Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Cities Deepening Community Policy Digest. The Digest provides timely policy updates from across Canada that support the work of cities deepening community.
National Policy Updates:
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“Decide what the box is in your church community and begin try to think outside of it. We need to understand our context much better before we can understand how the church needs to be different.”
This is how a member of a church congregation reflected on a day-long trip to various churches in and around Toronto this winter. Together with more than 40 other members from two congregations in Kitchener, the group learned how others have either repurposed their building or even redeveloped their entire property in order to make a difference in their communities.
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Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending the annual conference for our partners, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and presenting as part of their closing plenary. I was asked to share my vision for Canada in 2040. This gave me the chance to reflect on what Canada could look like if we steer our collective capacity toward eradicating poverty and deepening community as we embrace newcomers to Canada.
Many of us shy away from using the power that we have, often to our own and our community’s detriment. This was one of the nuggets of wisdom shared with the participants attending Tamarack's Adaptive Leadership Masterclass series that took us to five cities across Canada and wrapped up just last week. Liz Skelton, Co-Founder of Collaboration for Impact shared a story about working with Indigenous leaders in Australia. It was there that she discovered that leaning into her formal and informal power could be used to help the collaborative group drive change forward.
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We all seek to innovate for different reasons. Sometimes it’s that we feel the world is changing and we risk being left behind. Sometimes it’s because the issue we’re working to address hasn’t gone away, has gotten worse, or has changed. Sometimes it’s because we simply feel that we must.
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Community change initiatives are often set against complex and systematic problems – problems that cannot be solved in isolation and without authentic support from community stakeholders.
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