The power of
place
The Power of Place
For more than 20 years, the Tamarack Institute has collaborated with local communities from coast to coast to coast and globally to change systems that impact entire communities. Our experience proves the unique power of local places and their capacity to develop creative and durable solutions. Our experience proves that the best solutions to complex challenges such as poverty, homelessness, social isolation, and poor mental health are created and sustained at the local level. Local leadership ensures that these solutions are responsive and sustainable.
Place is the origin of change and transformation.
We know that local impact grows and is accelerated when communities are supported and connected. That’s where we come in. As a “field catalyst,” Tamarack helps places identify shared priorities, bring together all of their assets, and build the new things necessary to address them. We also connect placesto share learning, collaborate, and influence systems changes at regional, provincial, and national levels. This ensures that local innovation can thrive and is a driver for lasting impact.
Championing The Power of Place
Tamarack’s work has always focused on the unique power of local places because we know that the most creative and lasting solutions to complex social or environmental challenges emerge from people coming together locally. When collaborative partnerships bring together the community members who face the biggest barriers, nonprofits, businesses, philanthropy, and government, these leaders develop actionable strategies and measurable targets rooted in lived experience and local data.
Tamarack provides backbone support, learning networks, and tools, and each community leads its own work. This decentralized, place-based model enables both local experimentation and solutions, as well as the kinds of learning, advocacy, and storytelling that are only possible when places come together.
The power of this model has been recognized in Canada and globally for its ability to create lasting change for communities, building up a technology that not only helps to address complex challenge but also creating more vibrant and connected places:
The Schwab Foundation recognized Tamarack through its Collective Social Innovation Award and was recently highlighted in their recent The Future is Collective Report
The University of Toronto’s School of Cities and the Canadian Urban Institute recognized the Tamarack model as part of Learning From What Works: Leveraging Local Solutions to make better places
Tamarack also works with sector partners and governments to ensure that place is recognized for the important role that it plays in addressing large-scale national issues:
The 2025 Report of the National Advisory Council on Poverty highlights the need to support communities and the non-profit sector’s vital role
The 2025 Chief Public Health Officer of Canada’s Report on the State of Public Health in Canada recognized the importance of intersectoral and community-based solutions to improve wellbeing. This report also highlights Tamarack’s network as a model for this type of work.
The Government of Manitoba’s new Poverty Reduction Strategy released in 2026, notes the importance of community-based strategies and implementation and
Why Place Matters
Place is where people live, work, dream, and struggle. It’s where the impacts of affordability, loneliness, climate change, polarization, and disengagement are most visible and tangible. It’s where the solutions must begin. Place is powerful because:
1. Root causes are localized
In place, people can create holistic solutions to complex and interconnected challenges that play out in unique ways.
The housing crisis is different in a small town than in a big city. One-size-fits-all solutions can't address root problems.
To learn more, read this Tamarack Story: A Community-Driven Approach to Affordable Housing in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
2. It's where integrated responses are born
Local actors “do not live single-sector lives” and experience the impact of complex, interconnected challenges first-hand. This is why they are uniquely positioned to contribute to the creation of effective, integrated solutions.
It's easier to address entangled economic, social and environmental issues in practical ways at the scale of community.
For example, read: Montréal: Collective Impact and the Power of Place.
3. Local places are rich with assets
Every community has underutilized assets – knowledge, networks, spaces, and skills – that local actors are aware of and can mobilize.
People are often more willing to commit to long-term change efforts in “their” place and impacting their community. Once its immeasurable talent, time and other resources are recognized and mobilized, a community can change can happen efficiently and sustainably.
The Tamarack’s Story: Portage la Prairie's Roving Campus illustrates this beautifully.
4. Innovation thrives in place
Locally driven, place-based efforts are uniquely positioned to develop novel, creative and sustainable solutions to persistent problems.
Communities are innovative, and this leadership capability is often unleashed by necessity. Working at the local level enables them to move through cycles of design, reflection, and iteration much faster than larger systems.
See this in action in the Tamarack Story: Kahnawà:ke | Indigenous Wisdom Mobilizes Community Leadership
5. We can move more quickly in community
In a world of increasing shocks and disruptions, local communities can notice and adapt to change more quickly.
When we know each other and the assets around us, we are more likely to respond effectively when the unexpected occurs and are therefore also best positioned to seize the opportunity.
For an inspiring example, read this Tamarack story: PEI’s North Shore Climate Action for Resilience Collective
6. Communities can commit for the long haul
While governments, corporations, and organizations often operate on short cycles, communities can sustain efforts across decades and generations.
While institutions and governments may shift priorities, people in communities, who are supported, can organize and implement strategies designed for the long arc of change.
This Tamarack Story: Saint John, Stronger Together illustrates a commitment to long-term change.
7. Places rebuild agency and belonging
Locally led action fosters belonging, strengthens civic engagement, and counters social fragmentation and polarization.
Place-based collaboration seeds opportunities for people to participate meaningfully and bring their leadership to strengthen civic life.
This leadership is demonstrated powerfully in the Tamarack Story: Participatory Grantmaking in Peel
8. Place is where trust is born
Lasting change happens at the speed of trust. Trust is the result of relationships that are built over time and nurtured by frequent opportunities to interact and do things together. These things occur most readily at the local scale.
Ongoing, frequent, safe, and accessible in-person experiences can strengthen trust, empathy, and relationships while also creating opportunities to braid ancestral knowledge with modern insight.
This Tamarack Story: Plants of Change: A Biocultural Journey Through People, Place, and Policy shows how trusted intergenerational relationships create the foundation for building sustainable futures.
Where to From here
Since we began, Tamarack has helped hundreds of communities reduce poverty in all its forms. Together, these communities have influenced policy, improved access to services, and shaped how Canada addresses poverty, climate change, youth futures, and social connection.
This work has shifted the way poverty is understood, from short-term charity to long-term, systemic, and collaborative solutions root.
In each place, people with lived experience, nonprofits, businesses, philanthropy, and government come together. They create strategies and set measurable goals, grounded in local data and real-life experience. Tamarack provides the backbone—tools, networks, and support—while communities lead their own work.
This place-based model allows communities to try new ideas, find solutions that fit locally, and share learning with others. Together, they build the momentum and advocacy needed for big, lasting change.
If you believe everyone deserves opportunity…
If you believe systems can be transformed…
If you believe lasting change begins with the power of place. Then let’s make it happen—together!
Latest Resources
If you believe systems can be transformed, start where change begins - with the power of place. Now more than ever, trust is consolidating locally. Scale and legitimacy will increasingly start in and from local communities. Place has never mattered more.
Danya Pastuszek
President & CEO, Tamarack Institute
Ways to Get involved
Join the Movement
Join Tamarack in advocating for a Canada-wide strategy that integrates community belonging into discussions about the economy and the quality of life for everyone.
Become a Member
Tamarack membership unlocks knowledge, tools, and experience through a network of like-minded peers, Tamarack’s guidance, and national movements for change.
Communities of Practice
Our Communities of Practice are recurring online meet-ups where people with a common interest – and sometimes only Tamarack members – discuss common problems or goals within their practice area.