Building a citywide activist calendar to coordinate grassroots organizing in Saskatoon
The Stand Community Organizing Centre
| Website | www.thestandyxe.ca |
|---|---|
| Domain | community organizing |
| Region | Saskatoon, SK |
| Main offices | Saskatoon, SK |
| Size | 2+ |
Overview
Connecting events, improving visibility, and streamlining outreach through custom tools
The Stand Community Organizing Centre began as a shared physical hub for activists, artists, and community groups in Saskatoon, operating alongside the independent bookstore Turning the Tide. Its primary role was to provide accessible space for meetings, collaboration, and grassroots organizing.
When the pandemic disrupted in-person activity, that model quickly lost viability. Rather than pausing entirely, we shifted focus toward digital coordination—exploring how The Stand could continue supporting the local organizing ecosystem without relying on physical space.
I led the development of a centralized, curated activist calendar for Saskatoon to address a key coordination gap: events were scattered across platforms, making it difficult for people to discover what was happening or avoid scheduling conflicts. The goal was to create a single, reliable source for local organizing activity.
I designed and built the system end-to-end, including custom tooling to streamline publishing. This included writing code to format and export event listings directly into Mailchimp campaigns, significantly reducing the time and effort required to produce a consistent newsletter.
At its peak, the calendar became a shared piece of infrastructure for the community—improving event visibility, supporting attendance, and helping organizers coordinate more effectively across the city.
Outcomes
Like many volunteer-driven initiatives, long-term sustainability was a challenge. As volunteer capacity declined, maintaining the calendar became more difficult, eventually slowing the project. This highlighted the limits of even well-designed tools without distributed ownership or ongoing resourcing. Despite that, the project demonstrated how lightweight digital infrastructure can meaningfully strengthen grassroots organizing—especially when it reduces friction in communication and coordination.