Why us? Why now?

A donation to Tamarack means a donation impacting and uplifting those with lived experience.

The key to our sustainability is our people and their impact. At Tamarack we are committed to supporting our diverse community of members and partners, to making their work easier, and, above all, more effective. 

Our network of incredible and passionate changemakers has grown by more than 50% in the last five years.

The progress of our shared movement would not have been possible without changemakers like you, and its future rests on our commitment to continue building and learning together.

That’s why we have decided to embrace fundraising as a movement building tool. Together, we can strengthen our shared commitments to our communities and movements, policy and systems change, and large-scale impact.

Stories from the Movement 

Successes from the Movement  

• Achieving population-level outcomes at scale. Communities Ending Poverty members continue to be actively engaged in the development and implementation of local, provincial, and national poverty reduction strategies leading to significant reductions – specifically, over 2 million Canadians exited poverty from 2015-2020.  

• Demonstrating deep engagement of community members in decisions that impact them. Over 25,900 youth have been engaged in improving local education outcomes through Communities Building Youth Futures’ 19 local leadership tables, 40 innovation projects, and as backbone project staff since 2019.  

• Building extraordinary involvement in the movement for community change. Accomplishing exponential growth of our learning community and four outcome-focused networks from 23,000 learners in 2018 to 50,000 in 2023 as changemakers identify Tamarack as their go-to resource for community change.

• Co-creating bilingual field building resources that redefine what’s possible in communities. Our Learning Centre and communities continue to co-develop widely accessed learning tools, including a 10 Guide about engaging people with lived and living experience that has been downloaded over 12,000 times.

• Accelerating the scale of the movement through cross-sectoral investment. Bringing together governments, philanthropic organizations, businesses, and key strategic and global partners to mobilize capital for long-term commitments to climate justice, youth futures, community belonging, and eradicating poverty.

How your support enables the Movement?

Our supporters empower a growing community of over 50,000 changemakers across Canada and the world. By donating to Tamarack, you help sustain and expand the community change movement. Your donations help us build learning tools created by seasoned experts, such as: 

• coaching
• publications
• workshops
• communities of practice

Your donations also help improve the local conditions (e.g., common agendas, partnerships, backbone staff, data collection) to accelerate the capacity of communities to lead efforts to address the challenges they face.

Be a Light Fund: Scholarships for Equity-Deserving Learners 

You may also choose to support the Be A Light Fund. Through this Fund, you help enable the learning and leadership of diverse practitioners in the communities work with. The Fund provides scholarships that subsidize and/or provide free learning opportunities to support Black, Indigenous, and racialized changemakers, youth and emerging practitioners, community members living on no or low-incomes, and those from small and grassroots organizations to be leaders of community change work.

Funders of the Movement 

We want to give special thanks to the funding partners and contributors who breathe significant momentum into the movement and our collective work. Our growing learning community and organizational funding partners are catalytic supporters of the movement.  

As a registered charity, all funds generated through paid learning engagements from our members and learners are reinvested back into our work to strengthen Tamarack’s publicly available supports and resources. In 2022, contributions from our learning community totaled nearly $1.8M to the community change movement. 

We are also deeply thankful for the organizational funding partners who have journeyed with us from the beginning and those who have joined the movement more recently. 

Ways to invest in the Community Change Movement

Tamarack Institute is a registered Canadian charity. Our registration number is 86280 8615 RR0001.

Online Giving

We have partnered with Canada Helps to help make giving your contribution quick and seamless. Canada Helps will provide you with a tax receipt upon making your donation. Click here to donate using Canada Helps.

Direct Deposit 

We offer the opportunity to make direct deposits (also known as electronic funds transfer or EFT) straight into Tamarack’s account. If you would like to make a direct deposit donation, and require our banking information, please email us at finance@tamarackcommunity.ca.

Please note we will also request some personal information from you, should you desire a tax receipt. 

Offline Giving

If you would prefer to send a cheque directly to Tamarack, we are happy to process and send you a tax receipt directly. Cheques can be made payable in CAD $ to Tamarack and mailed to:    

Tamarack Institute  
Kindred Centre for Peace Advancement, Conrad Grebel University College  
University of Waterloo  
140 Westmount Road North 
Waterloo, Ontario  
N2L 3G6 

If you have any issues or would like to discuss your support further, please contact Justin Williams, at justin@tamarackcommunity.ca, to speak with our team!