Making Progress
Here at the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council, we recently hosted our annual working retreat on Friday April 1st. Our theme? “Thinking, acting and changing like a movement”. And did we ever!
You might recall that during our community consultation in 2009, community members told us they didn’t know how to be involved in the work of crime prevention other than to be at the Council table. With a Council table of 40+ members, and growing, we came to the realization that this would be unsustainable and not conducive to supporting a more community based movement for social change oriented crime prevention. We very quickly developed a plan to review, revise and restructure the way we operate in order to broaden the opportunities for anyone, from the grassroots to the highest levels of decision making, to become involved in the work of crime prevention through social development.
This work at our retreat day was significant in helping us make progress on our Smart on Crime Priority Direction for Organizational Design. We were able to reflect on the specific characteristics of networks that fit for the way we need to work and created several achievable action steps that can be taken by our network in the next year in order to realize the characteristics.
Our facilitator, Eli Malinsky, of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, designed a day of exercises and thoughtful reflection to help us think beyond being just a network of 40 connected organizations to a more community based movement.
Our work with Eli was also heavily influenced by an article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review called Collective Impact and we will continue our exploration over the next year, of systemic approaches that coordinate action across our community.
Eli also wrote about his reflections and insights on our work together. They can be found here. If you are interested in similar work from the Centre for Social Innovation, you might want to check out their Sandbox workshop series.