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Community Benefits Summit Highlights Opportunity for More Inclusive Prosperity

Two types of social wealth building initiatives are on the rise: Community Benefit Agreements (CBA) and Social Procurement. Scotland, Los Angeles, the Vancouver Olympics, and even the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games/Parapan Am Games were amongst the first to adopt CBA's and social procurement adoption. In fact, Ontario is the first Canadian jurisdiction to pass legislation on CBAs. Ontario’s Bill 6, the Infrastructure for Jobs and Prosperity Act, received Royal Ascent in 2015 and the regulations to support this policy are currently in development.

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Connecting Ideas to Practice: Tamarack on the Global Stage

The international Association of Community Development (IACD) is a global network of community change leaders who are seeking to build the capacity of communities to realize greater social and economic equality, environmental protection and political democracy. Over its 15-year history, Tamarack has both contributed to and been influenced by the ideas of IACD thought leaders including Peter Drucker, John McKnight, and Cormac Russell.

In the most recent edition of the IACD Practice Insights, Tamarack contributed two articles which illustrate both the challenge and the opportunity of deep community engagement in co-creating change. Lisa Attygalle’s article on The Context Experts describes the value of citizens in sharing their expertise about navigating community systems. Context experts are people with lived experience of the situation, including children and youth. They are the people who experientially know about the issue and can share their expertise in how the issue impacts them and their livelihoods. Authentic community engagement purposefully including context experts in co-creating solutions.

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Innovation Comes in all Sizes: Reflections from Three Days on the Lower North Shore of Quebec

It was early spring 2017 when a collective impact and community engagement capacity building gathering was held in La Tabatiere, Quebec. This tiny, isolated community of 499 residents hosted more than 100 colleagues from across the Lower North Shore region over three days, many arriving by snowmobiles and air as there are few roads that lead to the community in the winter.

The participants experienced a deep dive into four curriculum content areas including collaborative leadership, community engagement, community development and collective impact. The curriculum was designed to create a common language for all participants and to have them discover the great work that was already happening in the Region. In addition, the participants also learned about education and community-based success stories which were already driving innovation into the region.

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Lessons from Toronto Foundation's Vital Signs Report: Towards a More Just City

The Toronto Foundation, a community foundation focused on pooling philanthropic resources to maximize community impact, released their 2017/18 vital signs report this month. This year’s report, Towards a More Just City, uses an equity lens to reveal the ways that quality of life can be impacted by neighbourhood, income, race, immigration status, gender, sexual identity and age in Toronto. The Toronto Foundation hopes that the equity lens, and the concerns that it highlights, provide a useful roadmap for government, the philanthropic sector, private sector and individual citizens to remove systemic barriers facing some populations in Toronto from full participation in the city.

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A Matchmaking Website for Volunteers and Non-Profits

Have you ever thought of giving back to the community – volunteering somehow – but aren’t sure of where to start?

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A Framework to Learn to ‘Play Society’ Together

Can we learn to play society together the same way we learn to play hockey? To answer this question, let’s look at how young children learn to play hockey.

First, before young children can even begin to play hockey, they must learn some basic skills: to skate forward, backward, in a straight line or turning while handling the puck with a stick. Although it is hard at the beginning, they eventually learn the basic skills.

Gradually they also start assimilating knowledge and mastering other skills associated with the dynamic of hockey.

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