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A Mutual Pathway for Community Change: Sharing Global Perspectives

It was in 2004 at the first Tamarack Community Change Institute (CCI) that I first met colleagues from New Zealand.  They had travelled the globe to spend a week with Canadian changemakers and to share their perspectives, wisdom and questions.  For many of us attending the CCI, this seemed quite exotic, but little did we know that a bond had already been formed and the individuals from New Zealand were keen to learn about Tamarack, our way of working and community change. 

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It Takes A Village

“It takes a village” is a phrase that I’ve heard repeated at different fora and conversations in the western world. I heard it used again by Allison Hewitt on the Social Innovation & Poverty Reduction Strategy panel at the recently concluded ‘Cities Innovating to Reduce Poverty’ Eastern summit that took place in Mississauga from September 18 to 19, 2018 and it got me thinking deeply about the original meaning of the phrase and how it applies to the work that attendees at this summit do.

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Highlights from Cities Innovating to Reduce Poverty: Eastern Summit 2018

The Cities Innovating to Reduce Poverty Eastern Regional Summit took place in Mississauga from September 18 – 19th bringing together 206 learners from more than 29 cities and communities from across Eastern Canada. This included government and public sector staff, elected officials, community agency leaders, and interested residents collaborating to learn from one another on how we end poverty in Canada.

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Municipal Candidate Education Campaign from Grey Bruce Counties

Municipal elections will take place across Ontario on October 22, 2018.

While voter awareness and education will be a key activity for many Cities Reducing Poverty partners this fall, the Grey Bruce Poverty Task Force is changing the focus and asking - how well are the 300+ candidates aware of and educated about local poverty issues?

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The Power of Questions

I’m coming around to the idea that you can, in fact, respond to a question with another question, and still find valuable answers buried within.

Hear me out.

At work, our Founder and Director of Vibrant Communities, Paul Born, encourages me to continually ask questions, even if it means creating version eight or nine of a document I’m working on! Sure, this often feels like an endless cascade of twisting, turning questions, but this technique gets at the heart of the messy, imperfect work of poverty reduction. It reminds us that there are multiple ‘right’ answers to the complex questions we’re tackling.

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Opioids! We need a Reconstruction of Community

Two words we most often hear together in the negative, “people are dying in our community from opioids” or we have a “community opioid crisis.”

But today, in the Globe and Mail, I, for the first time, heard the call that to fight the opioid crisis we need not a war on drugs but a reconstruction of community. In her column on September 24,  Margaret Wente shares, “the writer Andrew Sullivan talks about pain and trauma too.

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