In April 2024, Tamarack’s board announced Liz Weaver's retirement. Liz has been a leader at Tamarack for 15 years, and she’s been Tamarack’s Co-CEO since 2017. I’ve worked beside her as Co-CEO since early 2022. I will miss the regular experiences of her laughter, her stories of place-based work, and her energy, when she convenes, facilitates and coaches.
Liz’s retirement leaves a position opening on our team, and gave our board the opportunity to consider: what staffing structure best supports our goals and priorities in the years ahead?
We’re excited to begin a process today to find our first Chief Operating Officer. They will be a people-, process-, and systems-focused leader, an analyst, a strategist, and a person who believes deeply in the power of place-based partnerships that centre people most marginalized by our current systems. They will create structures that support our team to understand the changing contexts of communities, to build the capacity of changemakers, to accelerate the impact of place-based partnerships, and to amplify local work to influence public policy and advance systems change at a national level.
Working alongside an amazing team, they will:
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Use all kinds of data to celebrate, learn, plan, and improve, within our organization and with communities and other partners
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See and prioritize Tamarack’s opportunities and risks
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Evolve our social enterprise and diversify revenue for our organization and for place-based partnerships across Turtle Island
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Support our amazing staff team
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Hold planning and reflection processes that further connect our staff teams, our strategies, and our outcome areas
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Support a multi-year journey to implement the recommendations that emerged from our equity, diversity, inclusion, justice, and reconciliation audit.
In the language of place-based partnerships, Tamarack’s COO will be the “backbone of the backbone.”
Tamarack has had a Co-CEO model since 2017. Many of you have asked me: why the move away from this model?
Every organization has unique reasons for selecting a Co-CEO model. For us, the model was designed largely to support both Co-CEOs to interact deeply with communities. By sharing administrative functions, more time was available to work with communities. More than two decades into our journey, our roles and culture and practices are designed so that everyone on the team sees themselves in this work. In the years ahead, everyone on the Tamarack team will continue their essential role, which is to understand, connect with, and animate communities. What’s critical right now – alignment across the organization’s capability-building, place-based partnership, public policy, equity, and reconciliation functions – is best enabled by the presence of an operational leader. What’s critical now is to continue the work of spreading decision-making authority and visibility across the entire Tamarack team and community.
We’re excited to share this position description. If this sounds like work that would serve your purpose, please consider applying. We’d also be grateful if you’d share this opportunity in your network. Details on the application or nomination process can be found in the position description. Please visit our jobs web page or Griffith Group’s website.
Finally, deep gratitude to my Tamarack colleagues! I am energized by the ideas and emotions you’ve shared since this announcement. I can’t wait to take the next steps with you, our board, the larger Tamarack community, and our new COO toward building and supporting partnerships designed to end poverty, build youth futures, build community belonging, and address climate change.
