Choose Community

Our work primarily takes place on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We recognize and honour the enduring presence of all First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people and stand in solidarity with the interconnected global struggle for self-determination, land back and sovereignty. We also gather in places and work with communities across Ontario and strive to understand and acknowledge the Indigenous communities who are stewards of those lands.

We stand in solidarity with the natural world—recognizing that our well-being is intertwined with the health of the land, water, and all living beings. We are committed to fostering a relationship of care, reciprocity, and responsibility with the ecosystems that sustain us.

We believe that collective joy requires justice. This means we consider and engage with issues of collective liberation, safety, care, identity, ecology, equity, power, inclusion, and accessibility—both physical and financial. We also hold space for ancestry, climate justice, neurodiversity, introversion, extroversion, and the impact of systemic oppressions, including many of the -isms that shape our world.

We are not experts in any of these areas, but we are committed to learning. Our goal is to continuously cultivate a culture of radical welcome and belonging, where people can show up as they are, knowing they matter.

A decade ago, eight people—most of whom didn’t know each other—came together to host a “digital detox summer camp for adults.” We instinctively called it Reset and invited 100 people to join us for a four-day experiment in nature, which, by all accounts, surpassed our wildest and most whimsical expectations. Ten years later, we are proud to share our first strategic plan as an organization. This plan reflects our learnings from where we have been and serves as a map for where we are going over the next three years.

At Reset, we are driven by a mission to restore life-affirming communities as the foundation for collective well-being. This vision stems from our belief that relearning how to community is vital social infrastructure, necessary to reimagine our worlds beyond rupture, crisis, and division. In our view, the path of restoring community offers the greatest hope in the face of urgent crises and complex change. But more than that, it is the world we want to live in and leave for our future ancestors.  

Our renewed mission to support people, places and organizations to cultivate community is rooted in a decade of growth, experimentation, and learning. We began our mission by creating opportunities to play as a method of connection and well-being and a measure of psychological safety and inclusivity. Over time, we’ve come to understand play as one of many interconnected elements that contribute to building life-affirming communities and nurturing collective well-being. 

This deeper understanding has been shaped by our work hosting annual camps, opening a community living room in Little Jamaica in Toronto, Ontario, partnering with organizations to host custom retreats, and creating public playgrounds and activations across Toronto for over 5,000 people. Through this work, we’ve not only built a vibrant community and a collection of joyful moments and connections, but also developed a collective leadership model, and methods of care that strive to prioritize relationality, inclusivity and growth. Along the way—through experimentation, consultations, lessons from diverse knowledge systems, and moments of conflict—we’ve understood and felt the impact that a sense of community has on our well-being and developed approaches on how to ‘do’ community in diverse and complex urban environments. In recognition of these efforts, we were honoured with the Toronto Community Champion Award in 2023. The sum of these experiences and achievements inspired our decision to transition from nurturing our own community to now shifting to being in service to people, places and organizations cultivating their communities.

As we step into 2025, we are faced with undeniable challenges. For many, the world feels as if it’s calling for a ‘reset.’ When Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General ended his second term this past December, he offered this parting prescription: cultivate a strong sense of community to help ourselves and others. He described community as a “powerful source of life satisfaction and life expectancy,” emphasizing that “relationships, service, and purpose are the time-tested triad of fulfillment.” 

This advice is not novel per se. Historically, community has been the backbone of societies, cities, neighbourhoods, and faith-and interest-based groups. Yet, in recent decades, our relationship with community has shifted as we’ve pursued more self-sufficient ways of living and working, while also questioning and confronting systems of oppression, destabilizing our sense of belonging. We find ourselves paradoxically more connected than ever while feeling increasingly disconnected, fueling growing loneliness and division. This erosion in our skill and comfort with being in community—caring for, relying on, trusting and listening to each other—is palpable and reflective in everything from our economic to political systems. This considerable gap between our needs and desires necessitates new approaches, and a greater focus on our ‘social health’ or otherwise said, the quality of our relationships and connections. Amid these challenges, we see a powerful opportunity.

Our ambition has always been to offer an alternative way to experience, understand and pursue community. While the challenges that inspired Reset have grown - we are oriented toward the possibility of a new way forward. The truth is, there is no perfect way to “do community.” Like all relational work, the process is messy and unpredictable. As Bell Hooks called love a verb, we call community a skill—one we need to redefine, relearn, and practice together. We are committed to the process and understand we will also falter. While the idea of community itself is not a revolution, returning to communal and collective ways of being is a radical act in the context of our current world. We stand by this wholeheartedly.

As we look ahead, Reset is committed to creating opportunities for people to engage with and practice the core elements of community, such as relationality, work, presence, play, care, solidarity and rest. By investing in these practices, we believe individuals and groups can begin building life-affirming communities that repair fractured systems and shift us from disconnection to reconnection. We will do this by nurturing our ecosystem: the network of collaborators that we design experiences with (our mycelium), our partners to whom we deliver experiences for (our forest), all while strengthening our roots through learning, systems and leadership development, solidarity work, strategic planning, and research (our river).

This strategic plan, presented below, reflects the creativity, care, and vision of many people who have contributed to Reset’s journey—from our founding team to the thousands who have joined us over the years. As we move forward, we are intent on not only responding to the crises of our time but about imagining and creating the world we all need and deserve. A world where beloved and life-affirming community is on the other side of a reset.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the public Strategic Imagination Sessions. There are too many to name individually, but please know how deeply we value your insights and input.

Special thanks to Hima Batavia and Adil Dhalla-Kim for stewarding the process and developing the plan, Camara Chambers and Monique Miller for designing and co-hosting the imagination sessions, and Jessica Campbell for bringing it to life through design.

To the Reset community—thank you for your unwavering support and solidarity over the past 10 years. We hope this plan reflects our journey together.

To the Reset Team, Collective, and Collaborators—thank you for transforming imagination into reality. Your Big Believer Energy (BBE) is our life force.

To Reset’s Board—we are grateful for your voluntary stewardship, including your guidance throughout this strategic planning process.

To our eight Co-Founders—thank you for lighting the match and to enabling everyone who has carried the torch forward since.

There are many whose work and leadership have shaped this plan, even if we don’t know them directly. We extend our gratitude to them and, finally, to our ancestors and future ancestors—thank you for grounding us in purpose and possibility.