October 2022 Edition

Hi there,

Reflecting Together: Results and Implications of our 2022 Members Survey 

In July and August 2022, midway through the second year of Tamarack 2030 plan, you – Tamarack’s learners – participated in a survey designed to understand your current interests and needs, your hopes for how Tamarack will support your work, and the impact of Tamarack's support so far. We are grateful for the care that so many of you put into responding.

We are thrilled to share a summary of what we learned from you, and of how the learnings will inform our work in the year to come.

What is Community?

Our Deepening Community team believes that all place-based work should have community at the centre. 

What is Community is the first paper in an eight-part series designed to help you make the case for taking a Deepening Community approach to your community development work. We invite you to read and share this with others who are working in the community building space.

Stewarding the Land Back: Sage Harvesting

“For as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the rivers flow.” – Treaty One

If you grow your own foods or live off the land, this time of year is special. On the prairies, as in many other parts of the world, there are berries to be picked, corn to be shucked and root vegetables to be dug up and plucked. Many traditional Indigenous medicines are also ready for harvesting.

Recently, Angelina Pelletier and members of the Communities Building Youth Futures team in Portage la Prairie traveled to Long Plain First Nation (an Ojibway and Dakota community in the central plains region of Manitoba) to pick sage, one of the four sacred medicines. In this piece, Angelina shares recollections from that trip. Already, the piece has inspired at least one other person to travel to the same location to pick medicine.

This summer we launched the 2022 Collaborative Leadership & Governance series, a collection of over 20 articles and papers that will help inform the process and people aspects of effective collaboration and provide you with a wide range of practical ideas and resources for pushing your work forward.

We've launched the third resource in this series, Collaboration: The Act of Building Trust, which explores those two critical phases of the collaboration process.