#community-organizations

#community-organizations

The magic room was a community effort, maintained by many residents volunteering their time to keep it well organised and running smoothly. I often saw my neighbour, Wendy Showyin, when I stopped by.

"Leave it better than you found it is a really powerful mantra. It speaks not only to refuse pick up but just as a reminder to breathe deep, listen closely, stop time for just a moment and enjoy the surrounding."

"The responders weren't just FEMA, it was people taking up direct collections for food, for clothing; it was a community response."

"That is not democracy. That is a power grab," Chow told a crowd of people. "To the provincial government, you do not get to erase this park without a fight. And to the people standing here and to every Torontonian, we need your voice - talk to your neighbours, make some noise. This park belongs to you and we are going to keep it that way."

The gathering within the grove at Golden Gate Park took place on April 18, 2026, just days before Earth Day on April 22 and during Earth Month.

Most nonprofits begin with passion, and for good reason. A founder identifies a critical need and brings together a team that cares deeply enough to act. That kind of energy is what makes the early days possible. It drives long hours, resourceful problem-solving and a deep commitment to impact.

The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.

Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.

"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.

Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.

For justice-centered leaders, there is a stubborn dichotomy between our genuine commitment to equity, inclusion, and alignment in our organizations on the one hand, and our continuing self-diagnosis of high levels of misalignment, conflict, and turnover on the other. Three years after Maurice Mitchell's seminal piece, " Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis," rang the alarm of "urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces," the current discourse suggests that the needle has not moved much.