The Future is Collective Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 2025

Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement Ending poverty in all of its forms Background Tamarack began in the 1990s as a series of conversations between two non-profit leaders – Paul Born and Alan Broadbent – reflecting on how to bring together multiple stakeholders across a city to combat poverty. In 2002, this idea spread nationally as community leaders from cities across Canada came together to launch a campaign called Vibrant Communities. From this gathering, 13 cities committed to embarking on a 10-year journey to explore a collaborative, cross-sector approach to poverty reduction. To support the novel social change approach, Tamarack created Vibrant Communities (now Networks for Change) to support the network of place-based collaboratives, and a Learning Centre (now Skills for Change) to document the effort and disseminate learnings to the broader community. In 2012, the results from Vibrant Communities showed that the effort had exceeded their goals: more than 250,000 people experienced benefits and 15% reported a durable reduction in poverty levels. Based on this evidence, the network began to grow rapidly and, starting in 2015, a series of annual Poverty Summits raised the profile of poverty reduction in Canada. Over the next decade, Tamarack applied its proven approach to three additional issue areas: belonging, climate transitions and youth futures, while continuing to build the network to end poverty. Each of these issue areas has grown into a network of local collaboratives bringing together different sectors and individuals impacted by their areas of work to implement large-scale change initiatives in their cities. A total of 37,000 changemakers around the world use Tamarack’s resources, consulting and coaching services to build the skills to collaborate on community- driven outcomes. Headquartered: Waterloo, Ontario, CanadaYear founded Regions represented Entity typeGroups assembled Organizations involved Constituents represented Number of employees Budget range42 full time $8-12 million (Canadian dollars)180 local collaboratives working across 500 municipalities Primary focus is Canada with relationships in the US, the United Kingdom, Europe, New Zealand and Australia39,000 changemakers from thousands of organizations across the world (with a majority in Canada)09 Non-profit organization Local collaboratives are working in communities representing approximately 60% of people living in Canada (24 million of 40 million citizens).2002COLLECTIVE ACTION CASE STUDY The Future is Collective: Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 62