Using a Positive Lens to Explore Social Change and Organizations PDF Download

Author: Karen Golden-Biddle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415878853
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 525

View

Book Description
First Published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: Alnoor Ebrahim
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503609219
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 341

View

Book Description
The social sector is undergoing a major transformation. We are witnessing an explosion in efforts to deliver social change, a burgeoning impact investing industry, and an unprecedented intergenerational transfer of wealth. Yet we live in a world of rapidly rising inequality, where social sector services are unable to keep up with societal need, and governments are stretched beyond their means. Alnoor Ebrahim addresses one of the fundamental dilemmas facing leaders as they navigate this uncertain terrain: performance measurement. How can they track performance towards worthy goals such as reducing poverty, improving public health, or advancing human rights? What results can they reasonably measure and legitimately take credit for? This book tackles three core challenges of performance faced by social enterprises and nonprofit organizations alike: what to measure, what kinds of performance systems to build, and how to align multiple demands for accountability. It lays out four different types of strategies for managers to consider—niche, integrated, emergent, and ecosystem—and details the types of performance measurement and accountability systems best suited to each. Finally, this book examines the roles of funders such as impact investors, philanthropic foundations, and international aid agencies, laying out how they can best enable meaningful performance measurement.

Author: Kimberley A. Bobo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

View

Book Description
Feel comfortable speaking useful Mandarin Chinese in just three hours with this accessible audio course.

Author: A. Schutz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118534
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

View

Book Description
Community organizers build solidarity and collective power in fractured communities. They help ordinary people turn their private pain into public action, releasing hidden capacities for leadership and strategy. In Collective Action for Social Change , Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy draw on their extensive experience participating in community organizing activities and teaching courses on the subject to empower novices to think like an organizers.

Author: Cynthia Rayner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198857454
Category : Social change
Languages : en
Pages : 293

View

Book Description
The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only beentrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions thatno longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visionsof 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agencyfor people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.

Author: David Peter Stroh
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585818
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

View

Book Description
"David Stroh has produced an elegant and cogent guide to what works. Research with early learners is showing that children are natural systems thinkers. This book will help to resuscitate these intuitive capabilities and strengthen them in the fire of facing our toughest problems."—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning—for everyone! Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results. Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert. Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts on complex problems like: ending homelessness improving public health strengthening education designing a system for early childhood development protecting child welfare developing rural economies facilitating the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society resolving identity-based conflicts and more! The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.

Author: Jay Weinstein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442203013
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 459

View

Book Description
This introduction to social change covers the momentous and relatively recent changes that have occurred in the human condition, examining not only the major causes and conditions underlying our current situation, but also the main choices and options we face as we strive to shape our individual and collective futures. This edition of Social Change has been thoroughly updated and revised. Building on previous editions, the book introduces a social scientific approach to change, discusses the components of change and the factors driving them, examines change on the macro-level, then looks toward the future with a discussion of planned change. Most chapters explore societies of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and include comparative dimensions, especially along First, Second, and Third World lines. The engaging narrative traces several themes, such as the rise of capitalism and the socialist alternative, or civil rights movements in the United States and elsewhere, throughout the book. Social Change, Third Edition features a new discussion of the recent economic crisis and the interconnectedness of the global economy, new empirical data on globalization, and updated discussions of the concepts of evolution and altruism. It also incorporates the dramatic changes in India and China throughout the book.

Author: David Gershon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

View

Book Description
If "change" is the mantra of our moment in history, Social Change 2.0 may be poised to become its bible. Drawing on his three decades in the trenches of large-scale societal transformation, David Gershon--founder and president of Empowerment Institute, and described by the United Nations as a "graceful revolutionary"--offers an original and comprehensive roadmap to bring about fundamental change in our world. His goal is to empower change agents to tackle pressing social problems or unmet social needs by providing them with strategies and tools to effect transformative change at any level of scale.From his initiation as architect of the United Nations-sponsored First Earth Run--a mythic passing of fire around the world symbolizing humanity's quest for peace on earth that drew tens of millions of participants, the planet's political leaders and, through the media, over a billion people at the height of the cold war--to his recent climate-change work helping citizens, cities, and entire states measurably reduce their carbon footprint (using his book Low Carbon Diet), Gershon offers readers strategies to evolve an effective new model for social change. These include: The first comprehensive social-change model with proven, practical strategies and tools to either launch a social change initiative or improve the efficacy of any existing change program. A "Practitioner's Guide" accompanying each chapter, to help readers apply this social change framework to their initiative. The result is a riveting, enlightening, and inspiring book that will quickly find its way onto the desks--and into the hearts--of the tens of thousands of change agents engaged in the work of building a better world. Social Change 2.0 speaks to a wide range of practitioners across the spectrum of social change including social and environmental activists, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, and civic, government, and business leaders, as well as the vast number of baby boomers looking for a way to give back and the millennials just raring to go.

Author: Eleanor Bernert Sheldon
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610446917
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 833

View

Book Description
Includes many original contributions by an assembly of distinguished social scientists. They set forth the main features of a changing American society: how its organization for accomplishing major social change has evolved, and how its benefits and deficits are distributed among the various parts of the population. Theoretical developments in the social sciences and the vast impact of current events have contributed to a resurgence of interest in social change; in its causes, measurement, and possible prediction. These essays analyze what we know, and examine what we need to know in the study, prediction, and possible control of social change.

Author: Herbert J. Rubin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351348477
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

View

Book Description
This book portrays how small, geographically dispersed, and progressive social change and social service organizations working within a coalition can influence national-level social policies. Based on extensive empirical research on two national organizations and their local affiliates, one focusing on affordable housing and the other working to protect lower-income communities, this book shows the ways in which professionally staffed organizations that coordinate coalitions come about, and describes their work to mobilize coalition members to lobby and advocate, providing information, analysis and instruction to facilitate such action and, in so doing, becoming the public voice for the social change efforts of coalitions. Advocacy for Social Change details the characteristics of these organizations that the author has labeled as focal catalytic coalition organizations and then provides numerous examples of campaigns led by them on affordable housing and economic justice; campaigns that illustrate tactics that other social change organizations can emulate. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in social problems, social action, political sociology, urban studies, community development and organizing while extending the literature on interest group lobbying.