WEBINAR | Caring for Community Caretakers Across Canada

Description

At the heart of community change lies the people needed to sustain care-centred work, relational leadership, and an unwavering commitment and vision for strategic investment. From grassroots, non-profit to large-scale movement building, we hear time and time again that systems of white supremacy, including funding structures, basic income and inequitable policies, continue to demand exhaustion, productivity and burnout of people leading the way. What if we chose a different path to systems change? A path that honours the caretakers as essential infrastructure to community change, people who need systems of support to protect their health and wellbeing?

Building on Tamarack’s Open Letter to Philanthropy, this webinar will explore the transformative power of community care initiatives that center love, compassion, and well-being as essential parts of equity-centred systems change.

Our panellists represent grassroots, research, and practice-based approaches to community care:

• FireLoch’s Care for Caretakers Fellowship supports volunteers through reflection and rest.

• Edmonton-based Community of Care for BIPOC Equity Practitioners, which embeds care and relational accountability in equity and reconciliation work.

• Good Futures Collective supports equity-denied communities in responding to climate adaptation

Together, they’ll share how grassroots, community-led acts of care can spark systemic shifts in how we care for the people essential in our systems change efforts, and the shifts required by policymakers, philanthropists and funders to recognize and value care work as essential work. We’ll also discuss how we can better sustain the well-being of those at the heart of community transformation.

Together we will explore:

• What it means to embed care, compassion, and love into our community and organizational practices.

•  The role of rest, reflection, collective responsibility, and personal development opportunities in sustaining caretakers.

• How grassroots care initiatives can become evidence for broader systems change.

• Strategies to ensure care-based work, including the people doing it, are adequately valued, funded, and supported.

This webinar invites equity practitioners, community organizers, and changemakers to reflect on the ways they care for the caretakers leading their change efforts and reimagine new ways to sustain their efforts while advocating for broader policy- and funding-level reform.

Speakers

Anjum Chagpar. Co-Founder, Good Futures Collective

Anjum is the daughter of immigrants from Tanzania and India, a settler on Treaty 13 Territory, in what is colonially known as Toronto, a mother, poet, gardener and life-centred designer. In 2022, she co-founded Good Futures Collective to advance alternative stories about our futures alongside equity-denied communities. She also currently leads the Climate and Equity Lab at Social Innovation Canada as their Temporary Innovation Practice Lead. 

Jennifer DeCoste. Founder, LifeSchoolHouse

Jennifer is a grassroots community change leader and social innovator in Atlantic Canada. She is the founder of the LifeSchoolHouse - a barter-based skills sharing platform used to address social isolation and loneliness. Jennifer’s work internationally focuses on supporting community leaders in building place-based “folkschools” as local Asset-Based Community Development projects. In 2021, Jennifer also founded a social enterprise called FireLoch in Northern NS: a land-based rest and retreat space for non-profit sector volunteers and teams that also invites local economic development by way of regenerative and rooted local tourism.

Rochelle Ignacio. Director, Equity, Anti-Racism and Reconciliation, Tamarack Institute 

Rochelle Ignacio (she/her) is an equity strategist, facilitator, public speaker, and community builder who guides organizations and individuals through meaningful equity and anti-racism journeys. Grounded in an intentional, relational, and care-based framework, Rochelle fosters environments where belonging, reconciliation, and transformative change can take root.  Since 2021, Rochelle has led Tamarack Institute’s inaugural Equity, Anti-Racism and Reconciliation team and spearheaded Seeds of Transformation — a loving framework for equity, belonging, and reconciliation. Beyond consulting, she advances Black mobility and belonging through economic development, arts and culture production, and board leadership in Alberta. 

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