Description
Join veteran community organizer Paul Born with Tamarack Institute Co-CEOs Liz Weaver and Danya Pastuszek as they celebrate the launch of this new book, Breakthrough Community Change, and interview special guests who have experienced population-level change breakthroughs in their communities and beyond.
The Book
In his latest book, Paul Born has captured the Tamarack Approach for large-scale change. This approach has contributed to lowering cancer rates in Maine, improving mental health for young people in Florida, and reducing poverty rates in some Canadian cities by 50%.
Tamarack was recently recognized with the Schwab Foundation Collective Social Innovation Award, which highlights the practices written about in Breakthrough Community Change. In his book, Paul was able to capture how this approach catalyzes local communities and guides them to make significant progress on seemingly intractable community problems.
Tips for Success
Born and Tamarack have found that the secret to success is to organize and unite around a common agenda. This is not a list of topics, like a meeting agenda, nor is it a strategic plan; it is a process for bringing leaders from business, human service organizations, and government together with people who have a lived or living experience of a specific community problem.
A common agenda is a statement of shared aspirations, a map of the assets in the community, and a roadmap for how to work together to make those aspirations a reality.
Part I of this book describes how to identify your community’s readiness for change, form Leadership, Action, and Strategy Teams, create a common agenda, and establish plans for community engagement. Part II presents the approaches and skill sets needed to do the work described in Part I.
The Importance of Thinking Locally
Remarkably, enormous systemic problems like climate change, poverty, disease, racism, housing and many more issues can be best addressed at the local level. Communities can develop solutions tailored to their unique circumstances and can collaborate at a magnitude that can result in truly transformative impact. This book shows how it is done.
What people are saying:
"Award-winning social entrepreneur Paul Born is one of the most creative anti-poverty leaders of his generation. Unwilling to surrender to a problem many consider intractable, he brings singular commitment and expertise to the fight. In Breakthrough Community Change, he shares those insights with organizations, equipping them to collaborate, change failing systems and achieve impact at scale."
– Melody C. Barnes, Chair, Aspen Forum for Community Solutions; Executive Director, Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia; and former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Administration of President Barack Obama.
"Paul Born, the [former] head of the institute, emphasizes that the crucial thing these community-wide collective impact structures do is change attitudes. In the beginning, it’s as if everybody is swimming in polluted water. People are sluggish, fearful, isolated, looking out only for themselves. But when people start working together across sectors around a common agenda, it’s like cleaning the water.”
– David Brooks, from his article "Winning the War on Poverty" in The New York Times