STRENGTHENING tHE Movement for a Canada-wide
Strategy for Belonging
A Growing Recognition
We are profoundly grateful for your contributions to this movement. Over the past two years, our call for a Strategy for Belonging has reached almost 2,000 individuals across Canada, including people who recognize that belonging is the essential social infrastructure that weaves us together and serves as the ultimate antidote to poverty in all its forms.
We are thrilled to witness a growing ecosystem of purpose-driven organizations leading their own initiatives around belonging. Whether these partnerships were cultivated directly through the Strategy or emerged independently, we salute these efforts. This momentum signals a vital shift: the recognition of belonging not just as a nice-to-have, but as a vital policy priority and a fundamental social determinant of health.
Responding to the Moment
Our research and the stories we hear from the field highlight concerning rates of loneliness, social isolation, and polarization. In conversations with practitioners across Turtle Island, it has become clear that belonging is vital to creating a more just and regenerative future. To date, we have published two reports documenting this journey. As we embark on the third year of our three-year roadmap, we are hosting a milestone webinar in Spring 2026 to share key takeaways and look toward what’s next.
Shifting Systems through Community-Led Change
This year, we are moving to collaborate more deeply with sector leaders and changemakers to ignite an even stronger movement. Our focus is shifting beyond individual practice toward systems transformation. To shift systems, we need community-led change. We need the stories of collaborators and practitioners who work closely with those who continue to face othering to fundamentally change how we live with one another.
An Invitation to Reimagine How We Live Together
Whether you are a longtime member, a new cohort participant, or connecting with us for the first time, we invite you to participate in these Communities of Practice as we collectively lead and deepen our understanding of our work on building belonging.
- For the CBB Network Calls: This work builds upon the collective learning and takeaways from the 2024 and 2025 editions of the Circle of Actions cohort. We ask that participants be active Tamarack members as a way of investing in our shared effort and long-term journey together. Recognizing the relationship-first nature of our Networks for Change membership model, support is available for those who experience financial barriers to engagement. This is an invitation to bring your unique strengths to the conversation, staying true to the asset-based nature of this movement.
- For the Belonging Practitioners Calls: These sessions build upon the takeaways from Pathways for Change (formerly known as the Systems Transformers cohort) and incorporate Seeds of Transformation: our foundational framework for equity and anti-racism across our Networks for Change. These calls are open to both members and non-members. We encourage you to attend as many sessions as possible, as each conversation is designed to be mutually reinforcing.
We need all hands, all perspectives, and all visions of the world to ignite a more just, caring, and connected society. Together, we are rethinking our social contract to ensure that belonging is recognized as a fundamental human right.
Meet Your Facilitators
Sonja Miokovic (she/her)
Sonja is the Consulting Director of Community Innovation at the Tamarack Institute’s Learning Centre, where she leads the design and delivery of learning experiences, strategic consulting engagements, and ecosystem-building initiatives that advance place-based and systems change efforts across Canada and globally.
A seasoned social innovator and facilitator, Sonja specializes in co-design, collective leadership, ecosystem mapping, and collaborative sensemaking. She works with nonprofits, funders, community foundations, and cross-sector partnerships to strengthen their capacity to navigate complexity, deepen community engagement, and move from strategy to meaningful action.
With experience spanning more than 40 countries, Sonja brings a relational, creative, and practical approach to her work—helping changemakers build shared understanding, design innovative solutions, and cultivate the conditions for long-term community impact.
Savroop Shergill (she/they)
Savroop is the Manager of Communities for the Community Climate Transitions and Communities Building Belonging teams at Tamarack. Sav is committed to decolonial praxis, abolitionism, and third-world and Black feminist principles. She is a registered Social Worker and community organizer. She has worked with survivors of gendered violence, houseless youth, immigrant communities, incarcerated folks, diverse faith communities and S2LGBTQ+ youth and elders. She is passionate about addressing and dismantling the various systemic barriers that marginalized youth and their communities face.
Sav lives and works on Treaty Thirteen Territory, signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Williams Treaties, signed with multiple different Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. This place has been the traditional home and meeting place of Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. Tkaronto, colonially known as Toronto, is on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, Huron-Wendat, the Chippewa, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. In the Mohawk language, “Tkaronto" means "the place in the water where the trees are standing." She is passionate about addressing and dismantling the various systemic barriers to support climate justice and belonging work across different communities on Turtle Island.