Community Navigator Work

This last month, in partnership with the Denver Foundation’s M. Julie Patiño, Barclay Jones, and LaDawn Sullivan; Joby Schaffer wrote an article featured in The Foundation Review. The article, Community Navigation as a Field of Practice: Reframing Service Delivery to Meet the Needs of Communities’ Marginalized Populations, calls out lessons learned through the Basic Human Needs Navigator …

Three Tips for Making Network Analysis Actionable for Your Social Impact Project

Many of our partners have adopted what Jed Miller and Rob Stuart called “Network-Centric Thinking.” They recognize that long-term sustainable progress on today’s social problems rarely comes from the efforts of a single organization. Rather, progress requires a strategy involving networks of organizations with the aim of producing network effects. However, the strategist and evaluator’s …

Is Google Fusion Tables Right for My Social Impact Project?

What do the Colorado Farm to School Task Force and a Denver-based Community Navigator initiative have in common? Well, beyond the fact that they’re projects looking to make a big change in the world, they’re both initiatives that rely heavily on the idea of “place”. In our last blog in this series, we explored how …

Data Mapping as a Tool for Change

Place matters, and whether or not we explicitly or consciously use the term “place-based initiative,” it describes much of the work we are undertaking right now. In essence, a place-based initiative is an effort to address an issue in a specific geographic area; instead of trying to solve the issue for everyone, everywhere, you focus …