Our community – and every community across the planet — faces one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime: dealing with the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss.

To meet this challenge, we need all our resources, chief among them the community itself.  We need local sources of energy, food and ideas.  We need local voices joining the conversation, adding new perspectives, and airing new ideas.  We need local talent to convert ideas into action.

In short, we need a change from traditional ways of organising our communities. Decisions made from above do not always reflect community values or take advantage of community knowledge.  And they can contribute to feelings of powerlessness and inertia at a time when agency and action are needed.

Scaling deep means accessing the power of the entire community, in a focused, intentional way, to meet our long-term challenges.  We want to hear from everyone, build strong ties among new actors and leverage those ties into action.

Scaling deep is a new way of working in local communities, taking advantage of community assets to tackle major challenges. And it looks at what constitutes a community asset through a different lens. It means building new organisational structures where no one is excluded and community actions reflect local knowledge and values.