The people of Prince George are being invited to share their ideas on how to tackle persistent social problems at a workshop this Thursday.
Achieving Large Scale Change Through Collective Impact will take place on Thursday, June 9 from 7-9pm at the Bob Harkins Library branch.
The workshop will be facilitated by Liz Weaver, vice president and director of the Tamarack Learning Centre. She says it takes a community to challenge big problems.
“When you bring a community-wide effort together, whether it’s government or business or the voluntary sector and citizens, you can really move the needle quite significantly and the folks in Prince George are really interested in the model and how it might apply.”
Weaver says she’s heard a lot about the Prince George community and is excited to bring the collective impact perspective to the city.
“How do we align all this work that’s already going on in Prince George in a way that is looking at the whole community, all elements of the community. So that’s a bit of the conversation – can we find alignment and then how are we going to know that we’re successful.”
Other Canadian cities have seen significant successes with the program. According to Weaver, Hamilton, On has dramatically reduced poverty levels for more than 30,000 residents by engaging city officials, citizens, community organizations and local business.
“In Medicine Hat, AB, one of their ambitious goals was to end homelessness and they did that with the leadership of the mayor, city council and a whole number of players, including the business community. They were able to achieve that goal in a period of about five years.”
Weaver says she hopes to see a broad cross-section of the Prince George community attend the workshop.
“Each community looks slightly different in terms of their priorities but business is a critical player in this work, as are community organizations, individual citizens and government as well. It really takes a network of all of the players to identify what are the problems, what do we want to work together on and then how do we get traction to really make a significant impact.”
The workshop is free and open to anyone who wants to attend. No registration required. You can find more information on Tamarack here.
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