Grow your capacity: Shepherd Parkway public meeting, legal clinic, building talent, and more

Local Events and Resources

Small Business Brief Advice Legal Clinic on Wednesday, June 6: Meet one-on-one with an attorney for brief pro bono legal advice about your business at this free legal clinic. Attendees can get answers to questions about business formation, contracts, leases, taxes or any other legal matters related to running a small business. Registration is encouraged.

Public Meeting about Shepherd Parkway, Thursday, June 7: Through many discussions with partners, the community, and DC government agency officials, the National Park Service has committed to host near-monthly events at Shepherd Parkway.  In addition, the Committee to Restore Shepherd Parkway, in partnership with Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White Sr., is hosting a public meeting to discuss the future of Parkland. The meeting takes place Thursday, June 7, 7:00-8:30 pm at  THEARC, East Campus Community Room.

Science and Policy Communication Workshop, Saturday, June 9: Looking to improve how you communicate your science or policy work? Participate in this affordable workshop and learn best practices from experts Karl Leif Bates, Director of Research Communications at Duke University, and Jory Weintraub, Science Communication Program Director with the Duke Initiative for Science and Society. Some of what you will learn: 1) ways to support your message through storytelling, metaphor, effective use of numbers/statistics, etc., and 2) ways to avoid jargon.

Does your organization get mentioned in the media? On blogs or social media platforms? Find out using Talkwalker Alerts and Google Alerts.

What do you want to learn? Please take this short survey so we know what you need to be and do better. We’ll do our best to find trainings, articles, courses, and the like to meet your needs.

Tools and Resources

At work

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On April 4, Microsoft announced a number of changes to its nonprofit discount and donation program. The reason for the shift is a desire to optimize its offerings to better serve smaller nonprofits. The shift also reflects a larger, global trend to move IT infrastructure to a cloud-based model.

This shift has affected what TechSoup offers to nonprofits.

The internet is truly a required service for any organization to be successful in 2018. But what if your programs are meant to serve people who are among the 60 million Americans who don’t have internet access at home?

The Digital Adoption survey seeks to understand how organizations are making decisions and addressing the challenges of internet access and use by both staff and the communities they serve. The good news is digital adoption is increasing, but there are still gaps or needs among specific communities that digital inclusion programs have the opportunity to address.

Learn something

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Since 2002, the Tamarack Institute has convened cities across Canada and the United States to engage in place-based poverty reduction efforts. This network is now 61 members strong, and represents more than 175 communities.

Vibrant Communities Canada was launched before the Collective Impact framework but builds many CI features into practice. In this webinar, our presenters will discuss the lessons they are learning about getting to impact. They will reflect on the results of the When Collective Impact has an Impact report and the implications this evaluation might have on the future design of Vibrant Communities Canada.

Neighbourhoods are one of the foremost opportunities available to us to foster a sense of belonging. Neighbourhoods are home to an abundance of people with shared experience, while at the same time offering great diversity in personalities, experiences, gifts, cultures and backgrounds. But, without regular, intentional connection, our sense of belonging to the place and to each other can be eroded in favour of more polarizing identity-based communities.

This webinar will feature two top thought leaders in community building and engagement – Jim Diers, author of Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way and Paul Born, author of Deepening Community – in discussion on how we bring ‘community’ back into neighbourhoods, and create more vibrant connections in the places where we live.

Human-Centred Design and Design Thinking, popularized by innovation firms such as IDEO and institutions such as Stanford’s d.school, are rapidly being adopted as approaches to innovation across the private, public, and voluntary sector. The promise of these approaches is alluring – that seeking to deeply understand the perspective of those impacted by a service, program, or system, and adopting an iterative, prototype-driven approach to problem-solving will result in revolutionary changes that will benefit all. But, is that promise always possible?

In this introductory one-hour webinar join Galen MacLusky, Tamarack’s Director of Community Innovation, as he explores Human-Centred Design, Design Thinking, and their relevance for community changemakers.

  • The most interesting through-June-15 webinars listed in Wild Apricot's 50 Free Nonprofit Webinars for June 2018: Creating a Culture of Volunteer Engagement (June 6), Successful Volunteer Interview Strategies (June 7), and Writing Accurate and Useful Volunteer Position Descriptions (June 13).

Good reads

Building Capacity, Capacity BuildingGuest User