Ask the ACE Team

Ask the ACE Team

Have burning questions on what's going on in ACE? Email us and we'll send your question to our team of ACE leaders, contractors, coaches, ACE Communities and ARPA staff members!

Anonymous asks:
ACE Communities has been referred to as a change framework that results in "comprehensive community transformation". What is that and why is it important?

brenda

While ACE Communities began as an initiative that focused on the leadership, collaboration, and innovation required to improve the quality of life in rural Alberta, it has become clearer that a change process has evolved that results in sustainable, collective impact and, when done effectively, comprehensive community transformation.

The ACE Communities framework for this transformative change results in neighbourhoods, communities, and regions able to respond to an increasingly fast paced and complex society and economy, and, work together to ensure a different kind of future. This practical how-to knowledge is generating interest across Alberta and beyond. 

It is also clear that this comprehensive or wrap-around change requires community leaders working across sectors to lever local assets and to place a collective focus on challenges.

An emphasis on collaboration, partnerships, networks, and other joint efforts to address specific issues and challenges, is nothing new. However, it is clearer that community transformation and collective impact requires long-term commitment by a group of key stakeholders from different sectors committed to leveraging community assets and to addressing specific social, economic, or environmental issues.

Whether it’s improving quality of life, creating jobs, reducing youth outmigration, improving main streets, utilizing technology and social media, reducing and preventing childhood obesity, ensuring safer communities, becoming more diversity-friendly etc., it is clear that large-scale community change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations, businesses, or government departments. Greater progress can be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex community challenges when social profits, governments, businesses, and the public are brought together around a common vision and agenda to create collective impact.

Too often, we’ve overlooked the potential for collective impact because we are used to focusing on independent action as the primary vehicle for change and growth. RADF funding and applied research enabled ACE Communities to develop innovative frameworks, tools, and resources for tapping that potential and creating synergistic results. 

Local leaders in communities who successfully applied the ACE Change process:

• Learned to suspend judgment and see the value of different perspectives
• Found new ways to reduce conflict and work together
• Developed a community-driven and owned vision and values
• Challenged the status quo
• Evolved new and innovative initiatives
• Created conditions for learning and growth
• Included the entire community rather than a select few or the traditional elite
• Decided for themselves what would work, how, and why
• Found hope and optimism
• Learned they should, and could, take responsibility for making a difference in their community
• Continue to grow and evolve socially, environmentally, and economically

Rick Smyre, the futurist who coined the phrase "comprehensive community transformation" put it this way, “As local communities and regions attempt to respond to an increasingly fast paced and complex society, pockets of ‘transformational change’ have only recently begun to emerge. From a global perspective, ACE Communities is one of a very few initiatives that, in my opinion, is well on the way to understanding how to design and implement the new concept of "Comprehensive Community Transformation”. Their transferable frameworks, tools, and resources are some of the most innovative and important I have seen.”