Supporting local communities of practice in sustainable supply chains: the case of Stocate in Montreal, Canada

• The practices of decision-makers who support sustainable supply chains are researching, buying, selling, and managing, which are mutually beneficial and can be amplified by local communities of practice regarding sustainability (CoPS). • We codesigned and developed a support system for CoPS called Stocate, which operates as a social enterprise offering a knowledge mobilization platform and in-person services. • The system is designed to address 5 requirements: practical sustainability assessments, a pocket shopping assistant, a hybrid sales funnel, a collaborative platform, and a self-sustaining, agile, and scalable system. • Using the platform to share information and strengthen their collective impact, users have posted 3557 products, 336 businesses, and 1218 sustainability-related attributes. • Aligning decision makers' personal criteria (needs, values, preferences) with their impacts via sustainability assessments can lead to direct, collective action. Human society relies on its supply chains (SCs), which are in urgent need of a sustainable transformation – from the local to the global scale. However, coordinating on-the-ground efforts is obstructed by fragmented information, limited communications, and unreliable assessments, particularly at the local level. We demonstrate Stocate, a support system for local communities that practice sustainable consumption and production. Stocate was co-designed and developed with SC actors through a participatory action research approach in the city of Montreal, Canada. The result is a social enterprise offering both in-person services and an online platform (app and website). The platform synthesizes crowdsourced SC data into actionable insights aligned with sustainability assessments. By harnessing the platform to mobilize knowledge, Stocate helps decision-makers research, coordinate, buy, and sell sustainable products according to their needs, values, and preferences. By the end of the study, 390 users had posted 3612 products at 349 businesses along with 1889 sustainability-related attributes. Our findings suggest that empowering individuals to align their impacts with their personal criteria, and to collaborate in amplifying those impacts, can foster both direct and collective action. In this context, Stocate offers a socio-technological lever of change that transforms eco-anxiety into meaningful engagement toward a reformist circular society.