Community Innovation Council Summit – Simcoe Muskoka: Building Community Resilience From the Ground Up

If Canada seeks to build a stronger, more resilient economy, we need to mobilize it in the communities and places we call home. This was a key theme from this year’s Victoria Forum and a call to action in Social Innovation Canada’s latest discussion paper, Pathway to Prosperity: Building an Innovation System to Solve Canada’s Hardest Problems Together.

Over the past several years, the Future of Belonging project has gathered community-based insights about belonging, wellbeing, participation and the future of our region from the lens of equity-owed groups. At the same time, Georgian College and its partners—the YMCA of Simcoe/Muskoka and Social Innovation Canada—have been designing and testing the architecture for a Community Innovation Network; an interconnected network of spaces, programming, tools and resources designed to help turn community insights and ideas into responses to some of our toughest challenges.

Now we want to explore what comes next.

On November 10, 2026, Social Innovation at Georgian College invites you to join the inaugural Community Innovation Council Summit at the Barrie Public Library.

This is not intended to be a traditional gathering.

It is a working gathering bringing together people from across sectors to explore how we might strengthen the infrastructure for community-led innovation, collective foresight and uncommon collaboration across our region.