Movements that transcend geographies do not begin in abstract policy ideas; they are seeded in local efforts where people are willing to redraw how we live with one another. Last year, the Tamarack Institute launched the 2025 Circle of Actions Cohort, inviting community leaders, municipal staff, and changemakers from across sectors to co-create plans that embed belonging into existing local priorities. Throughout this journey, one central question guided our reflections: “How do we intentionally build a Canada-wide movement for belonging through deep collaboration?”
As we look back on this journey, one clear lesson stands out: belonging does not happen by accident. It must be intentionally designed. While advocating for a more cohesive and caring society is a long-term journey, working together in a cohort gives local teams the perfect space to lay the groundwork. Through the Circle of Actions, these collaboratives co-created the practical blueprints needed to foster connectedness, proving that a movement for belonging starts with intentional, local design.
Fostering belonging requires intentional design. While the cohort’s timeline from March to December 2025 was just an initial step, it provided the foundational skills and confidence for changemakers to lead authentically alongside their communities.
Building belonging is amplified when we cultivate transformative capacities. That is why the Circle of Actions was designed around core skills such as Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), Community Engagement, Collective Leadership, and storytelling. These skills were integrated into a mutually reinforcing framework that centred equity and guided them through three scales of work:
The Individual Level (Grounding in Positionality): From our very first session on raising awareness and will, we recognized that belonging is deeply tied to equity. We began by exploring our own positionality by examining how our personal backgrounds and relationships to power shape how we show up in community and how we experience belonging ourselves.
The Community Level (Moving from Service to Co-Creation): Through ABCD and collective leadership, teams mapped existing strengths and ways in which they can show up to lead change. This allowed us to cultivate a co-creation mindset focused on community-led transformation.
The Societal Level (Shifting Norms and Building Solidarity): As teams sharpened their local visions, our reflections scaled up to the broader policy structures that impact our daily lives. We explored how embedding belonging can actively strengthen and advance other critical movements, such as climate action, basic income, public health, and strengthen the fundamental structures of democracy by shifting the conversation from scarcity and individualism to abundance and solidarity.
When working across complex networks with multiple moving parts, keeping everyone connected can be a significant challenge. To address this, the 2025 cohort leaned into the Plan on a Page tool.
Originally championed by partners from our Communities Building Youth Futures (CBYF) network to align local and Canada-wide priorities, a Plan on a Page serves as a concise, one-page synthesis of a community's collective impact approach. Rather than hiding a strategy within an exhaustive report, it distills a collaborative’s core design into a single, highly visual sheet.
For the Circle of Actions, the Plan on a Page became the primary engine for advocacy, community mobilization, and staff accountability. By mapping their group efforts, teams were able to visually demonstrate how place-based actions directly connect to structural policy changes, organizing their common agendas into six distinct pillars:
Our shard aspiration: Identifying the group’s long-term vision for their community.
Key data: Highlighting important pieces of information that make a compelling case for the change the group hopes to make in their community.
What we’ll do: Highlighting the specific changes the group hopes to make in their community to build belonging.
Who we’ll do it with: Collaborating with individuals, organizations, and institutions to make these changes possible.
How we’ll do it: Moving away from purely academic or prescriptive knowledge to centre lived experiences and build relational trust.
How we’ll know we made a difference: Outlining concrete indicators of success to transform the qualitative feeling of "belonging" into a measurable, accountable outcome for the group.
We are delighted to share a few examples of the foundational work that took place during the 2025 Circle of Actions Cohort. These stories demonstrate what can happen when space is intentionally created for local teams to come together, learn from one another, and rethink how we build community. Furthermore, these examples remind us that investing in relational infrastructure (the invisible networks of trust, partnership, and shared values) is key for sustaining collaboration when tackling complex issues like loneliness or othering. Here is a glimpse into how a few of our cohort communities tailored the Plan on a Page tool to set their own local foundations for belonging:
Peel Newcomer Strategy Group (Ontario) – Focused on bridging connections between newcomers and long-time established individuals.
Lloydminster (Alberta) – Focused on embedding ABCD principles into local housing crisis response and support efforts.
Global Citizen (Newfoundland) – Focused on helping newcomer families thrive by cultivating foundational vocational skills in parents and supporting their children’s integration into local schools through cultural connections.
Good Futures Collective (Ontario) – Focused on co-designing local Generosity Hubs for community members to counter isolation by actively practicing care, sharing resources, and building deep everyday connections.
Tri-Cities Intergenerational Belonging Project (British Columbia) – Focused on hosting open conversations that bring different generations together to share their perspectives on what makes a community feel like home.
Carman Wellness Connections (Manitoba) – Focused on encouraging local businesses, volunteer groups, and individuals to act as community connectors by hosting neighbourhood events that showcase the direct link between belonging and wellbeing.
Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (Alberta) – Focused on spreading a culture of belonging across a vast network of neighbourhood leagues through knowledge sharing and practical tool development.
These examples represent the collective dedication, creativity, and thinking that emerged across our entire 2025 Circle of Actions cohort.
The 2025 cohort reminded us that dedicated spaces like this one are essential for collaboratives to come together and learn from each other. While each team operated in a unique geographical context, some teams shared similar structural barriers. Having a space to connect allowed participants to build a common language and narrative, drawing quiet inspiration from the unique gifts and stories that each community brought forward. While a 10-month timeframe has its limitations, a few core insights emerged that we would like to bring forward:
Thinking Fast and Slow is Vital: Even within a condensed timeline, making explicit room for deeper, unhurried conversations helped unlock fresh perspectives on who needed to be at the table and what needed to be prioritized. To support this under a tight schedule, every participating team received a Tamarack membership, granting them access to our suite of resources and direct guidance from their Networks for Change Manager.
Every Action Matters: Grounded in Asset-Based Community Development, we witnessed how even the smallest localized steps can plant important seeds for the future. When we intentionally celebrate and mobilize the unique gifts each person brings, we quietly set long term change in motion.
Vision Over Team Size: The capacity to drive meaningful local progress was rarely determined by the size of a budget or a staff. Teams with a clear, shared vision and a commitment to authentic collaboration consistently showed that alignment matters far more than resources.
Centring Lived Experience: Belonging cannot be designed for people; it must be designed with them. This means intentionally creating spaces where individuals with lived experiences can co-shape the work. Elevating these voices ensures our policy advocacy remains firmly grounded in local realities, especially when navigating the complex inequities that many individuals face daily.
The 2025 Circle of Actions demonstrated that when teams are equipped with practical tools, dedicated space, and a supportive backbone infrastructure for collaborative learning, we create more fertile soil for seeding a future that is inherently more caring.
As we continue our efforts to end poverty, break down silos, and build stronger social connections in our neighbourhoods, let's remember that change begins when we keep our plans accessible, our values collaborative, and our long-term focus centred on shifting the underlying structures that impact our everyday lives.
Bring your vision to life: Want to map out your community's goals? Explore our Plan on a Page tool and template, to see how a concise page can spark collaboration.
Join the movement: Building on everything we’ve learned so far, we are bringing folks together across Canada to deepen our belonging practice through two Communities of Practice. Discover how we are taking this work forward and learn how your community can participate by visiting our 2026 CBB CoPs page.
Explore our latest report: Check out our Strategy for Belonging Mid-point report, featuring practical recommendations on how we can work together to make belonging a policy priority across Canada.
This conversation is just the beginning. If you are passionate about the Strategy for Belonging or see an opportunity to collaborate, we would love to hear from you. You can contact us at orpah@tamarackcommunity.ca and/or jorge@tamarackcommunity.ca.