Communities across Canada with a passion for multiple dimensions of health and well-being are turning to belonging. Recent studies reveal that a lack of positive social connection negatively impacts health at rates similar to smoking 15 packs of cigarettes a day, while also impacting housing prospects, employment, addiction, educational outcomes, mental health, and disaster preparedness. The potential of this work to turn the tide in sweeping public health goals means it’s time to develop and refine effective belonging strategies at every level of community development.
In this case study, we examine the Tri-Cities Intergenerational Belonging project, which intentionally brings together youth and seniors to foster positive relationships, and how a Collective Impact (CI) strategy guides their work. This initiative takes a tiered approach to accomplishing the following three goals:
Create a connection between existing intergenerational belonging interventions.
Increase opportunities for community members to lead and participate in intergenerational exchanges.
Promote belonging as a priority for municipal strategies, plans, and policies.
The Tri-Cities team, a vibrant participant in our 2025 Circle of Actions Cohort, is proving to be an energizing force within the Canada-wide movement for belonging. This Cohort, launched by the Tamarack Institute with support from the Samuel Family Foundation, brings together 13 teams from across Canada to develop plans and test interventions for belonging.
Through the Circle of Actions Cohort, the Tri-Cities team receives coaching from Tamarack’s Learning Centre on CI and other skills for change, including community engagement, collective leadership, and asset-based community development. One individual nominated by the Tri-Cities team participates in Pathways for Change, a leadership training program specifically for Cohort participants. The successes, challenges, and lessons learned from the Tri-Cities team and the other 12 Cohort participants directly inform the call for a Canada-wide Strategy, aiming to make belonging a policy priority for well-being and economic prosperity.
Collective Impact, or CI, emerged to address complex, multilayered problems with many moving, continuously evolving parts. This strategy simultaneously reorganizes hierarchical, top-down systems to reflect equity in the way problems are identified and resolved. Belonging, as a dynamic experience requiring transformative systems change, matches well with Collective Impact.
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About Tamarack's Work on BelongingAt the Tamarack Institute, we're dedicated to ending all forms of poverty, including relational poverty, by strengthening belonging in communities. Since 2016, our focus on connectedness has deepened, leading to a 2024 shift in our movement to make belonging a policy priority across Canada. The engagement of 70 collaboratives nationwide serves as a powerful testament: belonging is key to countering loneliness and polarization. |
The Tri-Cities team’s journey has revealed that Collective Impact (CI) can be a unifying force in both process and result. As they apply CI to their Intergenerational Belonging project with coaching from Tamarack, the team is bringing together representatives from organizations and collectives, with the intention of creating a sense of belonging among those most acutely at risk of isolation while nurturing trust, connection, and collaboration.
Through these efforts, the team is also bringing to life the vision of the call for a Canada-wide Strategy for Belonging, by advancing their own reflections on belonging as a policy priority, guided by local needs and aspirations.
The Tri-Cities community is made up of three municipalities and two villages and has a population of over 240,000, with 44.3% of its neighbours and residents born outside of Canada. A CI framework has thus far allowed them to collaborate with different teams in ways that touch on many layers of public health as it relates to belonging in their diverse, culturally rich environment. In the following section, we will walk through the five conditions of CI, how Tri-Cities has adopted this approach, and what we’ve learned so far from their experience.
The Tri-Cities team is part of the Tri-Cities Healthier Communities Partnership (HCP). The HCP initiative is Fraser Health’s commitment to working with municipalities and community organizations to create healthy environments where residents live, work, learn, and play. In 2008, in recognition of the need for a healthy community approach, Fraser Health began working with municipal leaders across the region to establish these formal partnerships, which were later mandated by the BC government in 2012.1 In the Tri-Cities, municipal councillors and staff, the school district, community committees and coalitions, library, the Local Immigration Partnership, Fraser Health and other partners work across sectors toward promoting health and well-being in their community.
In partnership with the HCP Table, the Tri-Cities team is igniting action around the five conditions for CI:
The members of the Tri-Cities backbone organization are in a process of learning and discovery when it comes to CI and belonging. Thanks to their generosity, clarity, and investment, we have been able to learn alongside them, uncovering powerful insights even at these early stages. Here are some takeaways we’ve found together thus far.
The following reflections have emerged from the CI journey of the Tri-Cities team as a 2025 Circle of Actions Cohort participant:
Building on Existing Strengths: The Tri-Cities case highlights the advantage of leveraging existing structures. The HCP Table was running before the Tri-Cities Intergenerational Belonging Project began, giving them an immediate foundation for continuous communication, effectively jumpstarting the CI project. If similar collaborative platforms exist in your community, consider partnering with them to accelerate groundwork and foster collaboration.
The Power of Dedicated Backbone Support: Sustainable initiatives rely on consistent backbone support, especially as other participants’ involvement may vary. Identifying and nurturing these dedicated individuals and organizations is crucial. The alliance between Fraser Health, the Tri-Cities Local Immigration Partnership, and the Tri-Cities Literacy Committee exemplifies this, demonstrating that an effective backbone organization can emerge from otherwise unlikely collaborations facilitated by a CI strategy. Organizations do not need pre-existing connections to excel in this role.
Nurturing Community-Led Leadership: Reaffirming members of the community who are not involved in recognized institutions that they can take on leadership roles can take time and strategic reframing. This involves acknowledging diverse capacities and desires, along with flexible approaches to power and labour distribution. It’s a journey of affirming latent leadership within the community.
Navigating Shared Measurement: Developing a shared measurement strategy seems to be among the most challenging aspects to navigate, both in establishing what will be used as a reliable measure, how they will know if they are measuring the outcome they want to be measuring, and how that measurement will take shape, especially as desired outcomes themselves can be dynamic and moving objects.
The Art of Letting Go: Collective Impact inherently involves letting go–whether it’s releasing treasured partnerships when their season ends or relinquishing control as the initiative becomes a shared endeavour.
Despite the complexities and early stages, the work in Tri-Cities shows exciting signs of positive change.
When communities come together to meaningfully cultivate belonging at multiple scales, they can subjectively and objectively transform people’s lives in deeply meaningful ways. While there can be many barriers to a holistic belonging strategy, the Tri-Cities Intergenerational Project offers an example of how using Collective Impact constructively transforms systems as they are today to ones that reflect and facilitate shared power, equitable division of labour, and mutual support. This strategy and approach to partnership can significantly alter hierarchical, competitive, isolating systemic structure to those that generate and sustain belonging to the benefit of individual and community health. These partnerships can simultaneously foster deep, meaningful relationships while expanding the reach, scope, and diversity of belonging solutions throughout a community.
Tri-Cities emphasizes collaboration in its approach, actively seeking out programs that already exist, looking for ways to support and connect them, and to center equity-denied members of the community in consistent conversation with those who have been given more access and means of exercising control. They’ve identified community-level leaders and programs that are already making a meaningful impact in areas of belonging, as well as the most up-to-date policy considerations and thinking at a municipal level when it comes to changing belonging and loneliness outcomes for communities. By continuing to learn with and from members of their community and moving in the direction of fully integrated community action, they are co-discovering a way forward for municipalities, communities, and residents who want to see belonging become an actionable public health priority wherever they call home.
Learn more about Seeds of Transformation, Tamarack’s framework for centring equity, anti-racism, and reconciliation into our Networks for Change.
Explore our Collective Impact Toolkit.
Take a look at the Strategy for Belonging report, sign the belonging pledge, and join us in making belonging a policy priority in Canada.
Try out our Changemaker Self-Assessment and learn more about the skills needed to make community change.