Changemakers Library

Sharing Stories from Community Changemakers

The Changemakers Library is a resource, a guide, and source of inspiration for anyone looking to make a difference in their community. It shares the stories of Changemakers working at the local, community scale of action, chronicling their lessons learned, skills developed and advice for others seeking to make change.

Photograph of a person with long dark hair looking at a wall with thought and speech bubbles.
Photograph of a person with long dark hair looking at a wall with thought and speech bubbles.

Our Purpose

This website was created to inspire collective learning about the “how” of building momentum towards communities that are safe, healthy, vibrant, just, and gentle in their relationships with the more than human world. Our goals are to:

  • To identify and amplify stories of community-scale innovation and action that offer insights about how to strengthen social bonds, address past and present injustices, protect our communities, and live more gently with the more than human world;
  • To build capacity, community, and momentum around transformative initiatives;
  • To build and tell new stories about what is desirable and possible in this moment such as how to strengthen democracy, and collectively realize alternatives.

Leadership is emergent, collective, and imperfect! It requires the capacity to see the horizon of possibility, to engage others to build momentum. Hearing from people who have launched successful initiatives (who can see that horizon) offers key insights into what is needed, what is possible, and how that momentum can build, and how nonlinear success is.

We want to help students and, more widely, community members explore and understand what skills they have and how to build their skills to create change.

History

We designed this site in Spring 2026 as a primary resource for a course at the University of Victoria taught through the School of Environmental Studies and the Transformative Climate Action program called “Changemaking Skills for Thriving Communities”. https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/environmental/index.php https://continuingstudies.uvic.ca/science-and-the-environment/programs/transformative-climate-action

The first interviews were conducted by Sonia Furstenau and Ryan Hilperts as a way to highlight inspirational stories of community-scale changemakers. The full development team includes Ryan Hilperts, Peter Salmon, Sonia Furstenau, Dr. Kara Shaw, JoJo Beattie, and Sabrina Guzman Skotnitsky.

Next Steps

We want to keep this library growing! What stories would you like to contribute?! Please leave comments on the videos, share this website with others who might be inspired by the stories it contains, and join us in building this library of stories from changemakers. Contact us to share ideas for future interviews and stories.