibly more than just a technique, it's maybe self-care right now. Everyone in our field, not everyone, but probably be most people are desperate for systems transformation, and in a better world. And the problems are, the challenges are stubborn, and they seem to be getting harder in some ways, because of polarization. And you know, we've got climate change, etc. And so it doesn't seem to be getting any easier. And I think for me, the issue is while we might seek that kind of change, and have to be the best we've ever been. Nowadays, if we're interested in systems change in transition, our job is not to actually transform the system and to change the systems on our own. We are unavoidably involved in a process of systems transition, right systems transition and kind of get disentangled and re-entangled over time. It doesn't just happen once things are happening around public awareness, narratives, worldview, belief systems, changes, niche innovations capacity being developed, we have that example of the multi-level framework with the story about the parents, I don't know if you remember, we did that story about the parents look about saving parents and St. Lucia, change happens over time. And our job is we're not here to we have we're not here to write the book on change. We are here for one chapter of it, maybe two. And our job is to take our zone of influence and time our resources and be the best we can be within our chapter, and create the conditions for the next group to do an even better chapter because transition and change takes a long time. So let's have those big ambitions. But let's be a little bit easier on ourselves saying Do the best you can with the time and resources and energy that you have. It's bigger than us, and hand off the baton to group number two who probably can build on our successes and even do more than we could.
Luke Waldo 1:13:42
I can't thank you both enough. It's it's been a true pleasure. I am forever grateful for all the guidance and support that you've given to our team. And I'm hopeful that our audience will take some time to benefit in some way, shape or form to drive change in their community. So thank you, I will end there. Say goodbye and we'll talk to you again soon.
Luke Waldo 1:14:19
I hope that today's episode and insights from our experts have you thinking more about how we might approach community and systems change, so that we may improve the conditions for overloaded families and reduce family separations for reasons of neglect. Before we go I wanted to highlight three key takeaways to reflect on as we move into our next episodes. 1. As Mark stated early in our conversation, programmatic interventions help people beat the odds, systemic interventions help change their odds. This statement serves as a solid foundation for the second season, as you will hear stories about the programmatic interventions that have helped caregivers build skills to navigate crises, and better cope with stress. You will also hear stories about systemic interventions that can improve the conditions for families so that crises and stress are less likely to occur in the first place. 2. Nothing about us without us, those most affected by our systemic and community problems know the most about it. Therefore, as Liz shared, we must build trust with our individuals with lived experience by creating equity through equal representation at the decision-making table, building their capacity, so they may be able to truly participate ,and commit to an accountability not blame approach to engaging with one another. 3. If community and systems change is an infinite game that reveals new challenges after we solve systemic problems, we must be clear about the pathways we take to align with one another and build collective strength. Recognize the small steps forward, celebrate the progress and triumphs. And remember that community and systems change take time. Give yourself grace, when things don't go the way you'd hope, take care of yourself, and keep walking that path towards better. Thank you for joining us for today's conversation. We hope that you will come back and listen next week as we continue to explore the critical pathways that lead to child and family well-being and reduce family separations for reasons of neglect. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also, if you rate us on whatever podcast platform you listen to us on, it makes it easier for others to find us. To learn more about the experts that you heard today, visit the show notes, which is where you will also find links to sources or information that were mentioned in today's episode. This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Carrie Wade, who is responsible for our technical production and original music composition. I can't express my gratitude enough to carry for all she has given to this project. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being at Children's Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities Initiative, and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast. Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and to all of you and the commitment to improving the lives of children and families. I'm Luke Waldo, your host and executive editor. Thanks again for listening and see