Community Change Festival

September 30 - October 3, 2019 | VANCOUVER, CANADA

Be the Changemaker

Join changemakers from near and far to deepen your knowledge of the 5 practices needed to move your community change agenda from idea to action to impact. Go deep into one practice area or advance your skills in all five.

Meet your peers, re-charge, and have fun!

About the Event

This event is for community engagers, practitioners, and innovators. It is an opportunity to come together with inspirational leaders from across the country and beyond to share ideas, successes and failures and to take this learning home and apply it to the community change work you're passionate about.

This event is about building the five interconnected practices that are vital to getting to impact when tackling complex community challenges - diving deep in an area you haven't explored or getting acquainted with different leverage points that may be missing from your community changemaker toolkit.

Learn the latest thinking, understand your role as a changemaker, and replenish your toolkit with practical ideas and tools you can use in your own community. Discover and be inspired by how other groups are tackling complex issues like equity, mental health, the opioid crisis, environmental sustainability, reconciliation, and belonging and inclusion. Are you an experienced changemaker? Join the advanced learning stream on systems change.

At the Tamarack Learning Centre, we focus on Five Interconnected Practices every community changemaker tackling complex problems needs to harness to move from idea to practice to impact. No matter what issue you're focused on - affordable housing, mental health, food security, reconciliation, environmental sustainability, youth engagement - a strong understanding of each practice below and how they intersect will give you the foundation you need to see real impact in your community work.

Collective Impact

One of the biggest challenges facing community change leaders is impacting systems and policies to improve the well-being of citizens. In 2011, FSG in the United States defined an approach to large-scale, system-wide community change called Collective Impact. The Collective Impact idea provides a useful framework for community change and is situated within the broad frame of collaborative efforts focused on systems and policy change. Tamarack collaborates with colleagues in Canada, the United States and internationally to intentionally build the field of practice in Collective Impact and collaborative community change efforts.

Community Engagement

Community Engagement is the process by which citizens are engaged to work and learn together on behalf of their communities to create and realize bold visions for the future. We apply the theory to community contexts and teach and coach organizations, municipalities and groups to engage their communities meaningfully. We stress the importance of approaching engagement with an outcomes-based lens, of always involving context experts, and to provide community ownership of solutions whenever possible. We specialize in applying Community Engagement to systems-thinking in order to work collaboratively for community-wide change.

Community Innovation

We see Community Innovation as a particular form of social innovation that is place-based, within the specific geography of a community. As dynamic ‘living labs’, communities offer the perfect container for innovation. Through our experience with community change, we have come to understand that to be effective, innovation requires an appreciation of both the issue one is hoping to address, as well as a deep understanding of the unique characteristics of the community – the place and the people within it – where the innovation will be implemented.

Collaborative Leadership

The premise of Collaborative Leadership says: If you bring the appropriate people together in constructive ways with good information, they will create authentic visions and strategies for addressing the shared concerns of the organization and community. When collaboration works, it reproduces and builds the characteristics of civic community, allowing us to deal with future issues in constructive ways. Collaboration builds social capital. Collaboration is the new leadership, and we work with communities and organizations to implement Collaborative Leadership processes to achieve impact.

This Festival is all about the Five Interconnected Practices - Collective Impact, Community Engagement, Collaborative Leadership, Community Innovation and Evaluating Impact. That's why our Festival Faculty is comprised of experts on each. On our final day together we will also have the opportunity to hear from and engage in dialogue around the topic of Power, Privilege, and Being the Changemaker You Need to Be with Greater Good Studio Founder, George Aye.

Meet George AYE

George co-founded Greater Good Studio with the belief that design can lead to positive behaviour change.Previously, he spent seven years at global innovation firm IDEO before being hired as the first human-centered designer at the Chicago Transit Authority. Since founding Greater Good, he has worked across multiple social issues including autism, criminal justice, education, public health and health care. George is an Adjunct Full Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With his co-founder, he was awarded the TED Prize City 2.0 (2012) and recognized in the Public Interest Design 100 list (2013).

View a short clip of George's recent webinar Overcoming Power and Privilege in Community Change, which will help get you prepared for his keynote address at the Community Change Festival this fall!

Meet Our 5 practice area faculty

Liz Weaver

Liz is passionate about the power and potential of communities getting to impact on complex issues. Liz is Tamarack’s Co-CEO and leads Tamarack’s Learning Centre. In this role she provides strategic direction to both the Learning Centre and Tamarack while also advancing collaborative leadership, collective impact skills and strategies in communities across Canada, the US and Internationally.

Co-CEO and Consulting Director, Collaborative Leadership

Sylvia Cheuy

Sylvia is an internationally recognized community-builder and trainer. Over the past five years, much of Sylvia’s work has focused on building awareness and capacity in the areas of Collective Impact and Community Engagement throughout North America.

Consulting Director, Collective Impact

Galen MacLusky

Galen is a Consulting Director of the Tamarack Institute’s Community Innovation Idea Area. He is passionate about working with community organizations to help build and scale new ideas that deepen their impact. An experienced design, innovation, and co-creation consultant, at the core of his work are approaches that help organizations engage with those who are impacted by their services and test new programs and services with minimal investment.

Consulting Director, Community Innovation

Pamela Teitelbaum

Pamela is a Consulting Director of the Tamarack Institute’s Evaluating Impact Practice Area. She is passionate about supporting and facilitating an interplay of learning and evaluation that creates transformative experiences aimed at developing healthy, equitable, gender-responsive and rights-based communities. Pamela believes that increasing access and awareness about evaluation strategies, methodologies and processes leads to more critical, collaborative and long-term community change.

Consulting Director, Evaluating Impact

Lisa Attygalle

Lisa works with cities and organizations to help them meaningfully engage their communities. Over the last six years her work has focused on creating authentic engagement strategies and training staff teams, teaching and writing about innovative engagement methodologies, designing and facilitating workshops with a focus on raising the voice of the context expert, integrated communications planning, and the use of technology and creativity for engagement. Lisa advocates for simplicity in infrastructure, frameworks and design and loves applying the principles of marketing, advertising, loyalty, and user experience to community initiatives.

Consulting Director, Community Engagement

A Festival CELEBRATION

This gathering is not just about strengthening your community change competencies, but about celebrating the amazing work that is being done by leaders like you all across the country and beyond. Throughout our time together we will: enjoy artistic performances by local artists; explore the city we're in and celebrate the local projects that are taking place within it; make time and space to connect, socialize and learn from one another; and, offer opportunities to contribute to the emerging learning community that we will create together throughout the week.

Community Change Festival

Diverse Changemakers

Tool Sessions

Idea Sessions

New Resources

Immersive City Experiences

About the Event

A Festival of Ideas

Collective Impact

Community Engagement

Community Innovation

Collaborative Leadership

Evaluating Impact

The learning arc

Our Festival Faculty