Community-Based COVID Recovery

Posted on March 17, 2021
By Paul Born & Lisa Attygalle

10 - A Guide for a Community-Based COVID-19 Recovery is a beautiful 32-page booklet based on an idea hatched by the Tamarack Board and Co-CEO’s Liz Weaver and Paul Born while developing a ten-year strategy for Tamarack. As an organization we have spent many hours considering why and how cities and communities have become such a force in community change, especially now during COVID-19. With an eye to the future, this guide captures this momentum, attempting to do so in practical and useful ways.

This resource looks at how communities are recovering from COVID-19 in a variety of ways. We’ve included an assessment to help you gauge how your city is working toward a COVID-19 community-based recovery. This provides a baseline and will help you explore the ideas and stories included in the guide.

We’ve also included 10 Really Good Ideas for thinking forward at a city or community-wide level. These are some of the most universally applied ideas that we’ve seen through our work, and conversations with our learners and partners:Road to Recovery written on desert road-1

    1. An Opportunity to Unite! Don’t Let the Crisis go to Waste. 
    2. Engage Your Community in Dialogue 
    3. Create Innovative Ways to Inform Your Community 
    4. Support and Mobilize Citizen Action 
    5. Adapt and Respond to Emergent Change 
    6. Take an Asset-Based Approach for Sustainable Change 
    7. Build on Shifting Worldviews and Adopt Innovation 
    8. Embrace a Collective Impact Approach 
    9. Harness This Opportunity for a Just Recovery 
    10. Build Community Resilience

You will also find 10 Inspiring Stories from our peers from coast to coast to coast, exploring how cities are working together and applying some of the ideas shared in the guide. Lastly, we’ve also included 10 Useful Resources for cities and communities interested in citizen-led community planning and innovation as you adapt and recover from COVID-19.

This has been a difficult year, but it is more important than ever to view our response and recovery to COVID-19 through a community-based lens. Cities across the country are already hard at work to ensure that we’re engaging communities, taking the opportunity for a Just Recovery, and putting people at the centre. Each of these cities has adapted their approach to their own context – people, culture, and place. We hope that these examples, ideas, and resources provide encouragement and practical tools for helping your own community. 

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Topics:
Community Innovation, Community Change, Inspiring Communities, Recovery, Homepage Blog


Paul Born & Lisa Attygalle

By Paul Born & Lisa Attygalle

Paul Born grew up as the son of Mennonite refugees. This is what has made him deeply curious about and engaged in ideas that cause people to work together for the common good. Paul is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Tamarack Institute and the Founder and Director of Vibrant Communities. He is the author of four books, including two Canadian best sellers. Paul is a global faculty member of the Asset Based Community Development Institute (ABCD) and a senior fellow of Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social innovators. In her role at Tamarack, Lisa works with cities and organizations to improve the way they engage with their communities. Over the last seven years her work has focused on creating engagement strategies for municipalities and organizations, integrated communications planning, and the use of technology and creativity for engagement. Lisa constantly advocates for simplicity in infrastructure, frameworks and design and loves applying the principles of marketing, advertising, loyalty, and user experience to community initiatives. -- Au Tamarack Institute, Lisa travaille avec les villes et les organisations afin qu’elles améliorent leur façon de mobiliser leur communauté. Au cours des sept dernières années, son travail s’est concentré sur l’élaboration de stratégies de mobilisation pour les municipalités et les organisations, la planification intégrée des communications, et l’utilisation de la technologie et de la créativité pour mobiliser les gens. Lisa est partisane de la simplicité en ce qui concerne les infrastructures, les cadres de travail et la conception. De plus, elle adore appliquer les principes de la mercatique, de la publicité, de la fidélisation et de l’expérience utilisateur aux initiatives communautaires.

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