Social innovation from the inside out

We are excited to share this talk that Warren gave last month at University of Cape Town exploring the organizational dimensions of social innovation. In our experience, few social purpose organizations spend much time looking at how their own organizational cultures support or hinder the kinds of changes in the world they are working so hard to create. In this talk, Warren challenges us to consider how much of our current difficulty in fostering and scaling social innovation is bound up in this disconnect. What kind of change might we create if [...]

What if an art gallery was itself a work of art?

“Is it possible that creativity in arts organisations not be limited to the gallery space?”

Anne Bertrand has been flirting with this question for as many years as I have known her. When we first met almost a decade ago, she was asking it from a place of frustration. She had spent several years working for an artist-run organization and was feeling quite disheartened as a result. How can it be, she would say to me in exasperation, that [...]

Dancing with Zenith Cleaners

I was reading through the Zenith Cleaners blog recently and came across a reflection written by our friend Tolu Ilesanmi titled Invitation to the dance. In it he describes the kind of reciprocal relationship he works hard to create with his staff, clients and suppliers.

When our first instinct is to run away . . .

I once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”

More adventures with Jonathan

Last year, we wrote a blog post highlighting the work of Jonathan Glencross. Jonathan’s approach to environmental advocacy has helped spark some dramatic sustainability initiatives at McGill University. We thought you’d enjoy listening to a TedxTalk that he gave a few months ago to an audience of 700

Distributed voice

I once worked at an advocacy and training organization where, in an effort to look more professional in the eyes of our funders and partners, it was decided that all correspondence would have a uniform look- even down to the font that we used in our emails. I could handle the idea of uniformity for [...]

Sounding

The most catalytic organizational practice I’ve encountered lately is humblingly simple. It involves nothing more than pausing in the middle of a meeting or discussion and going around the room to hear from each person how they are actually experiencing the issue at hand – right now, in the moment. It seems like an obvious [...]

Turn to wonder

Several years ago, when I was in the thick of major organizational shifts at COCo, I came home one evening in a fit of tears and with a back full of knots. I felt horrible about how things felt at work and frustrated that my attempts to move things to a better place seemed to [...]

Where do organizations go when they die?

Just thought I’d share this article that I wrote for the Centre for Community Organizations (COCo) last June. ——– A couple of years ago when we first began our restructuring at COCo, we considered the possibility that COCo had run its course and asked ourselves the question: Was it time for the organization to end? And while we ultimately [...]

Oneness

I’m seeing it again. The tilt toward everything. Most people say it is impossible. That community is always closed. That we only know where we belong when we know whom and what we have barred. In a review of several books on community participation, Malcolm Payne argues that community identity is necessarily formed through a [...]