[On-screen text: The importance of learning and international examples of place-based success
Insights from Mark Cabaj, international community change expert
President - Here to There Consulting (Canada)
Associate – Tamarak Institute]
[On-screen text: How can we adapt and learn while in the middle of a place-based approach?]
Mark Cabaj: That really is critical this idea of learning as you go and learning in real time.
And so if we don't over plan our place-based support mechanisms—and we have the tendency to do that—so if we don't over plan then the learning potential really grows.
And that is to jump in and say in real time learning so what are we learning about what's going on?
What are we learning about the context in which we're working about the systemic nature of the problems we're dealing with?
What are the contextual factors that hold this problem in place?
Where are the strengths of leadership and where the limitations of leadership?
What's working and not about our own interventions and our own strategy?
What's going on in the environment that we can that we can deal with?
And this really is strategic learning, learning in real time about everything that's going on around us and then asking the question ‘what? So what? Now what?’
Part of that asks us to also do something that doesn't come naturally to most people—and certainly doesn't come easily to government—and that's to identify, acknowledge, and embrace and adapt to failure.
So failure is not an aberration and tackling complex issues it's endemic, it is guaranteed to happen.
If you're not failing it’s because you're not doing anything.
So we want to fail on a scale that's survivable.
You don't want to take big unnecessary risks.
But how do we build the muscle and the culture to identify, spot failure and learn from it—really learn from it?
So sometimes people say I have a lesson and then they actually do the same mistake over again, which means it wasn't a lesson learned.
So you may have heard about this one of my favorite examples of how groups can do this is to force themselves to admit and learn from failure by writing something called a failure report.
Maybe we could actually get good and adapt that basic idea and talk about developing failure memos.
Would it be interesting for a group to get to get together and just say we're never going to publish this memo but what was the failure, why did it occur, and how did we manage it to cope with it while we did it and what would we do next time?
So real-time learning, strategic learning, and hopefully acknowledging failure is a real big part of it.
But that's not all.
The last thing I think we should say about this is despite all those terrific practices out there for—and there are a lot—we also have to demonstrate that we're willing to adapt to learning.
So if we find out that our original strategy—our original open move—was either not the right one or things have shifted so much that it's no longer the relevant one, we have to adapt.
[On-screen text: Examples of government place-based approaches, and key lessons]
[On-screen text: Example 1 Finland health promotion]
Mark Cabaj: So Finland has some of the lowest rates of type two diabetes and heart disease in the world and the reason they have that is partially because of national diet, etc.
But their national diet isn't that much better than Canada and Australia is, at least in the rural areas.
But through place-based work with different regions and communities and counties they have a health promotion push that is second to none.
And they have recorded population-level reductions in a whole bunch of areas of physical health.
So Finland it's not a place we often go to first but it's a place that don't be surprised going there that you're going to see population level changes.
[On-screen text: Example 2 Canada Homelessness
Mark Cabaj: So partly because of deinstitutionalization of mental health services—number one—increasing poverty and increasingly high cost of housing—which you guys have here in spades—there's a lot of people who live on the streets now.
And they may not be as visible in Australia where the weather is warm.
But when you're living in a cold weather climate like Canada, you have to be in the public eye because you need someone to take care of you if you're freezing to death.
So it's very apparent in cities across Canada—such as Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton, and Vancouver.
In Alberta the government supported and amplified community-based social innovation in the area of ten-year plans to end homelessness.
Community started that, but government came with a better policy package and a new pool of investments that accelerated and amplified their work.
And they did such a great job—and it's captured in a ten-year plan to end homelessness at the provincial level that supports the seven cities—that many cities have recorded dramatic reductions in poverty.
My city of Edmonton—1.6 million—has a recorded reduction in eight years of 47 percent and the smaller city of Medicine had has for two years running completely eliminated chronic homelessness.
When someone doesn't have a home, or they're found not to have a home in someone spots that, within seven days they have an apartment with wraparound services.
[On-screen text: United States of America – Education and juvenile justice systems]
Mark Cabaj: So Strive the partnership in Cincinnati has recorded across multiple measures population-level changes in academic achievement across multiple counties.
The region of Connecticut—the state of Connecticut—working through place-based initiatives has actually done such good work on reducing incidence of juvenile criminal activity that they've closed down their detention centres, right, and they've diverted people from a traditional system.
So they've seen population level changes in getting people out of the system with no increases in recidivism or crime rates.
So a terrific case study, I think the list goes on and on and on.
Focus on almost any domain, throw place-based in and you're going to go on a journey on the internet and find some kind of good story.
So I think people can feel agnostic about what the issue is.
When you're thinking about complex challenges though they almost always have a place-based dimension.
And therefore almost all the time there's an ability to use place-based approaches to help make meaningful progress.
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