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 resilience strategist, facilitator and systems thinker who helps communities, organisations and governments navigate complexity together.
She is passionate about creating the conditions where people can learn, build trusted relationships and work collectively towards the futures they want to create. Her work brings together systems thinking, collaborative practice and community knowledge to strengthen the collective capacity needed to respond to an increasingly uncertain world.
Maree is perhaps best known for her role as Deputy Chief Resilience Officer for Resilient Melbourne, where she co-authored Australia's first metropolitan resilience strategy across 32 local governments as part of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities network. Since then, she has worked across local government, community development, emergency management and climate adaptation, supporting organisations and communities to move from complexity to shared understanding and practical action.
Rather than beginning with hazards or organisational structures, Maree begins with people and place. She believes that communities already hold deep knowledge about the places they care for, and that lasting change happens when institutions and communities learn to steward those places together.
Through Once Upon Tomorrow, Maree designs collaborative processes that cultivate the relationships, confidence and shared understanding needed for communities and organisations to thrive together.
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 frameworks and tools to help multi-disciplinary thinking and to get things done.
