Andrea Reimer
Andrea Reimer is the founder of Tawâw Strategies and teaches power literacy at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, where she was the school’s first Policy Practitioner Fellow.
Andrea spent over two decades in elected office and community organizing in Vancouver, Canada. During her three terms on Vancouver City Council, Andrea led on initiatives such as Vancouver’s Greenest City framework, the commitment to be the first city in the Americas powered by 100% renewable energy, and she developed Canada’s first municipal reconciliation framework with Indigenous peoples. Both as an activist and an elected official, she learned how to move bold policy through resistant systems, and how to make government accessible to people typically shut out of decision-making.
But her work to get successful policy outcomes revealed a deeper problem: even when progressive leaders win, change often doesn’t stick or scale because most people – including many leaders – don’t understand how power actually operates.
Andrea’s Loeb Fellowship year (2018-19) gave her space to move from wielding power on behalf of communities to developing a framework for teaching it. Since founding Tawâw Strategies in 2020, she has worked on 85 projects across 40+ clients—unions, First Nations, municipalities, health authorities, philanthropic foundations, political parties, progressive businesses – and the pattern is consistent: technical expertise fails without power analysis. Leaders default to the tools they know (more research, better communications, stakeholder consultations) when what they need is to understand where decision-making authority actually sits, what relationships shape those decisions, and how to build sufficient power to move them.
Power literacy is the critical competency for leaders now. The problems we face – climate crisis, reconciliation, housing, democratic erosion – require coordinated action across systems that were designed to resist coordination. You can’t solve for justice if you can’t read power. Reconnecting people to the craft of democracy requires making power legible again.
It’s not just her professional life that informs her work: Andrea grew up street-involved and had no formal post-secondary education until being awarded the fellowship in 2018. The fellowship was an incredible opportunity to connect personal experience with theoretical frameworks and new networks to create impact.