What Makes RESET Communities Unique?
Key learnings were gained through collaboration with local leaders (with or without a formal title) and through our own and others' practice-based observations and experiences in communities across Canada and beyond.
A Different Kind of Compass
We don’t offer communities a fixed blueprint or treat complex challenges as isolated single issues. We help communities understand and strengthen the wider system of relationships, capacities, assets, institutions, resources, and conditions that shape those challenges and their solutions.
RESET’s framework brings together:
Our role is to strengthen the leadership, relationships, hope, confidence, knowledge, resources, and enabling infrastructure that allow communities to create and sustain their own change.
RESET is values-led in its commitments, adaptive in its pathway,
and locally owned in its application.
We also verified that a different kind of collaboration is needed...
Collaboration is essential but there are different types....SYSTEMS COLLABORATION is the most challenging, but also the most critical, for addressing today's complexity.
Systems-Catalyst Leadership and
Social Capital
Additionally, there are often two missing critical elements that need to be in place to improve social, economic, environmental, and cultural wellbeing:
- Local, neutral cross-sector connectors or systems-catalyst leadership is required to bring sectors together and ensure a whole-community or ecosystem approach to innovation and transformative change.
- Acknowledgement that social and systems innovation needs to be fueled and scaled by public, private, and philanthropic capital.
R.E.S.E.T. Communities Collective increases responsiveness to complex challenges and opportunities by collaborating with multiple partners to provide a variety of support and services that enhance social, economic, and environmental well-being.
Future-readiness is increased by supporting capacity for (1) community-driven development, (2) systems-practices, (3) strategic foresight, and (4) AI and digital optimization. We've learned these four components are necessary for the project and systems collaboration and informed decision-making that are essential for transformation and innovation.
Innovative approaches require being bold, perseverance, tenacity and a sprinkle of panic.
-- Michelle Baldwin
Many situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you start walking. You don't need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started.
--James Clear
Leadership today is about courage. Courage to realize our challenges are complex and no one individual, organization, or sector can resolve them on their own. That means we have to let go of the idea that we alone have the answers. Instead, we need to strengthen our individual and organizational competencies in order to become system-catalyst leaders who call meetings before the answers are known, aren't intimidated by messy, and can ensure a culture where all voices are heard. Only then, can our collective gifts, experience, and wisdom be focused on building a better future for all.
--Brenda Herchmer
In times of change it is the learners who inherit the future. Those who have finished learning find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
-- Eric Hoffer
