engageFest Learning Agenda

All times listed are in Eastern Standard Time. The agenda is subject to change.

Session Descriptions

Day One: October 29, 2024 

Fireside Chat: Awakening Leaders in the Places We Live 

Speakers: Louise Adongo and Margaret Wheatley

Now more than ever, it is imperative that we empower ourselves and those around us to lead with compassion, generosity and curiosity. Join Louise Adongo and Meg Wheatley for a fireside chat about challenging each other to uncover root problems, shift power and building a foundation for sustainability and impact. 

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Day One Workshops

Choose one of the following workshops to attend on Day 1. Too many  incredible sessions to choose from? Don't worry, participants will receive recordings of all workshops after EngageFest!.

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Workshop Descriptions:

Youth engagement best practices and cultivating youth leadership 
Facilitators: Lisa Attygalle and Mike Des Jardins
Participants will learn from the lessons of Tamarack’s Communities Building Youth Futures (CBYF) project, including  Learning Centre (LC) coaches, CBYF staff and CBYF youth, about why engaging youth is critical at this moment in Canada, and how communities can engage youth as leaders in issues and topics that matter the most to them.

The Role and Skillsets of Being a ‘Backbone’ (FR)
Facilitators: Jean-Noé, Louise Adongo, and more
Participants will explore what it means to be a place-based mediator or ‘backbone’ organization, explore challenges of the role, core competencies, and will walk away with a set of tools to support their convening of local collaboratives. The Transition Bridges Project will offer their research/findings, identifying similarities and differences from Tamarack’s Essential Mindsets and Skillsets for Backbone Leaders.

Art, Mindfulness and Play: Practical Strategies for Accessible Spaces 
Facilitator: Yas Hassen
Participants deserve spaces designed with their needs in mind. Grounded in Disability Justice principles, this workshop will introduce practical tools and arts-based activities such as collage and body mapping that can be infused into your design as you expand your understanding of disability types, access needs and barriers to participation. Prepare to explore, create, and enhance accessible spaces in a dynamic and inclusive setting as we demonstrate digital and accompanying tactile engagement techniques throughout the workshop.

Building Belonging in Canada: A Pan Canadian Strategy  
Facilitator:  Danya Pastuszek 
Belonging is the antidote to the growing polarization that is settling across communities in Canada.  To fully contribute, community members need to feel represented by our governments and decision-makers; people need to see themselves in those leaders, know that their voice matters, and that they have the agency to effect change.  Building a sense of belonging is what drives social change––such as poverty reduction, climate action, and youth engagement. This workshop will explore the power of place to advance strategies for belonging, and the ways that communities are contributing to building more inclusive and democratic societies.

Community Innovation 101

Details to come!

Evaluation Beyond Accountability

Details to come!

Meeting in the middle: Local governments as a catalyst for change 
This workshop will help local government elected officials, staff and community members understand and step into their role as a local systems change leader. It will identify leverage points that municipalities have in community innovation, and suggest ways in which municipalities can offer leadership and collaboration to community-led, community-wide strategies for change.

Mindset & Skills for Collaboration
Facilitator: Sylvia Cheung
This workshop is designed for leaders of multi-sector collaboratives, backbone staff of collective impact efforts, funders, and other leaders who are working together to pursue shared goals. The session will provide you with essential mindsets, skillsets, and resources to apply what you are learning to advance your day-to-day work.

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Day One Plenary Panel

Shifting Power in Practice - Centring People in Your Work

Speakers: Becky Sasakamoose-Kuffner, Darryl Answer, Narlie Dapilos and TD Bank

This panel explore practical strategies for understanding and transforming traditional power structures – in ways that prioritize the vision and experiences of community. Through stories of what they’ve experienced, conversation with each other, and reflection on what we know is possible, the panel will explore how you can shift power in your communities so we can create structural changes to advance trust, build relationships, new leaders and advance equity. Questions might include: 

• How do you define shifting power dynamics? Why is it crucial for equitable outcomes? 

• How can practitioners ensure that actions are not symbolic but rather result in real structural shifts? 

• How do you build trust with communities as you work to shift power dynamics? 

We hope the conversation and tools will offer insights for both experienced practitioners and changemakers new to the field.  

Day Two: October 30, 2024

Day Two Workshops

Choose one of the following workshops to attend on Day 2. Too many  incredible sessions to choose from? Don't worry, participants will receive recordings of all workshops after EngageFest!.

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Workshop Descriptions

In this 90-minute workshop, we’ll come together to learn how to genuinely connect with and support people with lived experience as leaders in our communities. We’ll explore practical ways to collaborate that honour their insights and experiences, ensuring they have an active role in shaping decisions that impact everyone. Together, we'll look at different approaches to sharing leadership and decision-making, moving beyond simply giving advice to truly sharing power.

Debate to Dialogue: Conflict Transformation in Communities   
Facilitators: Lisa Attygalle, Jorge Garza
Community engagement is a pathway to fostering inclusion. Creating opportunities for dialogue is essential to cultivate mutual understanding in our engagement processes. This workshop will explore the importance of engaging people with different opinions as allies in a society that is increasingly polarized. Participants will learn ways to re-frame a situation to invite people in, promote inquiry and dialogue, build empathy, and ground in strengths. Participants will also be introduced to a measurement framework for thinking critically about diversity in communities and tracking progress toward fostering pluralism.

Communities Getting to Systems Change 
Facilitator: Sylvia Cheung
Explore how community-based changemakers can amplify and accelerate their  impact through the power of movement building. What are the roles and contributions that communities bring to higher-level policy and systems change? What power do local individuals and collaboratives have, how can it be amplified by joining-up with others, and what is the role of a field catalyst?

Backbone Leaders and Systems Mediators: One and the Same for Collaborative Change? (FR)

Building on the March webinar with the Transition Bridges Project team, this workshop explores the role and positionality of backbone leaders as systems mediators. Participants will engage with Tamarack’s Essential Mindsets and Skillsets for Backbone Leaders, reflecting on their own experiences and competencies in facilitating systems change. The session will focus on self-awareness, humility, and reciprocity, encouraging participants to consider how their leadership styles and relational approaches contribute to community-driven transformation. The workshop prioritizes adaptive leadership and reflective practices to sustain long-term systemic change.

Exploring Black Geographies: Reimagining Place, Identity, and Resilience
Facilitators: Chúk Odenigbo and Yas Hassen
Tamarack has long recognized the transformative power of place, emphasizing that communities can drive meaningful change at the local level—whether in a neighbourhood, city, or region. This change is rooted in deep community engagement, mutual care, and collaborative efforts. However, to truly harness the power of place, we must confront and dismantle the assumptions shaped by Eurocentric worldviews and settler-colonial histories. These perspectives have created norms that often limit the effectiveness of place-based work, reinforcing settler-colonial ideas of what place is and should be—measuring everything against this standard. 

In this workshop, we will explore the concept of Black Geographies—a framework that challenges Eurocentric views of space and place by redefining Blackness (or sometimes Blacknesses) as the norm. We will delve into the rich connections between place, identity, and resistance, examining how Black communities have historically and continue to navigate, shape, and redefine the geographies they inhabit.

Frameworks for Community Systems Change   
Facilitators: Heather Keam, Justin Williams
Population-level change is the goal, but how do we get there? Collective Impact is ONE framework that can help communities organize, but there are many tools and approaches in the toolbox that changemakers can draw from depending on their context – who’s involved, the political climate, financial and human resources, level of support from the community at-large, etc. In this workshop, participants will learn about 34 evidence-based frameworks including methodologies and approaches that communities have successfully adopted to plan and achieve change.

Movement Building – Field Catalysts Moving People from Awareness to Action
In this workshop, participants will learn more about the role of the field catalyst, including the essential role they have at the local, regional and national systems-level in raising awareness, commitment and changing the behaviour of the general public, influencers and decision-makers.

 The Community Case for Basic Income

Details to come!

What's the Deal with Decolonization  
Facilitators: Shanese Steele & TBD 
The word "decolonization" has gained significant attention recently, becoming somewhat of a buzzword. However, understanding and applying the principles of decolonization is crucial for creating equitable and inclusive spaces. This engaging and interactive session is designed to provide participants with the knowledge and tools needed to decolonize their personal, community, and organizational spaces through Indigenous to so-called Canada and Global Indigenous contexts.

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Tool Share

On the second day of EngageFest!, we'll be hosting a Tool Share. Learners have the chance to sign up to explore two practical tools designed to build your capacity as a changemaker. Not only will you learn how to apply these tools, but you'll also have access to our entire EngageFest! tool library after the event. We want to give you all of the tools and resources you need to make a real impact in your community. Here is the current line up of tools for you to choose from and their descriptions below:

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Tool Descriptions

Brainstorming Critical Shifts: The Critical Shifts Tool is invaluable in developing a common agenda to guide the work of collaborative partners. Using this tool facilitates a process for identifying, and reaching consensus, around the specific problem or priority spaces that a collaborative effort intends to focus their solutions.

Capire Engagement Triangle: The Capire Engagement Triangle is a spatial tool which identifies desired outcomes of engagement based on the overarching objectives of informing decisions, building capacity and strengthening relationships. It should be used early to plan engagement outcomes.

Plan on a Page: Communications is an important condition of collaboration. Keeping everyone on the same page is difficult when there are multiple parts in flux. A Plan-on-a-Page can address these challenges by summarizing the key design elements of the collaboration effort.

Impact Feasibility Matrix: This tool outlines a useful process for assessing and prioritizing the many possible ideas and/or solutions that a group has generated. Those ideas that have the potential for high impact AND are identified as feasible should be the ones to prototype first.

Defining your Collaboration Purpose: When collaboration partners have co-created a compelling purpose, getting to impact is more achievable. This interactive six-step process builds connections across members, focuses efforts and supports the design of a compelling and shared purpose for the collaboration.

Context, Effective questions, and Listening for Responses: People bring wisdom, experiences, and other assets into conversations. This tool provides focus to group discussions and helps groups create shared meaning. It includes ideas on how to set context, a framework for how to design open-ended questions, and ideas on how to hear all of what's said AND draw out what's most essential in the moment.

Horns of the Dilemma: Complex issues often involve entangled challenges that are not intuitively obvious. When we frame these possibilities as “either-or” choices, we unintentionally contribute to their intractability. The “Horns of the Dilemma” tool helps to reframe – and recognize – the competing dimensions of a complex issue so we can work to reconcile them.

The Double-Diamond Process: A consensus-based process to bring diverse perspectives together to work through an issue to solutions. Understand four key phases of co-design: Start by sharing perspectives, forming a common vision, building new ideas, and deciding on your path forward.

Conflict Navigation: From Resolution to Transformation:  This tool is designed to guide individuals and groups through the complex process of navigating conflicts, with a focus on moving beyond resolution towards transformative outcomes. It offers a comprehensive framework that supports learners with understanding practical strategies, reflective exercises, and communication techniques to address underlying issues, foster understanding, and promote relational compassion. The tool emphasizes the importance of empathy, active listening, and collaborative problem-solving. It encourages participants to explore the root causes of conflict, understand different perspectives, and co-create solutions that honour the needs and values of all parties involved. By integrating elements of restorative justice, mediation, and conflict transformation theories, this tool aims to create a safe and supportive environment for meaningful dialogue and sustainable change

Appreciative Interviews: Appreciative interviews energize groups to share their success stories instead of the usual depressing talk about problems. Stories from the field offer proof of local solutions, promising prototypes, and spread innovations while providing data for recognizing success patterns.

Volunteer Recruitment Planning Canvas: The Volunteer Recruitment Planning Canvas is an exciting way to develop a volunteer recruitment strategy for a community collaborative, promoting a sense of community and shared purpose. This tool will help streamline your volunteer recruitment approach, ensuring consistency and clarity in volunteer recruitment efforts. The Canvas facilitates collaboration across various sectors, including those with Lived Experience, to create a more inclusive volunteer network. The tool advances equity and inclusion by addressing the impacts on equity-deserving populations and making volunteer efforts more equitable and inclusive. 

Policy Pizza: Using pizza as a metaphor for policy change and influence, this interactive session will engage participants in considering the equity and inclusion dimensions of policy strategies. Participants will walk away with insights into policy goals, development and policy outcomes. They will also consider who has influence and who is often left outside of the conversation.

Gradients of Agreement: Use the Gradients of Agreement to make group decision making easier. This tool invites group members to express their level of support for an idea, identify areas that require more discussion, reduce circular discussions, and ultimately help a group to reach consensus. Gradients of Agreement provides the data and process for people to confidently move from idea to action. 

Circle of Trust - Use the Circle of Trust tool with individuals and/or with collaborative groups.  The tool invites the individual or groups to identify who they consult in their ‘inner circle’.  This tool can help individuals or groups determine the diversity of their network and can also help individuals and groups unconscious, affinity bias.  The tool can also help an individual or group reflect and develop a path forward to increase the diversity of perspectives to consider.   

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