About Us

The concept for this site was born when a group of us at West End Community Ventures were launching Ottawa-Carleton's first Green Communities initiative. We wanted to better our understanding of how to improve our own program's impact. In securing funding from the Ontario and Canadian governments, we were encouraged - and enabled - to step back from the day-to-day urgencies of our particular program and to take a broader and longer view.

We published a workbook on what we found. It included 25 residential case studies of communities from across North America whose programs we had studied. It built on the community-based social marketing framework that had been developed by Doug McKenzie-Mohr, and published by NRTEE in "Promoting a Sustainable Future: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing". We are grateful to the many people who helped with the preparation of the original workbook.

Jay Kassirer of Cullbridge spearheaded the effort and co-authored the workbook along with Doug McKenzie-Mohr. The workbook was subsequently re-edited and published by Canada's National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) .   Free download.

The workbook had been designed so that it could eventually evolve into an interactive web site. With generous funding from both Health Canada and Natural Resources Canada, we were able to build that website and  expand the scope to include health and safety promotion. We invite others to join with us in further developing and promoting the site, so that it can become an even better resource for program planners and implementers across the globe.