CommunityNet Aotearoa is a useful website operated by the Department of Internal Affairs, with all kinds of community-related news and a community resource kit.  You can also subscribe to receive regular updates.

In 2009 there were 315 Jane's Walks in cities across Canada and the US led by urban planners, youth, guerrilla gardeners, professors, newcomers, social historians, cyclists...  see the website for more.

The Maytree Foundation invests in leaders to build a Canada that can benefit from the skills, experience and energy of all its people.

"Our policy insights promote equity and prosperity.  Our programs and grants create diversity in the workplace, in the boardroom, the media and in public office, changing the face of leadership in our country.

... we work with leaders who imagine and deliver effective solutions, and who are relentless in their pursuit of change for a better Canada."

Increasingly it is about involving community leaders who:
-- want to learn to lead without being possessive
-- want to be helpful without taking credit, and
-- are ready to let go in order to achieve more for the common good.

At the heart is the discipline of asking really useful questions: Albert Einstein said: If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.

Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson explains why it's equality, and not high income, that makes a society thrive.

Alan Briskin, Sheryl Erickson, Tom Callanan and John Ott 2009

This book defines colective wisdom, considers how it shows up and
explores what it is that makes groups foolish. It includes a chapter
on "the unlimited co-creative power of groups and communities."

You can read a review of the book on the Tamarack website -
Collective Wisdom and Folly by Paul Born.

You can also visit the Collective Wisdom Initiative website
www.collectivewisdominitiative.org, which offers tools and practices that help build the discipline of collective wisdom.

2010 Adam Kahane

In his latest book Adam Kahane claims the conclusion he came to in "Solving Tough Problems", i.e. that we solve such problems by opening ourselves up and connecting to our own true selves, to one another, and to our context and what it demands of us, was only half right.

He now knows that this alone is not enough, "we must also grow". He suggests that to co-create new social realities we have to work with two distinct fundamental forces that are in tension - love (the drive to unity) and power (the drive to self realisation). "We need to learn to integrate our power and our love."

Read a review of the book on the Tamarack Website - Social Change and the Dynamics of Power and Love by Liz Weaver (page 6 of PDF).