Annually, the Tamarack Learning Centre takes the time to pause, reflect and plan forward. We had a very full 2021 delivering workshops, hosting webinars, building online learning courses, and developing papers, tools, case studies and other resources.
Tamarack’s consulting work took us virtually to all corners of the globe including Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Europe and across Canada and the United States. A positive outcome of COVID is that virtual borders are more accessible, and learning can be cross-community and cross-cultural.
Tamarack has adapted its learning strategies over the past year to continue to provide meaningful experiences for members and learners. All virtual workshops include coaching sessions which typically occur one-month post-workshop. We know that this deepens your commitment to learning and enables you to engage further with Tamarack Directors and your peers. The coaching sessions have also helped us understand better the needs of community change practitioners. It’s often through these coaching conversations that new ideas for papers, tools and resources emerge.
As we begin another year, we want to share with you some of the learning priorities for the Tamarack Learning Centre in 2022.
Community Engagement: We will be asking the following questions:
- How can we reinvigorate our engagement? How can we engage meaningfully and creatively in a hybrid world? How can we ensure our engagement is inclusive? How can we bring more community voices into decision-making processes?
Collective Impact: We will be advancing the following three themes:
- Equity as a driver for collective impact and community change, the role of field catalysts in accelerating systems transformation and impact and deepening our understanding of how different sectors are engaged with the challenges and opportunities presented in collective impact.
Collaborative Leadership: We will be working on the following topics:
- Continuing our deep dive into how to adjust governance and leadership within the collaborative and collective impact contexts, and then exploring the human side of community leadership including the challenges of navigating different power dynamics, and connecting deep trust, empathy, and love as drivers of community change.
Community Innovation: We will intersect social and community innovation by asking:
- What social innovation tools, approaches and ways of thinking can be most helpful to community changemakers? How can co-design practices lead to more impactful outcomes? What is emerging in design thinking that supports communities?
Evaluating Impact: We will focus on deepening the knowledge and practice of evaluating impact by:
- Keeping evaluating impact simple and accessible, empowering communities in their evaluation processes, focusing on participatory approaches that can be adapted to virtual environments, enabling an equity lens on evaluation and learning, and developing tools and case study approaches for effectively communicating impact.
In 2021, Tamarack focused on deepening our connections and networks across Quebec. There is a rich tradition of community change in Quebec, and we will partner with organizations across Quebec to share their approaches and lessons learned. As well, Tamarack is focused on making more accessible tools, resources, papers, and case studies that advance community change and changemakers. If you are providing programs and services to Francophone communities, you might want to join our growing community of leaders.
The Tamarack Learning Centre is excited about the potential in the year ahead. We invite you to learn with us by signing up for an upcoming webinar, workshop or online course. Or browse around the Tamarack website and access the many papers, tools and resources that were developed this year.
We look forward to engaging with you in 2022.
