My Favourite Community Change Resources

by Liz Weaver, Tamarack Institute:  https://www.tamarackcommunity.ca/latest/my-favourite-community-change-resources

Image: comnetwork.org

Many of us working in community change efforts are continually searching for new resources and tools to help facilitate effective community engagement and community change processes.  Over the last several weeks, some of my favourite twitter leads have shared their lists of sites that they regularly visit for tools and resources. 

In the Tamarack Learning Center library, you will find a wide variety of tools useful to collective impact, collaborative leadership, community innovation and community change efforts.  A simple way to access these tools is to insert the word – tool – in the search function on the home page of the website and a list of Tamarack tools will appear. 

Additionally, Tamarack welcomes posts from our Learning Centre network. We are very interested in the tools and approaches that you have found to be particularly impactful. 

In addition to the Tamarack tools, here are some websites that we like where you will find tools, resources, approaches and thinking that you can use in your community change efforts.  

• Co-Creative Consulting – This is one of our favourite tool resource websites. Co-Creative Consulting makes their tools open source.  They are interested in community change efforts and improving community change processes. In addition to tools and resources, Co-Creative Consulting also engages in consulting and training in collaborative innovation. 

• Liberating Structures – For those of you working in systems change, this website is one you will want to bookmark. The Liberating Structures website provides links to 33 tools for engaging communities in systems change strategies. The tools are useful for large and small groups. 

• Ontario Trillium Foundation Knowledge Centre – Recently launched, the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) Knowledge Centre focuses on the six people priorities of the OTF as well as sections focusing on measurement and open data. OTF invites community members and partners to contribute to the conversation on the website. 

• Service Design Tools – This website was suggested by Galen MacLusky as a site that he visits regularly. The Service Design Tools website is an open collection of communications tools used in design processes for complex, systems change work. For those of you wanting to improve communications across diverse partners, this website has some great resources. 

• Beth’s Blog – Beth Kanter writes extensively about the power of networks and community impact. In a recent blog post, Beth wrote about eight facilitation playbooks for designing effective meetings. This list of resources and links focuses on effective meeting processes. One website on the list that intrigued me is Hyper Island contains 75 tools to improve engagement and meeting processes. 

• Chris Corrigan – is someone you might want to follow. In a recent post, Chris provides 70 links to websites, tools, and processes which focus on group process methodologies, process architecture and maps, suites of tools, and specific learning resources. 

For those of you wanting to build your tool kit, these links and resources are useful to improving processes and engaging stakeholders. Take the time to practice new tools and approaches.