Relational Coordination Collaborative

RCC Community Building Innovation Lab

The RCC Community Building Innovation Lab is a place for Lab members to work together to collect, create, incubate, and develop practices that build community in the RCC. These practices are intended to stimulate self-organization and are the means for creating and maintaining the energy of conversations, flow of activity around particular shared goals, and continued relationship-building throughout the year. We see this Innovation Lab as a learn-and-do space where we think and act carefully in relation to the larger RCC membership and advisory structures.

Benefits We Expect to Emerge

  • Increase the value of the RCC to members by making it easy to intentionally build relationships throughout the year through conversations, coordination of resource flow, and collaborative activity.
  • For the purposes of equity, inclusion, and increased creative generativity, leverage the RCC’s diversity of identities, perspectives, intentions, experiences, and capacities by building more connection and opportunity for conversation, coordination, and collaboration.
  • Shift the current core-periphery network structure of the RCC where most RCC activity happens within a core of members, to a network with more flow between members in the periphery and between the periphery and core (multilevel relational structures).
  • Help shift the culture beyond an entity framework (human-focused) to a more relational framework (connection-focused).
  • A chance to create structures that harvest the on-going and rich work of practitioners – to be shared with other practitioners and to become the fuel for scholarship.
  • Find ways to amplify the shift from cultures dominated by “power-over” relationships to those that enable the “power-to” of impassioned members to feed collective shared goals through “power-with” relationships.
  • A place to collect, create, incubate, and develop practices that might be applicable to RC field work.

Join this Innovation Lab where we can explore and experiment together with “Tightening the Weave” of the RCC relational fabric.

Tightening the Weave

Community Fabric Graphic

Join This Innovation Lab

manage  your member account to join this  innovation lab Resources 

Book: Barnum, J., & Kahane, A. (2011). Power and love: A theory and practice of social change. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Book: Ehrlichman, D. (2021). Impact networks: Create connection, spark collaboration, and catalyze systemic change: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Article: Krebs, V., & Holley, J. (2006). Building smart communities through network weaving. Appalachian Center for Economic Networks.

Innovation Lab Leaders

Jim Best

Scholar/Practitioner and Independent Consultant

Jim Best is a scholar/practitioner and independent consultant with a PhD in Organizational Systems.  His current interest is the use of Social System Maps by change agents and communities to support theories of complex adaptive social system changes like the Relational Model of Organizational Change. Social System Maps expose the relational structures and patterns of communities or social systems for reflection so that iterative adaptive action experiments can be performed and assessed in terms of the community's intention to change. He is an active member of the Social System Mapping Community of Practice. He is also a volunteer curriculum developer and facilitator for the Bay Area chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice. They focus on moving white people along their anti-racist journeys and raise funds to support BIPOC-led partner organizations. The lens of dismantling white supremacy as a critical system of dominance informs all of his work.

Lorinda Visnick

Doctoral Student, University of Massachusetts Boston

Lorinda Visnick, originally from Michigan, holds a BA in Computer Science from Boston University, a MS in Organizational Behavior and Learning from Endicott College, and is a 2nd year PhD student in Public Policy in the McCormack School at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.  In addition, she is elected to serve on the school committee in Beverly, MA.

Herself a first-generation college graduate, she is intrigued by the promise of education as the great equalizer yet the reality of the tremendously persistent achievement gap. Her research interests lie at the intersection of affordable housing, social services, academic outcomes, and economic mobility.

Specifically, she is designing her thesis research focused on a housing-based coordinated social services approach to address poverty as a way to close the achievement gap. Though wonderful educators consistently make a difference in the lives of children, she believes our society is expecting our schools and educators to do far too much. A different approach is needed. The planned research combines elements of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory, and the Relational Coordination Theory. You might imagine this approach as a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS as it is commonly used in the educational sector) but based in the social service sector instead of it being the responsibility of the education sector.

Heba Ali

Director of Operations and Analytics, Relational Coordination Collaborative; Post-Doctoral Fellow, Lancaster University

Heba Ali, Director of Operations and Analytics, is a physician with a PhD in Health Policy and Management and a Master of Science in International Health Policy and Management. She also holds degrees in Epidemiology, Medical Statistics, and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, and serves as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Lancaster Univerity in the UK.  With 15 years of experience in healthcare research and over eight years supporting health systems through relational coordination data analytics, Dr. Ali is a seasoned researcher and data analyst with deep expertise in Relational Coordination (RC) and Social Network Analysis (SNA). Her work explores the organizational and relational factors that shape service delivery and employee well-being, with a particular focus on vulnerable populations such as people with disabilities seeking to live in the community. She is co-author of Relational Analytics: Guidebook for Analysis and Action and has authored numerous scholarly articles. In her role at Relational Coordination Analytics, she provides strategic direction for the company as well as hands-on support for clients looking to incorporate RC data and insights into their improvement projects and daily operations.

Richard Wylde

Deputy Director of Improvement at LYPFT; Non Exec Director at Institute for Continuous Improvement in Public Services, National Health Service

Richard Wylde is an experienced Continuous Improvement Specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the health care industry. Skilled in Performance Improvement, Coaching, Culture Change, Benefits Realisation, and Quality Management. Strong professional with a Master of Science (M.Sc.) focused in Leadership, Management and Change in Health and Social Services from University of Bradford.
Darren McLean, RCC Board Member

Darren McLean

Project Manager, Relational Coordination, Gold Coast Health

Darren McLean works as a Principal Advisor, Clinical Teaming, at Gold Coast Hospital and Health Services in Australia. In this role, Darren plans and implements a range of hospital-based initiatives to improve the efficiency of care delivery. His work includes applying Relational Coordination to improve how individuals and groups work together to coordinate the provision of clinical care within the hospital that he works.  

Darren worked as Registered Nurse for over 10 years before turning to health improvement project work 15 years ago. He has a Bachelor of Nursing Science and a Master of Public Health, and is competing a PhD part-time at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia. His PhD thesis examines how contextual factors such as the economy, professions, and gendered work affects the implementation of a Relational Coordination designed to improve patient centred care.  

Fernanda Artimos de Oliveira

Membership Director, Relational Coordination Collaborative

Fernanda Artimos de Oliveira serves as the Membership Director for the Relational Coordination Collaborative.  She is a doctoral student in Children, Youth, and Families concentration at the Heller School. She is a lawyer licensed to practice Law in Brazil since 2007 and holds a Master's Degree in Health Sciences from the Federal Fluminense University (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) where her research aimed to address the impact of public health programs and social policies on children with severe disabilities (Congenital ZIKA Syndrome) affected by the Zika virus epidemic, which peaked in Brazil between 2015 and 2017. Her research interests include examining the effects of public policies on vulnerable, at-risk populations (such as people with disabilities, those dealing with chronic diseases, or those requiring long-term care) and how the healthcare delivery system and the social safety net can ameliorate these inequities.