Dear there,
“Why is Tamarack working on climate transition?” is a question that I’ve been asked many times since joining the Tamarack Institute as Director of Community Climate Transitions in April 2021 to get the initiative off the ground.
Most people who know Tamarack are familiar with our work to end poverty and our role in helping lift over a million Canadians out of poverty in the 20 years since the Institute was founded. We are also known for our success in strengthening communities and supporting youth. The common thread across these impact areas is the place-based collaborative approach to change, whereby the whole community comes together to collectively move the needle on a complex local issue.
Before Tamarack began working on climate transition, we did an extensive landscape analysis and learned the following:
- While there are many supports for cities and communities in Canada to take local climate action, these tend to be targeted towards individual sectors (e.g., municipalities, nonprofits, citizen-led groups) and the unique role they play. No one seemed to be supporting the formation of multi-sector collaboratives that engage residents to co-develop a shared vision and common agenda.
- There is a deep understanding that justice and equity needs to be embedded in how we mitigate and adapt to climate change, yet a dearth of tools and resources for how to do this at the local level. Given Tamarack's 20-year history working in poverty reduction and engaging people with lived experience, we are well placed to support communities to take climate action through an equity and justice lens, aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Filling these critical gaps became our raison d’être. Now, with our first year behind us, we’ve been reflecting on all that we’ve accomplished and our plans going forward. You can dive into this in our newly released Year 1 Impact Report.
In addition to developing this report, we’ve thought a lot about how change happens and how all that we do – communities of practice, coaching and peer learning, workshops and webinars, publications, partnership development and more – contributes to the impact we seek to have. We are pleased to share our Theory of Change that tells this story.
Sincerely,
Laura and the Tamarack team
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