HELPING PEOPLE AND PLACES THRIVE, TOGETHER.
Image: Golden Everlasting Daisy (Xerochrysum viscosum)
At Once Upon Tomorrow, we help communities, organisations and governments navigate complexity together.
Whether the challenge is resilience, climate adaptation, emergency preparedness, community wellbeing or long-term strategic change, we believe the best solutions emerge when people develop a shared understanding of the places they care about, build trusted relationships, and work together towards a common future.
Our work brings together systems thinking, community knowledge and collaborative design to help people make sense of complexity, strengthen collective capacity and create practical pathways for action.
Because resilient places aren't built by organisations working in isolation.
They grow when people learn, adapt and care for the places they love.
We do this by:
We help people understand. We bring communities, organisations and agencies together to make sense of complex challenges through thoughtful engagement, systems thinking and shared learning.
We help people connect. We create the conditions for trust, collaboration and collective decision-making across communities, organisations and sectors.
We help people act. Together we design practical strategies, frameworks and action plans that move beyond consultation to implementation.
We help people adapt. We build the confidence, relationships and collective capacity that help communities and organisations navigate uncertainty and thrive over time.
ABOUT MAREE GRENFELL FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL
Maree Grenfell is a prominent change strategist and facilitator specialising in urban, community and disaster resilience. She is passionate about this beautiful world and committed to working with others for lasting change.
Maree is best known for her landmark tenure as the Deputy Chief Resilience Officer for Resilient Melbourne (part of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities network), where she co-authored Australia’s first metropolitan-wide resilience strategy involving 32 local councils. Her career spans leadership roles at the City of Melbourne and Cairns Regional Council, as well as academic contributions to the University of Melbourne's Beyond Disasters Advisory Committee.
Maree’s core expertise lies in transformational facilitation and systems-level strategy, specifically designed for an era of climate emergency and social uncertainty. She is a specialist in community-led disaster resilience, having trained over 1,000 practitioners in the fundamental skills required to identify and respond to local shocks and stresses. By blending strategic urban planning with a human-centered approach, Maree excels at helping organisations build "collaborative capacity," fostering the courageous conversations needed to shift perspectives and create equitable, future-ready communities.
Image: Gratitude to Mara Ripani at Village Dreaming
OUR SERVICES
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STRATEGY & SYSTEMS CHANGE
Time is of the essence for radical transformations - not for strategy that sits on the shelf! Good strategy can enable ambitious outcomes and provide pathways to shift culture.
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ENGAGEMENT & CAPACITY BUILDING
We love facilitating conversations that connect diverse perspectives and emerge inherent wisdom. We can design community conversations, workshops and capacity building / training programs.
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TOOLS & ACTION
Sometimes we need a creative hand to unpack complexity and join dots to enable effective action. We love creating tools to help multi-disciplinary thinking and to get things done.
