LEARN TO BE CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVERS IN OUR COMMUNITIES
VIEW OUR TOOLKIT
The Impact Guild cultivates neighborhood placemaking.
We are a community of changemakers who are investing in our neighborhoods through creative problem-solving — Working to produce place-based projects at the intersection of property activation, relationship building and community engagement.
CORE METHODS
As social enterprise practitioners, we practice these methods every day and as partners and designers you will find them woven throughout our Toolkit resources and curriculums.
HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
DESIGN JUSTICE
COLLABORATION
ASSET-BASED COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
TRACKABLE & MEASURABLE
IMPACT
SUSTAINABLE REVENUE
MODELS
SHARED VALUES
ACTIVE EMPATHY
Active empathy is the sustained effort to understand and validate the experiences and emotions of others that we may not have felt ourselves. Working alongside and for the common Good of people is at the root of what we do. The work of understanding, rethinking, dismantling, designing, and improving human systems requires an ongoing and intentional commitment to honoring the dignity of every person, including ourselves.
CHANGEMAKING CREATIVITY
Changemaking creativity brings together ideas, action, and project management in order to turn imagination into innovation. To make social change and impact, we must wrestle with questions and issues about life–not just about how things are, but how things could be. We stress not only the creative confidence to imagine and reimagine, but the careful work of creating through reliable processes and plans of action. We sum this up using the Design Question: “How might we…?”.
COMMUNITY VOICE
Our target communities are not people who react to innovation. Rather, they are a part of its creation. Through collaboration and active empathy, target communities become partners. Every idea for change starts with centering and listening to the people involved. We work with people, not for them. With everyone together we ask: What do we want? What might we be missing that we don’t see? What ideas have already been tested or executed?
JUSTICE & EQUITY
We believe in working together for the sake of restoration and renewal. The work we do in innovation seeks to reconcile what is with what should be in order to decrease the space between people and perspectives. Thus, we aim to foster expansive projects and spaces where validation, support, access, and reform are championed. Justice and equity are not merely by-products, but the building blocks for our works of community development.
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
This work is complex. With every intersection between industry, location, identity, and experience that impact a project, more critical perspectives are needed. Asking human questions and solving human problems requires the voice and input of the many, not the few. This requires intentionality regarding who is setting the table and who sits there. We believe that active empathy thrives in a diverse and inclusive environment that challenges people to engage with new lenses through which we see the world.
SUSTAINABILITY
From the ideation stage to the implementation stage, we stress the ability of a project or solution to be sustained despite the test of time, institutional pushback, economic systems, or structural inequities. Sustainable innovations are built to last because they are made resilient through thoughtful design. This can look like resilient leadership, diverse revenue models, membership growth, and collaboration models.
INTERESTED IN PUTTING THIS IN ACTION IN YOUR WORK?
OUR TOOLKIT RESOURCES & PROJECT CONSULTING EQUIP YOU AS CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVERS IN YOUR COMMUNITY
The Impact Guild is a 501(c)3 organization, and your financial investment continues the work of incubating projects and changemakers for Good.
EIN: 81-4523471
2016-2021, the Impact Guild was a DBA of Mission City Renewal. 2021 and beyond we legally changed our name to simply Impact Guild.
