The Latest

Our Community Can Change | When We Work Together

Later this month, more than two hundred people from across North America and around the world will be meeting in Toronto to learn together and challenge each other to "up our game" in our work of community change.  This is the kind of disruptive leadership that is needed to encourage us all to relentlessly question our own assumptions and approaches in search of more effective ways to tackle our toughest social and environmental challenges.  

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Bold action to end poverty in Canada

This article originally appeared in the Canadian Mennonite Journal on June 6, 2016, by Paul Born

I was a young child when my family and I came to Canada as Mennonite refugees from the Ukraine. We were displaced people seeking to create a new life for ourselves. 

My personal experience of poverty has shaped my life’s work. It’s why I founded Tamarack, a non-profit organization that helps people collaborate to tackle the toughest social problems, including poverty. It’s why my long-held, deep hope is to end poverty in Canada.

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The Role of the Citizen

After one of seven Deepening Community with Collective Impact workshops in Australia and New Zealand, I was interviewed by Paul Bishop in Redland City, Australia, about the true cost of deepening community ­ both socially and economically.

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A Tribute to Brenda Zimmerman

Brenda Zimmerman, dear friend to Tamarack and a champion of community change and innovation, died verysuddenly in mid-December. She will be deeply missed and she leaves a lasting mark on us all. Like many of you, I was inspired and honoured that Brenda chose to share her newest idea - the concept of “snap back” - with us at the 2014 Collective Impact Summit. Her thinking offers guidance for moving forward despite being surrounded by resilient systems, and we now must share her thinking broadly so that it can live on.

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"Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast": Lessons from 2014

In December, Liz Weaver and I hosted Community Change: Lessons Learned 2014 a webinar exploring key community change lessons. It provided a great opportunity to generate deeper insights about our work over the past year with the 200 learners who joined the webinar. The dialogue and response energized us with the realization that our growing online community of learners has really become a movement for social change!

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Community Innovation: The Time is Now

I have long been a student of community. I am curious about people's varied definitions of it and how the sense of belonging to something beyond oneself, while at times a burden, can serve as a source of inspiration for generosity and shared action. Often, people's definition of community includes a specific physical place where one lives or works, a place whose well-being is linked to that of your own. Innovation - finding new ways of thinking about and addressing long-standing issues - is another concept I have studied for some time. Throughout much of my adult life, my work has focused on the intersection between community and innovation: nurturing new approaches to address the social challenges that exist within communities by working together. This is community innovation.

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