Recipe for Community — A Handbook for Building Belonging
This project responds to a question we’re often asked by grassroots organizers and changemakers: “How do we build a stronger, more connected neighbourhood?” Our handbook offers a practical, story-rich answer—one rooted in lived experience and community wisdom.
For over fifteen years, Green Wood Coalition has witnessed how small, intentional acts—sharing a meal, listening deeply, creating together, showing up for one another—can transform not only individuals but entire neighbourhoods. Now, we’re distilling those lessons into an illustrated, easy-to-read handbook that captures the heart of our approach: the Recipe for Community.
Using oral history interview methods, we’ll gather and share first-hand stories from thirty core Green Wood members—people whose everyday actions have created extraordinary ripples of change. These stories will bring to life the ten essential elements of the Recipe for Community framework, revealing how belonging grows from simple, tangible actions.
More than a manual, this book is a shared creation—a collaboration between those who’ve experienced marginalization and those who’ve stood beside them. It’s a testament to what happens when we choose to build with people, not for them.
Storytelling has always been at the heart of Green Wood’s work, from our Imaginate learning events to our films and photovoice projects. This handbook extends that legacy, offering a vital new tool for communities everywhere who are hungry for connection, compassion, and hope.
By supporting this project, you’re helping us share a proven method for community transformation—one story, one neighbourhood, one act of belonging at a time.
This project is important to our community because it recognizes that recovery and resilience don’t happen in isolation—they’re rooted in relationships and shared learning. Too often, the people doing the most to care for their neighbours feel invisible or unheard. Through this project, the interviewing process itself becomes an empowering experience, inviting community members to act as expert witnesses and collaborators in shaping the Recipe for Community handbook. Sharing their lived wisdom and hard-earned insights offers a validating and even cathartic opportunity to be seen and valued for the vital roles they play.
By turning personal recovery into collective learning, the completed handbook—rooted in these local stories—will serve as both an inspiring record and a practical guide for strengths-based, grassroots community building. Sharing it widely will help spark similar movements of connection, care, and resilience in communities near and far, reminding us that our greatest resource in facing adversity is one another.
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Green Wood Coalition’s recipe for community framework is a practical and inspiring guide for how to lead with humanity – we need this, collectively.
If anyone knows it’s Greenwood Coalition. They offer whole person support to our most vulnerable and This is something our community needs💜
Making space for all makes communities stronger!
Belonging is built through everyday kindness and shared stories, and this project reminds us that hope is found through connection.
Green Wood provides spaces for the community that welcoming and inclusive. I support any project they want to create as it would help the neighbourhood.
I love this! An opportunity for the community to listen to people stories with openness, break down barriers, reduce stigma and see the shared humanity.