Exploring the link between inscaping & social innovation

At the end of last year, we spent some time trying to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the practice of inscaping and the organizational capacity to initiate and sustain social innovation. Through the generous support of Nesta, we wrote a paper on the topic, which we presented to an international audience of […]

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 […]

Unbinding continued

Tana’s recent post on “unbinding” reminded me of some reflections I had made in a paper I wrote a few years ago. In a section that was actually called “The Unbinding,” I was thinking about how difficult it can be to recognize exactly what it is that binds us. For someone like Tana (disciplined, orderly, […]

Beware of applicant

The other day I was quite struck by a seemingly ordinary sentence at the end of a job posting that I received from Santropol Roulant. “We encourage applicants to drop their CVs off in person.” I was a bit taken aback, less by the statement itself than by my own reaction to it. It felt […]

Fierce intentions, humble means

Cameron’s recent post made me think of my friend Jonathan Glencross. That’s his picture on the left. Jonathan is a student at McGill who is disarmingly gifted at sparking visible, large-scale change. Last year he was the catalyst for the creation of a  $2.5 million sustainability project fund, financed and governed by students and administrators […]

In memory of Penny

Last Saturday, Tana and I went to the funeral of Penny Parkes. We had gotten to know Penny through our work with Santropol Roulant. She was a client, volunteer, and board member there and reflected the spirit of the place in a beautiful and charming way all her own. Penny struggled with a degenerative disease, […]

Oral culture and engagement

During our recent stay in Toronto, we had the opportunity to grab a drink with Mark Federman, a lecturer and PhD candidate at OISE at the University of Toronto. I had been wanting to meet him for a while after hearing that he was researching Inter Pares as part of his doctoral thesis work. From […]

Inscaping

Brandon, a teacher’s aide at Southwest Baltimore Charter School once said to me, “The weak link isn’t necessarily the person who doesn’t do the job well. It’s the person who doesn’t do the job from within or truthfully.”

This is why, I think, that the most deeply engaging organizations I’ve encountered seem to be rooted in small, daily acts of personal revelation. […]

The giving field

It seems simple now.

But I had to hear many voices say it in many different ways before it became simple to me. Two of those voices, Patrick and Louis, are from a small organization in Montreal called L’Abri en Ville:

Patrick: “Before I came here, I slept all the time. After I ate, I went to bed. […]