At Catalysts’ Circle we use a
Connected Community Approach (CCA),
a dynamic & practical framework that can provide inspiration and tools to help your organization, institution, research, or business catalyze actions that strengthen local communities, while advancing your own mandate.
Our circle of Catalysts include
> professional practitioners
> thought leaders
> educators
> researchers
who advance transformative change using their own unique capacities to work across sectors & scales.
Contact us at
hello@catalystscircle.ca to find out more about CCA & how you can become a Catalyst!
We support collaborative, inspirational, actionable strategies…
for community wellbeing, equity, and resilience.
Where it all began…
The Connected Community Approach has deep roots in East Scarborough; a community which suffered from decades of underinvestment. In 1999, in the context of declining resources and increased need, 40 organizations, institutions, and grassroots groups came together to explore what they could do to increase equity, wellbeing, and resilience in the community. To make a real difference, they had to be innovative, collaborative, and strategic. Together they founded a new kind of organization: one that enabled others to effectively leverage their mandates, ideas, and capacities to benefit the local community.
They started by creating a one stop shop resource centre and went on to transform an old police station into a thriving community hub, a parking lot into a multipurpose sports court, and the site of an old rusty water tower into a community garden; they created structures & processes that brought dozens of organizations together and supported grassroots action to co-create markets, food distribution networks, workforce development strategies, and so much more!
This unique organization is the East Scarborough Storefront and its innovative way of working with & in the community became known as the Connected Community Approach.
Find out more about Our Team and What We Do.
We’d love to hear
from you!
Do you have a community building example, tool, or resource to share?
Do you want to learn more about how the CCA can help you reach your community wellbeing, equity, or resilience goals?
Reach out & join us in building a more connected world—because the world needs more connected communities!
hello@catalystscircle.ca
Turtle Island (North America) has been home since time immemorial to the ancestors of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples. This land is foundational to our existence; at Catalysts’ Circle we honour the land and its Indigenous stewards.
We acknowledge that Canada, despite its many strengths, was built on a dark past of land stolen from Indigenous people, the forced labour of people who came to this country as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and generations of inequities and environmental degradation.
We commit to continuously educating ourselves so that we can be in right relationship with the land, Indigenous peoples and all people who have been harmed by colonial and white supremacist policies and practices. May we approach our work in ways that craft a new narrative for the future; a narrative that is built on humility, honesty, empathy and justice for our planet and all the people who reside here.