About Tobi
Election campaign photo, in front of the cedar-sided tiny house, built in 2018 as a prototype project with Tiny House Courses BC.
“Resilient island communities need tools for adaptive, distributed leadership for increasingly complex times.
As government funding dries up, leveraging strengths and opportunities from different partners, developing collaborations and co-ops, and inter-agency work must become the norm.
But how to organize it? We need a common map to navigate our community systems. That’s what systems thinking does: makes explicit the system we are living in. Only then can we shift the system.”
Tobi Elliott is elected as a trustee in Islands Trust, serving Gabriola, Mudge and DeCourcy communities (2022-2026). She is an avid learner. Follow her musings on governance in A Gulf Island Reader at: https://tobielliott.substack.com
Tobi is a collaborative community-builder & innovative systems solver, who is grateful to live, work and play in Snuneymuxw First Nation territory, on Gabriola Island. She presently serves in the Islands Trust ecosystem on the Executive Committee, chairs 4 local Trust Committees (Thetis, Lasqueti, South Pender and Mayne Island), and sits on the Board of the Conservancy.
Tobi Elliott is a system decoder and storyteller who connects the dots between community resilience and the “preserve and protect” mandate. Drawing on an MA in Leadership and a background in global documentary filmmaking, she loves navigating complex territories of understanding while challenging the status quo. From supporting land return pathways to bridging divisions in housing policy to decolonizing organizational processes, Tobi is committed to practical, relational approaches to community and land care, holding a steadfast belief that, through intersectional dialogue, we can co-design systems that honour both the land and its peoples.
Tobi moved from her hometown of Abbotsford to Gabriola in 2012 to edit a documentary, then predictably found another documentary project about the oldest sailboat in Canada, and in the process of filming and fundraising, fell in love with the community. A renter and a tiny house advocate, she works to decolonize our approaches to land care, stewardship and collective governance. She helps run a family farm, lives on shared land, digs tractor work, creates soil, cares for two aging rescue horses, and loves to sail and tell stories by the fire.
Islands Trust Work
In 2023, the Tiny House Working Group was formed to address the shortage of affordable housing, under the Islands Trust’s Regional Planning Committee. Tobi developed a systems map to understand where effort had been wasted in attempts to change the BC Building Code, and identify interventions to solve the barriers to legalizing tiny homes on wheels. Islands Trust funded a technical working group with Planners and Building Professionals from the Regional District of Nanaimo, who met with industry to brainstorm solutions. Their findings were presented on panels at the Association of Vancouver Island Coastal Communities 2025 Convention, and at the Union of BC Municipalities 2025 Convention.
Career
Tobi studied journalism in Montreal (Concordia BA 2010) before pursuing a career in documentary film. After landing on Gabriola, she collaborated on many media and communications projects for non-profits: the Gabriola Health Clinic, Gabriola Museum and Historical Society, the Gabriola Health and Wellness Collaborative, and Sustainable Gabriola. Working for ethnographic and communications scholars on their research project In the Name of Wild allowed her to pursue her MA in Leadership Studies (Royal Roads University, 2023).
Applied Research:
Tobi’s capstone Engaged Learning Project was an action research project involving local government and community groups, working with the Gabriola Historical and Museum Society’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Her research project “Walking in Truth: Unsettling, Decolonizing and Learning Relational Ways of Being for Key Organizations on Gabriola Island” explored the inquiry: How might the Truth & Reconciliation Committee work with Gabriola’s non-Indigenous leaders to decolonize their organization’s practices and processes?
Businesses:
Arise Enterprises Ltd. (2010-present) sole proprietorship, film development company.
Tiny House Courses B.C. (founder, principal 2016 – 2019). Organizing tiny home education courses in communities on Gabriola and Vancouver Islands, and around B.C.
LeftHand Media Co-op (Media Creator, 2014 – 2018). Communications and outreach, video capture and editing, writing and copy-editing educational materials.
Blue Cyrus Media (partnership, 2009-2012), specializing in short films for non-profits, including a short film Horses for Orphans - Brazil broadcast on the cable channel RDF-TV in the U.S. in 2012.
Community Activities:
Coordinated fundraising event to support Snuneymuxw’s Munu Canoe Family on Tribal Journeys, in 2024 and 2025.
Media and content coordinator for the Health and Wellness Collaborative’s “Gabriola Health Matters” public engagement (January 2022).
Project Coordinator, Media and Communications Manager for “Gabriola Housing Matters” public engagement (November 2020 - April 2021), to support the Gabriola Local Trust Committee’s Housing Options and Impacts review project (HOIRP).
Co-founded and helped develop the charter and process for Gabriola Talks, a Sustainable Gabriola initiative to support community conversations about critical topics such as governance, housing, climate change and reconciliation.
Chaired the Gabriola Housing Advisory Planning Commission. Developed an outreach strategy with a team of dedicated volunteers during the challenging first months of COVID. A bespoke website hosted information for the public to complete three surveys, garnering large numbers of qualitative responses for 3 surveys on housing, environmental protection, and water conservation approaches for sustainable development. Findings and final report are still available on the Islands Trust Gabriola Project Page.
Led a team building a demonstration tiny house on wheels in 2018 with local carpenters and 12 students to explore an alternative form of housing.
Volunteer Service:
Volunteer hours are devoted to advocacy for diverse forms of housing, social wellbeing, and supporting reconciliation initiatives ongoing on the island.
Served on the Gabriola Local Trust Committee’s Housing Advisory Planning Commission (HAPC) 2019-2021.
Board of the Gabriola Island Land Stewards Society (GILSS) since 2021
Currently serving on the board of the Gabriola Co-op Development Network
Values
Tobi's passion is sourcing solutions from people in community so we can collaborate and balance housing and environmental needs in the Islands Trust Areas.
Everyone deserves respect, equality and to be included in their community’s decision making processes
Diversity in community is our strength
Collaborative approach to any work I do… because the only way to get anything done is through teamwork!
Film background
Tobi Elliott’s abundant curiosity has led her to document trappers in Canada’s far north, horsemen in Brazil, and the restoration of Canada’s oldest sailboat on Gabriola Island, where she has lived for 8 years. In addition to producing video shorts for businesses and non-profits, her TV/film credits include: production coordinator "Watchers of the North” (2009); associate producer “Granny Power” (2014), “Goodwin’s Way” (2017); cinematographer “Inhabited” (2021), and editor for the interactive documentary, "In the Name of Wild" (2021). Her foundation in Journalism (BA, 2010) and Leadership Studies (MA, 2021) ensure that her creative approach to storytelling remains grounded in community values.
Living by the ocean on Gabriola Island has given Tobi a new appreciation for British Columbia as a maritime province. BETWEEN WOOD AND WATER (in production, self-funded), brings West Coast history to life as it follows the life and ultimate restoration of Canada’s oldest sailboat, Dorothy.
WILD HORSES / CAVALOS SELVAGENS (Portuguese/English, post-production, self-funded) follows a cross-cultural family from Canada to Brazil, as a world-renowned natural horsewoman and her Canadian husband mentor a group of Brazilian youth into leaders – and sonship.
Tobi was associate producer for GRANNY POWER (2014), a feature documentary about the Raging Granny movement (directed by Jocelyne Clarke and the late Magnus Isacsson) and GOODWIN'S WAY, about a BC town's resistance to a coal-powered future 100 years after the killing of controversial local labour activist Ginger Goodwin. She also worked as production coordinator in Nunavut for the Watchers of the North series for Picture This Productions.
Tobi was selected as a Bell Media Fellow to attend the Banff Media Festival in June 2013.