We recently asked a group of ten-year-olds: what is “technology?”
They spoke about software, apps, and AI (and moved into a conversation about their favourite YouTubers and gaming consoles).
However, in Canada’s community sector, technology looks different. It’s not about code - it’s about the systems, relationships, and infrastructure that enable communities to solve complex problems at scale. And it is an essential technology to address our shared generational challenges: rising poverty, housing shortages, climate shocks, and declining trust in institutions. These are not problems solved by governments or markets alone. They require an all-in approach - where civil society acts as a strategic partner, bringing unique capabilities that complement government and private sector efforts.
This technology has four components.
Community engagement: We counterbalance democratic erosion by embedding community voice and accountability into public systems. We decentralize power, strengthen civic engagement, and build trust. These are essential safeguards against authoritarian drift, isolation, and polarization.
Impact-focused program delivery: We design and deliver services that engage community talents, and often with greater impact and lower cost than government or private sector delivery.
Training and capacity-building: We have trained tens of thousands of public servants and private sector leaders in collaborative, community-based approaches. We create excitement for and pathways to engage in public office, volunteerism, and community life.
These activities connect us with people who hold diverse viewpoints and, in the process, build empathy, relationships, and ultimately trust across lines of perceived difference. Over time, the understanding of and engagement with key issues counters democratic erosion, decentralizes power, creates spaces to unpack and address misinformation, and reduces polarization.
Most societal transformations – think of the civic rights movement or the work for living wage – started in community. This piece of our technology involves:
Rapid prototyping and iteration: We bring experience in delivering (and teaching others about) systemic change, and cycles of design, testing, and improvement.
Scaling what works: We have a proven ability to scale (and teach others to scale) community-led models across sectors, geographies, and levels of government.
Reducing fragmentation: We align efforts across federal, provincial, and municipal systems to reduce duplication and increase coherence. We currently apply this “technology” to youth education and employment outcomes, the movement for an impactful social finance ecosystem, working poverty, local resilience to climate related emergencies, and more.
Data and evaluation infrastructure: We support rigorous measurement and learning, aligned with federal performance frameworks.
Community-driven efforts often exist as part of collaborative, caring, and decentralized delivery systems. Tamarack’s network alone includes 140 collaboratives across 500 municipalities, representing 58% of Canada’s population. These networks are ready-to-mobilize, enabling rapid response to heat domes, floods, fires, pandemics, and the departure of key employers.
Global learning network: We connect Canadian communities to international ones, building capacity and trust and the diffusion of impactful policy and programming efforts across borders.
Local partner network: We maintain a ready-to-mobilize network of trusted partners in communities from coast-to-coast-to-coast. For example, Tamarack’s network includes cross-sector partnerships that are focused on 58% of Canada’s population.
Distribution infrastructure: Through a decentralized, community-based delivery system, we deliver where government cannot.
Technology isn’t just about hardware - it’s about connective tissue. Community-driven efforts build the social cohesion that is necessary to make progress on any complex social problem. We do this by:
Building social cohesion: We strengthen the connective tissue that underpins immigration, affordability, well-being, and innovation diffusion.
Navigating complexity: We hold the social capital and experience with collaborative approaches to move complex ideas across sectors and communities, building legitimacy and trust.
Translating federal priorities into local action: This social capital also bridges the gap between policy and implementation with speed and accountability.
Bringing relationships and leading with equity expertise: While not yet enough of our efforts are led by, with and for First Nation, Metis, Inuit, Black, racialized, low-income, and newcomer leaders, an increasingly powerful contingent of our network is.
Busting silos: Our technology enables the shifts to processes and culture that lead to “whole-of-government” approaches that breakdown ministerial silos and “whole-of-society” approaches that mobilize all parts of Canadian society.
Finally, our technology delivers measurable savings and better outcomes.
Cost reduction and improved outcomes: Our "technology" has contributed to measurable savings and better results. In Saint John, NB, for example, a community-led initiative reduced social assistance cases by 17%, saving public dollars and improving lives.
Operational efficiency: It helps governments spend less by organizing services around existing community assets.
Speed to mobilize: Because of the relationships we hold, we can convene, deploy, and scale initiatives quickly, including in response to climate- and health-related crises and urgent or emerging priorities.
By identifying existing community assets and organizing around them, we can spend less while achieving more.
It is. It’s modular, scalable, and interoperable. It combines infrastructure (including social networks, shared data systems, and knowledge dissemination and delivery platforms), processes (including collaborative improvement and rapid testing), and capabilities (including on how to build trust, foster conditions for collaboration, and understand and change systems)
Imagine embedding this technology into Canada’s national strategies for housing, climate resilience, and economic growth. It could:
Accelerate affordable housing by linking public-private-community partnerships.
Strengthen national security by integrating social cohesion into resilience planning.
Reduce costs by shifting to community-based service delivery models.
Fulfill our moral (and legal) obligations to equity, anti-racism, and reconciliation by centring Indigenous, Black, newcomer, gender diverse and other equity-deserving leaders at all stages of decision making.
Canada’s prosperity depends on the holistic well-being of its people, people who live, work and spend their time in communities. The community sector’s technology is ready. How might we recognize, resource, and deploy it?