The Latest

Parkdale and the People’s Economy Project: Highlights of a CCI Study Tour

On Wednesday, September 29th, Approximately 30 individuals attending the Tamarack Community Change Conference filed onto a bus to travel to Toronto’s vibrant Parkdale neighbourhood for an innovations in poverty reduction workshop and walking tour. 

Our first stop on the tour was the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC), where we were greeted by Executive Director, Victor Ellis. PARC was the ultimate host and starting place for the tour, considering the pivotal support it has given over the last 30+ to the neighbourhood’s high proportion of low-income and marginalized residents.

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YAM CAM: A Film Screening for Youth, By Youth

By Evan Read Armstrong
Interim Director, Youth Active Media

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The Force That Bounces the World

This may be the easiest assignment Vickie and I have ever had.

The good folks at the Plan Institute and Tamarack Institute have asked us to host a webinar series on the ingenuity of people with disabilities and their families.

Easy, because innovation is the core competency of people with disabilities and their families.

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Neighbourhood Strategy Built by Neighbours, for Neighbours

Story shared by the Neighbourhood Strategy team in Kitchener, ON

"From the very beginning, we wanted the Strategy to be driven and created by residents," shares Mike Farwell, the resident co-chair of the Neighbourhood Strategy project team. "Based on the variety of ways people were involved and the number of hours people contributed during our community engagement, I am confident the final recommendations of the Neighbourhood Strategy will be firmly rooted in the community." 

The numbers are in and the project team is very excited about the deep and meaningful ways people provided their input: 

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Dancing in the Rain

A group of neighbours gathered in the middle of King Street in Peterborough, ON on Saturday September 17, 2016. Our heads kept turning left and right, making sure no cars were coming. We were holding back our instinct to get off the road and make sure that kids weren’t darting into oncoming traffic. It took us some time to feel safe on the road knowing that barricades were set up to stop cars from passing through. In this moment, we were reclaiming the street as a public space where we could re-imagine it as a car-free space where children and adults can play, be physically active, and experience our neighbourhood in a new way.

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Chicken Soup Friends

This blog was originally published here and is reposted with the author's permission.

It was a Friday night. I was at home, lying on the couch watching an episode of who knows what through barely open eyes. I was exhausted. Around 3am that morning, I’d gotten in a cab and taken myself to the Emergency Room. I was, the ER doctor told me, having a gallbladder attack (nice ring to it, eh?). Everything turned out just fine but I had to cancel some meetings on Friday and get some rest.

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