The World Happiness Report 2017 identifies the key variables of well-being and happiness including caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance. Dr. John Helliwell, co-editor of the report, will share findings about the social foundations necessary for world happiness, and reflect on the role of citizens and governments in building cities of happiness.
Working to build a safer city is easier said than done. REACH Edmonton leverages multi-stakeholder partnerships to help address issues of safety that affect youth, adults and families who are at risk of committing or becoming victims of crime. One initiative REACH focuses on is the 24/7 initiative which works with the community, police and emergency services to develop 24/7 solutions to ensure alignment of services and data integration with the aim of reducing inappropriate use of police and emergency services while connecting vulnerable Edmontonians with the resources and supports they need. With a changing downtown core, in 2016 the 24/7 initiative received increased funding from City Council in recognition of the many challenges facing the city’s most vulnerable. The 24/7 initiative is just one example of how Edmontonians are working together to build a safer city. Collaborating and thinking differently about how to solve complex social problems isn’t easy work, but the evaluation shows that multi-stakeholder partnerships that use collective impact are making some real strides toward creating an inner city that is safe for everyone.
Have you ever considered using theatre as a tool for community engagement? Around the world, theatre is being picked up as an innovative and effective way to open up dialogue and deepen connections between individuals who are working together to face some of the most pressing problems. From simple interactive exercises, to public performances, ‘applied theatre’ is a powerful platform to break down the barriers that exist between us, and better equip us to collaborate and understand one another as we work together to build better communities. Join Megan as she leads you through a series of interactive theatre-based exercises that can be applied to your next community engagement project. No theatre training needed.
Community and city innovations sometimes seem like tiny bright spots amidst dysfunctional systems, and the need to achieve positive change “at scale” is clear. But when we think about how to spread or deepen solutions to social problems, it’s not that simple – social issues are hugely dependent on context, systems are nested across many scales, and we need to think differently about scaling for social change. We’ll consider and apply three approaches to scaling innovations so they can have more systemic impact – “Scaling Up” to policy change, “Scaling Out” through program replication, and “Scaling Deep” by engaging people’s hearts and minds to shift cultures.
This workshop considers the city (human hive) as Gaia’s Reflective Organ, through the lenses of bio-psycho-cultural-social realities. Participants will explore the beehive as a lesson in complexity and the implications of the Master Code which guides human systems to “placecare and placemake” at four scales (self, others, place and planet). We will share case studies, maps, strategies and toolkits to examine the prospects of today’s cities as they evolve into the cities of the future. Out beyond the Traditional City, out beyond the Smart City, out beyond the Resilient City lives the Integral City. There is a Knowing Field – we will meet you there.
Innovative ideas and strategies are not hard to come by but fall to the wayside when the culture of an organization or collaborative provides insufficient space, time, permission, and support to explore new possibilities. In this session, Mark will share from his experience as a social innovator as well as best practice approaches for bringing about cultural change to foster innovation within organizations.
Co-creating the future means that you should focus on the strategic engagement of key stakeholders who will help drive the change forward. This simple and fun approach just might be the key to your community change efforts. In just one hour, participants will identify their list of key stakeholders and have a plan for effective engagement.
Presenter TBD.
Social, environmental and economical challenges faced by communities across the globe are complex and dynamic. Lack of deep understanding of the complexities of problems often result in unintended negative impacts in local and global communities. Systems thinking and analysis can be powerful tools to help practitioners understand complex community problems and implement systemic solutions that result in positive impacts in the communities. This interactive workshop will take a very quick look at what systems thinking is and share some practical resources, tools, processes and mindsets to be used for designing and implementing solutions to complex community problems.
Local governments are often on the front lines of increasingly complex challenges - climate change, economic development, affordable housing/homelessness, the opioid crisis, to name just a few. Increasingly, they are moving from a ‘doing/service provision role’ to act as catalysts and innovation brokers by empowering citizens and community organizations to act. Partnership development offers a unique opportunity. During this session we will provide tips and tricks for how local governments can collaborate with community actors, academics, and provincial/federal governments to streamline service provision, share in decision making, and unlock new economic opportunities. We will utilize examples from our work with the City of Kelowna.
Community change does not just happen. There is a rhythm to how cities, communities and collaborative work. This session will help participants learn how to identify both the opportunities and traps in the collaborative planning processes using the eco-cycle as a dynamic community change tool.
We live in a hyper-connected world where information moves across the globe in seconds and citizens have multi-modal opportunities to share their perspectives and voice. In a complex world with competing systems of culture, economics, justice and sustainability, how can we ensure a just and equitable future, and what role can dialogue play in navigating our changing world? Shauna and Julian will share their perspectives and engage in dialogue with one another and with CCI participants.
Host: Social Policy & Projects Team, Community Services, City of Vancouver
This session will share the Healthy City Strategy (HCS) framework the City of Vancouver adopted in 2014. The HCS is a social sustainability plan based on the social determinants of health which represents the “basket of goods” fundamental for the health and well-being of all individuals and communities. City staff will be presenting two examples of policies and initiatives that support the HCS, showing how the social determinants are interconnected and interdependent on the others:
Community Economic Development Strategy – The strategy was adopted by City Council in 2016 and was co-created by City Staff and the Community Economic Development Strategic Action Committee (CEDSAC). Staff from the City and the CEDSAC Director will share the process to develop the strategy, which contains 9 core ideas and 22 actions, and is built on several years of partnerships supporting social innovation, social enterprise and other local economic initiatives in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside. The presenters will also describe how CED initiatives are connected with the 13 areas in the HCS.
Host: Simon Fraser University's Vancity Office of Community Engagement
SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement supports creative engagement, knowledge mobilization and public programming in the theme areas of arts and culture, social and environmental justice, and urban issues through public talks, dialogues, workshops, screenings, performances and community partnerships.
This session will be an informal storytelling event with some of our long-term community partners, primarily based in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, ranging from social enterprises to community theatre groups. Join us in an exchange of ideas and hear directly from the groups we work with about the value of meaningful community engagement.
Host: City of Vancouver Sustainability Group (Renewable City Strategy)
Vancouver has set an ambitious goal to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels before 2050. We know that this will take time and will take the combined efforts of residents and business across the city and beyond. Join us for an interactive session exploring how to envision what a 100% renewable energy city looks like and how to make this vision a reality. Conference participants will start with a walking tour of the Olympic Village neighbourhood, taking in the scenery while hearing about ways residents are saving energy and building community. The City of Vancouver will share its engagement strategy for an ambitious and achievable 30-year plan to cut carbon pollution by at least 80% and transition to 100% renewable energy before 2050 by targeting the biggest sources of carbon pollution in Vancouver – buildings and transportation. The conversation will be enhanced by presentations by Empower Me, and ClimateSmart as well as an opportunity for participants’ own experiences with shifting energy demand and fostering behaviour change in other areas. Afterwards, participants are welcome to explore the Olympic Village and False Creek area on their own, by foot, bicycle or water taxi.
Empower Me engages tight-knit, culturally diverse communities that have traditionally been difficult for utilities and local governments to reach - saving households an average of $200 in annual utility bills. This award-winning program both guides and measures behaviour change, delivering messaging around energy efficiency, water usage, recycling, safety and health. Mentors – trusted community peers – visit homeowners in the comfort of their own homes, speaking their language to help them access and understand the abundant resources, tools and information available to them. http://www.empowermeprogram.com
Host: RADIUS Social Innovation Lab and Incubator at Simon Fraser University
This session will explore how to accelerate innovation for systems change. RADIUS SFU will host the discussion, sharing its experience using the university as a hub for fostering social entrepreneurship in individuals as well as acting as an incubator for innovation. One example is their 3-year LEDLab (a partnership with Ecotrust Canada) which focuses on working with residents and community organizations to build a more vibrant and inclusive local economy in the Downtown Eastside. They place the people most affected by the issues at the centre of creating solutions, supporting them with capacity - including graduate students!
The Binners’ Project is a group of waste-pickers aided by support staff dedicated to improving their economic opportunities, and reducing the stigma they face as informal recyclable collectors. Their initiatives build capacity and raise public awareness - as well as keep valuable materials like glass and aluminum out of the waste stream. They are piloting informal employment initiatives such as the Binners’ Hook and Back-of-House Sorting. https://www.binnersproject.org/
Host: The Vancouver Foundation
The Vancouver Foundation is leading a tour to visit two great examples of community investment that are within easy walking distance of each other. First, the group will see Hives for Humanity in the Downtown Eastside and then they will walk to Chinatown to hear from The Hua Foundation about their initiatives. The Vancouver Foundation’s Vice President Deborah Irvine will share her insights on supporting meaningful and lasting impacts in neighbourhoods and communities. The Vancouver Foundation funds hundreds of innovative projects – large and small – in areas such as arts and culture, education, children and youth issues, environment, animal welfare, community health, and social development. It promotes a systems approach and supports dialogue and deeper understanding within the community, such as through the Vital Signs Report which highlights issues that concern British Columbians.
Hives for Humanity encourages community connections through apiculture, more commonly known as beekeeping. Through mentorship-based programming they create flexible opportunities for people to engage in the therapeutic culture that surrounds the hive; foster connectivity to nature; and participate in local sustainable economies while supporting at risk populations of people and pollinators. This nonprofit started in 2012, by placing a colony of bees at 117 East Hastings in the DTES of Vancouver, and they now offer peer employment and workshops, as well as a product line including candles and tinctures. http://hivesforhumanity.com/
In the current dominant narrative of our society, we measure the success of cities, people and systems based on their contributions to the economy. David Korten suggests, to the contrary, that they should be valued for their contributions to the health and happiness of living people, communities, and nature. He will challenge us to rethink every aspect of conventional thought and practice regarding the role of citizens, cities, economies, and creation as we navigate the path forward for our cities.
In his workshop, Julian will challenge you to look not for solutions, but to ask the right questions. First he will outline the concept of 'just sustainabilities’, arguing that integrating social needs and welfare, offers us a more ‘just,’ rounded, and equity-focused definition of sustainability and sustainable development, while not negating the very real environmental threats we face. He will then look at examples of just sustainabilities, from bike shares to ‘local’ food, through a series of focused questions we need to be asking ourselves.
Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is an approach that focuses on strengths and assets over needs and deficits and creates the conditions for citizen leadership to flourish. With the challenges and opportunities facing our cities becoming increasingly complex, local engagement is key in leveraging people’s unique connection to place and drives innovative solutions that emerge when diverse perspectives come together with an emphasis on strengths and skills. This workshop will: introduce the principles of ABCD; share practical resources for incorporating the lens of ABCD into your community change efforts; and, share stories that illustrate how the community’s newly-recognized strengths can be directed to an endless range of shared priorities.
In 2002, thirteen cities in Canada took on the bold challenge of reducing and eliminating poverty. Vibrant Communities Canada has now scaled to include 54 cities with place-based collaborative roundtables focused on improving outcomes for their citizens and their communities. This collective impact living laboratory is transforming how communities and governments at all levels think about and tackle poverty. Learn about the game changer strategies that are improving the lives of Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
Expanding upon the morning keynote, join David Korten in thinking about how the prevailing public narrative contributes to the social and environmental outcomes you seek to change. How must that story change for your work to succeed and what are you doing to achieve that change? Through discussion, gain an understanding of how your individual efforts link into and contribute to the deeper story change on which a viable human future depends.
Policy influence and change can dramatically move the needle on complex community issues and yet most collaborative tables are reticent to pay attention to this process. Learn how to build a policy approach that leads to influence and impact.
This session will explore how social innovators can measure and track their efforts to disrupt and change the systems that underlie social, environmental and economic challenges all while resisting the ‘snap back’ that leads us back to the status quo.
Collective Impact is about engaging multiple partners around a common agenda. A journey map helps keep everyone in the collective impact or collaborative on the same page as you navigate the collective impact journey together. In this tool session, participants will build their journey maps and participate in a structured feedback opportunity.
Digital Storytelling is a form of personal, heartfelt expression that enables individuals, communities and organizations to reclaim their personal cultures and stories while exploring their artistic creativity. Digital Storytelling has been used by community change organizations to empower community members, educate stakeholders and the public, and as a way to evaluate change. See examples of digital storytelling and learn the process of capturing your own digital stories.
Learn about single, double, and triple loop learning which are learning strategies that respectively help create incremental, reformist, and transformational change. Engage Mark Holmgren in conversation about the barriers we face to effective learning and how to create conditions that foster adaptive, generative, and radical learning.
Social innovators are increasingly turning to prototyping to quickly and inexpensively test promising ideas and determine whether they warrant “bigger bets” of pilot projects or full-fledged models or programs. Learn more about the seven different types of prototypes, the prototyping process, and how to evaluate rapid prototypes.
You are launching, -- or renewing, -- a collaborative project, but the number of attendees you can invite to your initial meeting is limited. How do you determine who to invite? How can you create a “buzz” about your project that reaches far beyond the people who are in the room? How can you hold the tension between limiting invitees but conveying that all are welcome? This tool introduces a highly-participatory method for engaging beyond your invitee list to build interest, curiosity and credibility about who’s “in the room”.
The Living Cities movement in the United States is building a new urban landscape. For the past 25 years, this innovative partnership has brought together cross-sector leadership to dramatically improve the economic future of cities and low income citizens. Living cities frames their work through four key practices: open sourcing social change; investing in collective impact; capital innovation through the blending of private and public funding sources; and public sector innovation. Ben Hecht, CEO of Living Cities will share how to co-create a city and citizens that disrupt the status quo.
There is growing evidence confirming that loneliness and self-reported rates of isolation are at a record high in Canada – impacting every age cohort from seniors, to young adults and youth. This is cause for concern given the direct correlation between people’s feeling of belonging and their willingness to participate in actions for the “common good.” To effectively mobilize for community change, new approaches are needed that engage and connect those who are isolated and disconnected. This highly interactive workshop will share stories of effective engagement efforts that have overcome isolation as well as provide frameworks and tools that can be used to develop and nurture effective citizen engagement.
If we are honest with ourselves, all of our best intentions and efforts have not resulted in significant improvements in the economic condition of most low-income people. Our ability to come together and solve important and complex problems, like poverty and stunted economic growth, is broken. Where we need long-term, systemic solutions that can achieve exponentially better results year over year, we repeatedly respond with short-term, isolated programs.
That’s why Living Cities is leveraging the influence and resources of major foundations and financial institutions in the United States to build a New Urban Practice. The New Urban Practice is focused on getting dramatically better results for low-income people, especially people of color, faster. It is bringing public, private, philanthropic and non-profit sectors together in new ways to take on our most wicked problems, and holding themselves accountable for large-scale results. It is stimulating a growing conversation and encouraging action to overhaul outdated bureaucratic structures and models of citizen engagement. And, it is driving experimentation and innovation to harness both philanthropic and private capital to invest not just in physical infrastructure, but also inhuman capital, especially people of color.
Take your collective impact efforts to the next level. This interactive workshop will focus on systems change strategies to get to policy impacts, shared measurement and strategic clarity as you move your collective impact efforts forward.
The global challenges we face are coming home to roost in our communities and cities. While planning remains important, in our fast-paced and increasingly complex world we need to grow our abilities to embrace emergence, serendipity and synchronicity. Einstein said, “The rational mind is a faithful servant and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift.” In this experiential workshop you’ll learn three practices to cultivate the power of your intuition and intention. You’ll also deepen your ability to see systemically thanks to three potent perspectives on human systems dynamics: Adaptive Cycle, Chaordic Design and Conscious Co-creation. You’ll leave with a starter kit of in-the-moment practices for navigating emergence, and greater clarity about the North Star guiding your work.
The endless debate between the merits of ‘hard and soft’ indicators and methods is over. Social innovators – and those who support them – need a combination of both if they are to get a full picture of their progress in tackling tough issues. Join Mark Cabaj for an interactive session that will explore how to integrate the hard and soft measures into your evaluation work.
Community engagement is now considered the rule, not the exception. Anyone working in the field of community change knows that community engagement is a necessary element of any effective initiative. But what does it mean to do it well? In this workshop, learn how to increase the authenticity of community engagement and eradicate tokenistic community engagement through the meaningful involvement of context experts. Hear real-life stories of authentic engagement and gain an understanding of five lessons to consider when designing community engagement processes.
The Musqueam people have been present in what is now Greater Vancouver for several thousands of years. Archaeological journals have recorded evidence of Musqueam’s existence in this area, particularly the Marpole midden - located at the mouth of the North Arm of the Fraser River, in excess of 4,000 years and at the Musqueam reserve in excess of 3,500 years. Over 143 heritage sites were recorded in Musqueam Traditional Territory in Musqueam’s 1984 Comprehensive Land Claims submission to Canada. In the interim eighteen sites have been documented for a total of 161
Current Musqueam values and teachings are based on traditional culture. A major part of these teachings and values is the kinship system. Family and relations are more closely defined in Musqueam’s teachings than in Euro-Canadian ways. Traditionally, large extended families lived close together and the children were taught the importance of family and family history.
Join us for a First Nations feast at the Musqueam Indian Band on Thursday, September 28th. You will have a chance to walk the grounds, enjoy a traditional Harvest feast, and be entertained by cultural drummers and singer. This will be a highlight of our time together!
Buses will depart from the hotel lobby at 3:15, 3:30, 3:45 and 4:00pm.
Buses will return to the hotel at 8:45pm and 9:00pm
This session will (a) introduce participants to the case for an urban agenda in Canada and the emerging platforms for shaping Canadian cities of the future, (b) provide interactive opportunities to discuss and provide feedback on that urban agenda on a set of strategic questions and (c) invite you to participate in a variety of activities for participation on urban issues after the session. The session will be co-facilitated by Cities for People, Here to There Consulting and PercoLab.
