As we celebrate the retirement of Liz Weaver, join us in recognizing her immense impact on the Tamarack community.
A career of impact
Liz is well known on the Tamarack team as being one of the fiercest and most loyal fans of sports, from rugby to cycling. In a career spanning countless stories of meaningful impact, we tried to picture what statistics might get at how deeply, how consistently, and how profoundly Liz has met the needs of the Tamarack community (and beyond).
Here's to our "Most Valuable Changemaker": Liz Weaver.
225 Resources Developed
These include Liz's public papers, tools, case studies, and much more.
We've included a selection of Liz's most popular resources below!
185,000 Resource Downloads
These include downloads of all of Liz's papers, tools, and case studies.
250+ Clients and partners
Liz partnered with over 250+ collaboratives, organizations, and roundtables as a consultant, and engaged with many more through her pro-bono work and her work supporting Tamarack's Networks for Change.
260,000+ Changemakers Inspired
Accounting for Liz's resource downloads, webinar views, event attendance, and consulting, this number likely represents only a fraction of Liz's reach and impact.
Hear from Liz
Dear Changemakers:
During my time at Tamarack, I have been in the wonderful company of learners, explorers, innovators and changemakers. The work you are doing across Canada and across the globe is making a direct impact on communities. I have had the privilege to learn with you and to experience the joys and challenges that are part of change efforts. I am grateful to each of you.
Almost a year ago, I made the decision to move out of a leadership role at Tamarack. It’s a wonderful organization with great leaders at the board, volunteer and staff tables. I know the foundation will remain strong and the organization will also be agile and shift with changing times.
I want to thank each of you and the teams I worked with at Tamarack. You have influenced me in different ways and I am richer for the experience of collaborating with you.
In this short, six-minute clip, Tamarack Institute CEO Danya Pastuszek speaks with former Tamarack Co-CEO Liz Weaver about Liz’s 15-year tenure at Tamarack before retiring in November 2024. Liz shares some of her lessons learned, memorable moments of impact, her hopes for the future, and provides parting wisdom as she settles into her next chapter.
To commemorate Liz’s significant impact to the field of community changemaking and poverty reduction, the Tamarack Institute will be launching the Liz Weaver Community Training Bursary in 2025.
To learn more about contributing to this Bursary, please visit the Donations page of the Tamarack website. Applications for the bursary will launch in March 2025.
the last 20 years
Tamarack Institute Co-CEO
Liz has served as Co-CEO at Tamarack since 2017, playing a pivotal role in Tamarack's growth and strategic direction. Through Liz's leadership, the Learning Centre team's capacity grew to be able to support over 200 projects annually, strengthening the skills of over 4,500 people each year through coaching, facilitation, and training. Liz's thought leadership has focused on Collective Impact and Collective Leadership, evolving the field's understanding of how change happens through collaboration, alignment, and defining bold visions for the future.
Liz was instrumental in co-designing and launching Communities Building Youth Futures, and the Canadian Centre for Digital Resilience. In 2023, Tamarack was a recipient of The Collective Social Innovation Award from The Schwab Foundation and World Economic Forum which recognizes collaborative efforts to advance social change and impact.
The Tamarack team describes Liz as accountable and wise, the kind of person who brings others along on journeys of learning and growth, always keeping her focus on the big-picture outcomes. For 15 wonderful years, as Co-CEO, or the multiple roles she held since joining Tamarack, Liz has been an integral part of Tamarack. She is innovative , insightful and skilled at translating ideas into action. Her unique mix of accountability, insight, and heartfelt passion for community is inspiring. Liz is truly a "weaver": naturally connecting people, skills, knowledge, and resources to make lasting change.
"I keep pictures, quotations, and calls to action in the space above my desk. Looking at them know, I'm realizing how many of them come from Liz. Personally, Liz has helped me be a clearer communicator and advocate. For Tamarack, she's been quietly behind almost every innovation we've had in my time knowing the organization. For communities across the world, we'll never know the full depth and breadth of her impact. But it's been on how large numbers of people think, act, and believe in a better future. Liz's impact spans from operations (how we raise money for community work) to public policy (how we support tens of thousands of young people to craft a plan for the North). It's rare and amazing to find that complete span in one person."
Danya Pastuszek, Tamarack Institute
"Liz cares deeply and has an incredible ability to transform that deep care into action and impact. I have learned so much from Liz, and truly admire her ability to show up honestly and wholeheartedly in spaces always willing to listen, reflect, and build together. Liz will be greatly missed but her legacy and teachings will carry-on in Tamarack and across the different communities she's worked with (around the world)!"
Ana Gonzalez Guerrero, Tamarack Institute Board
Vibrant Communities Canada
Liz joined Tamarack in 2009 as the lead of Vibrant Communities. At that time, Tamarack had been working with 13 trailblazer communities across Canada to demonstrate how collaborative, cross-sector action is a successful way to reduce poverty. With Liz's leadership, the Vibrant Communities model was expanded to 26 cities, creating the next iteration of the poverty reduction movement.
Liz has stewarded Tamarack’s two main goals of developing tools and sharing stories of change happening at the community level, and engaging diverse, multi-sector leaders to apply these tools to help end poverty at the local level.
"Liz is a weaver of people, ideas and community. She has this incredible capacity to see the big picture and to know which levers to activate to advance social change. Behind the scenes she is an astute social entrepeneur who knows how to build an impactful consultancy and she has brought those skills to Tamarack in a quiet and consistent way. She is deeply rooted in community and cares passionately about eradicating poverty by supporting people where they are at and helping them get the tools they need to build the futures they want. She is in relationship with so many indigenous communities and seeks their counsel and ways of knowing to shape her thinking and Tamarack's approach to community change. Liz is a wonder! I am so grateful I've got to have a front row seat over these past few years to see how she leads. It's one thing to sit beside each other in a classroom at McGill (or walk at night through Mont Blanc or a New Delhi market), it's another thing to see Liz in action at work and around the board table. It's been such a pleasure to be in her orbit."
Shauna Sylvester, Urban Climate Leadership (former Tamarack Institute Board Chair)
Place-Based Work in Hamilton, ON
Liz not only teaches about the value of place-based community work, she also has years of experience actively doing it in her own community. She served as the Executive Director of Volunteer Hamilton from 1992 to 2003, during which time she earned a Masters of Management for National Voluntary Sector Leaders from McGill University. The themes of her thesis, Storytelling and the Voluntary Sector, can be seen across the work of her entire career. In 2002, she won the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 2002 for her leadership in the voluntary sector.
From 2003 to 2006 she served as Chief Executive Officer for YWCA Hamilton. Liz went on the serve as Director of the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction, where she led a Collective Impact initiative aiming to make Hamilton the best place to raise a child.
Liz's life work has been about mobilizing diverse people to work together for for bold change in communities. Her impact has generated ripples of change that continue to inform and inspire people across Canada and around the world.
"We were first introduced to Liz in 2007 in her capacity as a local leader for the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction. Our relationship with Liz grew and strengthened when she moved into her Tamarack leadership role. Over the last decade+, Inspiring Communities has hosted Liz in New Zealand multiple times. Her thoughtful and pragmatic expertise in collective impact, collaborative governance and place-based change is highly respected and recognized here in Aotearoa. Liz communicates with openness, generosity, honesty and speaks from a powerful practice-based depth of experience - all key ingredients for making powerful impact not just in Canada, but globally. We are hugely appreciative of the international connections she has enabled for Inspiring Communities and the friendship and respected thought leadership she has extended to our wider team"
Megan Courtney, Inspiring Communities
“Liz is an ABSOLUTE rock star collaboration and system thinker and knowledge maker. I have read her work, listened to her work, witnessed her work when she facilitates and she stands out as one of the most compelling changemakers in Canada. When I think Liz Weaver I think open heart, mind and yet fearlessly relentless. I am excited for what Liz does next as every interaction she has with humans is compassionate and in the pursuit of more equitable and sustainable communities.
In her "retirement" there will be purpose driven impact I am certain and I will be cheering her on and hope that my path gets to cross with her next adventures. In particular her work around collaborative governance, collective impact and leadership are what I will continue to carry with me. Much gratitude and appreciation does not say enough for how much I respect and admire her.”
Michelle Baldwin, Community Foundations of Canada
PODCAST: Reflecting on a Career committed to collective change
Liz recently sat down with friend and colleague Jennifer Splansky Juster, Executive Director of the Collective Impact Forum, for a conversation about her career in achieving community impact. Not only do they discuss Liz's 15 years at Tamarack Institute, but themes and lessons from across her entire career.
As part of our Community Change Series 2016, Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver put forward fresh thinking around five ways to build the next iteration of the Collective Impact Framework with their publication Collective Impact 3.0 - An Evolving Framework for Community Change.
In this article, they've laid out what we feel are foundational elements of a CI 3.0 framework. The core argument is that CI efforts are more likely to be effective when their participants operate from a movement-building paradigm.
This paper explores the multiple faces of leadership and draws from Weaver's years of experience in both implementing and supporting an array of community change efforts. The paper focuses on two central questions:
What similarities and differences exist between various approaches to leadership?
Which leadership approaches are best suited to help community changemakers achieve their desired impact?
The Journey of Collective Impact: Contributions to the Field from Tamarack Institute
Healthy, safe, vibrant communities have at their core leaders and stakeholders who believe in and work together to affect positive change. The Journey of Collective Impact provides practical approaches and resources to advance collective impact, and explores new thinking about its application.
Collective Impact Post-Pandemic: A Framework for Response, Recovery and Resilience
Through the lens of Collective Impact, this paper examines three important stages for leaders to consider when navigating our world post-Pandemic: Respond, Recover and Deepening Resilience Capacity.
Within these stages, what simple rules might we follow? How will these simple rules create a different future for ourselves so that we can transform our communities at the individual and systems level?
Explore a resource filled with Collective Impact tools, articles, webinars, videos, and resources curated by Tamarack Institute for member communities and key partners. The Toolkit is organized into eight chapters, following the key components of the Collective Impact framework.
We've broken down the resources provided into Primary, Secondary and Diving Deeper sections, allowing you to review the resources as you see fit.
"Liz has been an inspiration to so many of us as a leader, thinker, and doer. Her curiosity and ability to ignite others with enthusiasm and passion have made her a beacon in this field."
Johanna Mair, Hertie School, Berlin
"Liz's approach helped shape our Foundation strategy and way of working for quite some time, and her expertise was something we've regularly referred other community partners to - without Liz, the Canadian community sector would be a remarkably different landscape."
Kelji Stevens, via Suncor Energy Foundation
"In engaging with the Co-Founder group for CCNDR, it was clear that Liz is a the consummate network collaborator and, as such, had a huge impact on the growth and development of the CCNDR collaborative. Her ability to engage, build relationships and welcome diverse viewpoints was on full display. The unique collaborative model is not without its challenges and Liz is a skilled navigator."
Bruce MacDonald, Imagine Canada
"Liz not only coached us in our journey to become a better capacity building organization for Colorado's communities, but modeled what it means to be a humble, creative leader in the field who makes everyone around her better. We have gained so much from her as an organization, and as individuals in our own leadership journeys."
Bill Fulton, The Civic Canopy
"Liz's deep knowledge of community change is grounded in first-hand experience as the initial Project Director of the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction. This enables her to translate theory into practical action and offer valuable mentorship and support to fellow-changemakers. Her insightful reflections, insatiable curiosity and innate creativity have meaningfully contributed to the ending of poverty and advancement of equity in Canada. Liz's rare combination of talents and experience, combined with her thoughtful and compassionate leadership, have been foundational to Tamarack's success as an organization and its reputation and credibility across Canada and around the world."
Sylvia Cheuy, Tamarack Institute
"Liz Weaver's impact on the Collective Change Lab and its members has been profound. Her deep insights and courageous leadership, combined with a generous and kind spirit, have shaped the organization's work in invaluable ways. She has helped CCL hone its value to the field, consistently challenging us to deepen and expand our thinking.
Liz's ability to connect people and ideas demonstrates her commitment to field building and her passion for continuous reflection and learning. She leads with vulnerability and authenticity, creating space for others to do the same, while fearlessly challenging the status quo. Her warmth and accessibility inspire those around her to be better colleagues and human beings. Liz is a true leader, a mentor, and a friend, not just a colleague."
Juanita Zerda, Collective Change Lab
"Liz is one of the hardest working, deeply curious, energetic and talented 'generalists' that I have ever worked with - and being a generalist in this work is a gift and a 'niche specialty' all on its own. She is also terrifically relational and human. Together, these means she is one of the country's most impressive community builders! Gratified that the universe put she and I in each other's way!"
Mark Cabaj, Here to There Consulting
"Liz has been a tremendous though leader and thought partner for the entire field of people engaged in collective impact work. Her contributions are too many to name, but her deep thinking and prolific writing are widely influential. I am also personally grateful for her close collaboration and partnership over the years - always willing to connect, share ideas, learn, and lead. You will be missed, Liz!!!"
Jen Juster, FSG/Collective Impact Forum
"Over the past five years, I've had the opportunity to be involved in the Communities Building Youth Futures project led by Tamarack Institute. Over the course of this project, I've witnessed Liz's commitment in mobilizing community stakeholders to ensure that more youth have access to supports and have been impressed by her dedication in ensuring that youth were directly involved in the project. On behalf of all the youth who benefited from this project, thank you! It's been a pleasure working with you Liz and I wish you all the best in your retirement!"
Mathieu Larocque, Employment and Social Development Canada
"Liz has a strong presence in advancing the field of professionalism in community engagement, collaboration, and collaborative leadership. She has been generous in offering advice and support as I navigated challenging collaboration initiatives in the climate action space. She is a big picture thinker who saw the connection between climate action and poverty reduction and helped to invite strong inter-sectoral efforts into the Tamarack sphere - influencing the critical understanding of multi-solving as a key approach to today's polycrises. Liz - your ripples run wide, and I also count you as a friend. Wishing you the very best in your next exciting phase - can't wait to see where it takes you!"
Mary Pickering, Low Carbon Cities Canada
"Liz is the hardest worker I know, and I believe that comes from her deep care for people and outcomes that matter. Liz's face lights up with bold, new thinking, she connects ideas and multiple perspectives with ease, and tests ideas with speed and tenacity. I am grateful, Liz, for your thought partnership - no challenge is too big when you step into the arena with others to solve it."
Lisa Attygalle, Tamarack Institute
"Liz has been a relentless champion for the entire sector and has shown that it is possible to organize and support change without restricting collaboration to only those working with the same mission area, location, or organization type.
Changing the world will take all of us and Liz shows up to that task every day."
Amy Sample Ward, NTEN
"I had the pleasure of meeting Liz in my early 20s when I was a young professional and full of hope and promise. I connected with Liz at that point as I was doing outreach and helping to lead the development of the Pathways to Education program in Kitchener Waterloo. What has always stuck out to me about Liz is that Liz made time for informal conversations where she could share her expertise or wisdom. This role of her as mentor is one that she played naturally and with ease and I am appreciative of the many times she offered insight and wisdom into a problem or issue I was facing or exploring. Good luck in all your next steps Liz--I am confident you will find ways to shine and mentor people in many ways moving forward."
Megan Conway, Volunteer Canada
"I have learned so much from Liz's work over the years, and so have many of the researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who have been part of the Centre for Peace Advancement community. For example, Liz regularly attended meetings of our Research Hub, and provided wisdom and inspiration for collaborative projects between university researchers and community organizations.
Her positive energy and generous spirit is contagious, and her impact will continue to be felt even as she retires from her leadership role with Tamarack. We wish her well!"
Paul Heidebrecht, Conrad Grebel University College
"I had the privilege of working with Liz and others at Tamarack to support young people and communities through Communities Building Youth Futures (CBYF) initiative. Looking back, one of the biggest things that stands out in my time working with Liz is the way in which she brings people along on learning journeys throughout the Collective Impact process.
Whether it is with community partners, youth leaders, or colleagues, Liz partners with others with openness and trust. Through one-on-one discussions as well as in large groups, I have truly appreciated and learned from Liz's way of sharing space and how it leads others to share their voice, experiences, wisdom, and strength."
Nathalie Blanchet, via Tamarack Institute
"Liz is a passionate leader who brings a commitment to community and a depth of expertise to every table she joins. In the early days of creating the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, Liz was someone I turned to, to help us make sense of what we were trying to do. She brought the framework of Collective Impact to life and helped us think through and navigate how we could use this tool to create greater impact across communities.
As a knowledge mobilizer and community builder, she was also generous in sharing her wisdom through Maytree's Five Good Ideas - twice! At Maytree we are grateful to have had the benefit of Liz's experience and expertise over the years. Thank you Liz for being the kind of leader everyone considers to be a great friend!"
