Community Change Festival

OCTOBER 1-4, 2018 | TORONTO, CANADA 

Over 4 days, explore the 5 competencies every changemaker needs to move ideas to practice to impact. Through workshops, open space dialogue, tools, immersive tours, and peer input processes, go deep into one approach or advance your skills in each.

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250

Changemakers
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15

How-To Sessions
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5

Deep Dive Masterclasses
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8

Provocateurs
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5

Community Site Visits

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 key competencies 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.

This event will inspire. It will build capacities. It will build connections. Most importantly, it will give us a chance to CELEBRATE with others who dedicate their time, wisdom and passion to making communities stronger.

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A Festival of Ideas

 At the Tamarack Learning Centre, we focus on five key competencies 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 idea below and how they intersect will give you the foundation you need to see real impact in your community work. 

 

 CommunityEngagement

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
CollectiveImpact

 

Evaluating Impact

New approaches to community change require different ways of evaluating impact. We are experimenting with new ways of measuring change, exploring who is responsible for outcomes, developing methods that adapt to the pace of community change activities, creating alternative approaches for getting change makers involved in the actual assessment process, and using the results to drive new thinking, better strategies and deeper impact.

Artist at Community Change InstituteA 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. 

The Faculty

Join in on a daily Masterclass, workshop, one-on-one coaching session or how-to tool hosted by one of the Tamarack Learning Centre's Consulting Directors. Participants will have the opportunity to go deep into one approach or advance your skills in each.

 

Our Learning Agenda will also be complimented by a number of guest contributors and provocateurs who will bring a diversity of voices, knowledge, experience and perspectives to our learning. 

 

Meet a few of our faculty below:

Liz Weaver

Liz is Co-CEO of the Tamarack Institute, and is also Tamarack's resident expert on all things Collective Impact. Liz is well-known for her thought leadership on collective impact and is the author of several popular and academic papers on the topic. She is a co-catalyst partner with the Collective Impact Forum and leads a collective impact capacity building strategy with the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

Consulting Director, Collective Impact

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, Community Engagement

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

Mark Cabaj

Mark is President of the consulting company From Here to There and an Associate of Tamarack Institute. Mark’s current focus is on developing practical ways to understand, plan and evaluate efforts to address complex issues (e.g. neighborhood renewal, poverty and homelessness, community safety, educational achievement and health). He has first-hand knowledge of using evaluation as a policy maker, philanthropist, and activist, and has played a big role in promoting the emerging practice of developmental evaluation in Canada.

Associate Director, Evaluating Impact

 

“I’ve travelled enough to realize there are brilliant people in every community who know solutions. They don’t need saviours, they need allies.”

- WAB KINEW

The Community Change Festival will take place at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre

Address:
222 Bremner Blvd
Toronto, ON
M5V 3L9 

Questions about the event? Reach out to Stephanie.
Questions about payment? Reach out to Jana.

This event is hosted by the Tamarack Learning Centre.

Learn more about the Tamarack Institute
www.tamarackcommunity.ca 
 
  
Tamarack Institute © 2018