More Details About the agenda

Film Screening | Great Bear Rainforest

On Wednesday evening, we will travel to the Omnimax Theatre at Science world for a private screening of Great Bear Rainforest. The film will be followed by a reception at Science World, and learners can then continue into the city for dinner or return by bus to the hotel.

On the remote Pacific shores of Canada lies earth’s largest coastal temperate rainforest, an almost fairy-tale-like chain of granite domes and thickly forested islands, spiked with ancient red cedar trees, carved through by crystal-clear, salmon-rich rivers and bursting with one-of-a-kind natural phenomena.

This primeval land hosts not only some of the world’s most enchanting animals, but also a rare white bear that is neither polar bear nor albino but a “spirit bear,” a black bear with a vanilla coat so mystically beautiful it is revered by the First Nations people who have lived among the bears and protected them for millennia.

Narrated by Ryan Reynolds, and featuring music by Hans Zimmer, this film showcases the revered ecosystem of the Great Bear Rainforest, and the indigenous youth that are coming together to protect it.

• Learn more about the film

What is a Skills Session?

Want to deepen your practice as a community changemaker? Led by our expert facilitators, our Skills Sessions are workshops that will provide you with the theory, tools, and practices to help you enhance your Five Interconnected Practices for community change. Skills Sessions will be running on the first three days of the festival – come ready to build your toolbox! 

Learn more about our skills sessions below.

Skills Session 1 | Monday | Building Your Planning Canvas 

Choose one of the following sessions:

Collaborative Leadership 

Transformative community change requires skilled changemakers. The most effective changemakers understand, embrace, and practice collaborative leadership and the trust-building which makes it possible. Today’s session by Lindsay Daniller (Daniller Associates, Edmonton, Alberta, CA ) and Tom Klaus (Tenacious Change, Laurel, MD, USA), two experienced collaborative leaders, will lead participants in an exploration of what it means to lead collaboratively and the critical role trust plays in making it possible.  

Session goals: 

• Define collaborative leadership and assess your readiness to engage in collaborative leadership
• Identify how to build your capacity to engage in collaborative leadership
• Expand your understanding of the role of trust in effective collaboration
• Identify strategies for building, and repairing, trust 

Community Engagement 

Why engage? It’s a simple question, but one that most people don’t spend enough time exploring.  Too often we engage ‘because we’re supposed to’ rather than ‘because we absolutely need to’. In this skills session we will challenge the status quo and push our thinking beyond our comfort zone. 

Session goals: 

• Assess your comfort as a changemaker in deeply engaging communities  
• Learn the 7 foundations for authentic engagement 
• Critically evaluate why you’re engaging and challenge yourself to go deeper 
• Flip your perspective to understand your work from the community member’s point of view 
• Use the Community Engagement Planning Canvas to hold you accountable 
  
  

Collective Impact 

Since 2011, Collective Impact has grown into a world-wide field of practice.  Skilled changemakers need to know what situations ARE and ARE NOT well-suited to Collective Impact.  Equally important is the ability to assess whether there is adequate readiness to launch a Collective Impact initiative and how it can be cultivated.  In this skills session we will discern the right situations and critical success factors needed to launch, and sustain, a successful Collective Impact effort. 

Session goals: 

• Determine whether Collective Impact is the right approach for what you are hoping to achieve 
• Assess and cultivate the readiness for your CI initiative to thrive  

• Explore common “stumbles” that can limit the effectiveness of your CI Initiative  
• Discover factors common to successful Collective Impact Initiatives 
   
  

Evaluating Impact | Participatory Evaluation 

Gone (mostly) are the days when the evaluator was the expert and stakeholders anxiously awaited their feedback and judgement. In today’s world, initiative stakeholders can play a key role in every step of the evaluation, from establishing questions to making sense of results. This is particularly true in complex contexts where stakeholders have very different  - even conflicting – values, interests and power and everyone’s perspective and voice is required in order to meaningfully move forward

Session Goals: 

• Examine the different types of participatory evaluation
• Review the steps and stages when an evaluation can be participatory
• Explore exemplar participatory methods and where to go for more
• Critically reflect on which participatory approach might work best for you
• Use an evaluation checklist and reflection sheet to help transfer your learning back into your work, the work of your organization and/or community 

Community Innovation | Why it matters

What is Community Innovation, and what are some common ingredients that can help communities innovate? By looking at best practices and examples from the fields, of creativity, innovation, and social innovation, we will build a starting point for understanding what conditions and supports might be important to support Community Innovation, and the role that you, as individual changemakers, can play in that process.

Session Goals:

• Understand and articulate what community innovation is and why it matters to changemaking
• Identify areas of focus for support and capacity-building to help communities innovate?
• Understand the broad range of trends in social innovation and how they might apply to the work of Community Innovation

Skills Session 2 | Tuesday | Innovative Stories & Case Studies

Choose one of the following sessions:

Collaborative Leadership 

We are all on a collaborative leadership journey.  Tom Klaus and Lindsay Daniller will lead a conversation about the joys and struggles, challenges and rewards of collaborative leadership. Each have had successes and failure, and they will transparently share their stories and insights. Participants will have an opportunity to share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly of collaboration. You can also pose some of the challenges you have had and seek the wisdom of the group.   

Session goals: 

• Be inspired by seasoned leaders who have navigated collaborative leadership opportunities and challenges
• Share your own reflections and insights on collaborative leadership practices you have used and choices you have made
• Receive insights from the experiences of others and offer insights to those are on the collaborative leadership journey

Community Engagement 

What would it take for your engagement to be truly personal, accessible and centred around connection? Explore the role of humour, informal language and vulnerability through stories and exercises, and brainstorm the possibilities for your authentic engagement. 

Session goals: 

• Inspire with examples of engaging communications that are out of the ordinary 

• Explore vulnerability and why we need more of it in our society 
• Assess how approachable your current engagement activities are and plan what you’ll do to reduce the barriers 
• Consider accessibility in all its form and brainstorm solutions 
• Engage in an exercise to embark on ‘something crazy and wonderful’ 

Collective Impact 

What does it take to create a Collective Impact initiative that acts as a catalyst and container for a grassroots movement for change?  Discover how Collective Impact initiatives can create shared innovation spaces that generate change that no single sector or group could have achieved alone.  Explore the opportunities and challenges of learning to work differently together.  

Session goals: 

• Be inspired by stories that profile the highs and lows of Collective Impact in action  
• Discover the opportunities that CI creates to work differently; the challenges this can generate; and, what can be done to mitigate these risks 
• Learn how the work of CI evolves across 5 phases and determine what you’ll need to focus on next 
• Share lessons and resources from your own work in Collective Impact work 
   

Evaluating Impact | Innovative Practices in Participatory Evaluation

If we are serious about embracing a participatory approach to evaluation, we should be aware of some of the newest ways to go about it. This skills session will explore up to five of the most innovative paradigms and methods in the field and create an opportunity for you to discuss and reflect on their relevance for your work.

Session Goals: 

• Explore new participatory methods – including but not limited to critical system heuristics, gender-responsive evaluation, Indigenous evaluation and evaluation rubrics
• Examine how drawing from these methodologies can make your evaluation(s) more meaningful
• Critically reflect on which methodologies are best suited to your needs, and the needs of the community
• Use an Evaluation Planning Canvas to help transfer your learning back into your work, the work of your organization and/or community 

Community Innovation 

Who is making good use of innovation techniques in the community change world? What can we learn from their successes and failures? This session will focus on a few key case studies that will help us understand how to choose design methods and ideas that work for our specific contexts, and how to honour the agency and identities of our communities in the process.

Session Goals:

• Identify how others are using innovation and design methods to move their community change agenda forward
• Build a process for discerning which methods would be appropriate for our own communities
• Learn from the success and failures of others in the field

Skills Session 3 | Wednesday |Methods to put Theory into Practice

Choose one of the following sessions:

Collaborative Leadership 

Put what you have learned about collaborative leadership into practice with this unique case study experience. Tom Klaus will lead a case study called “The 10 o’Clock Fire.” The case study uses photography and storytelling to take you into an unusual but true experience in which collaboration makes the difference between success and failure, life and death. (Of course, no workshop participants will be harmed in the case study!) “The 10 o’Clock Fire” is a memorable conclusion to our exploration of collaborative leadership.

Session Goals: 

• Actively apply collaborative leadership ideas and principle in a compelling case study experience
• Increase understanding of the use of “simple rules” in collaborative leadership
• More fully appreciate the value and power of trust in collaborative leadership
• Understand how collaboration can be used to bring sense and order in times of disruption

Community Engagement 

Deep dive into two methods for deep collaborative engagement where communities are involved in co-designing the solution. Explore the role of the community from being the recipient of programs and services to having ownership and investment in the things that matter most to them. 

Session goals: 

• Understand the decision-making process for how to engage the community in co-design 
• Explore co-design methodologies through examples and tools 
• Learn how to link deep engagement processes together with consultative processes 
• Engage in an open discussion about what works and what doesn’t 

Collective Impact 

Explore – and apply – useful tools and frameworks designed to engage diverse perspectives in thinking together that can be used to help translate the theory of Collective Impact into action.  Discover the essential role that data, dialogue and shared learning play in building the necessary trust and mutual understanding needed for your Collective Impact effort to flourish. 

Session goals: 

• Consider the importance of trust and discover tools and practices to nurture and sustain it 
• Discover the importance of embracing a systems lens and learn simple tools to foster this view 
• Learn about and share resources to continue to build your CI Implementation Toolkit 
   

Evaluating Impact | Innovative Practices in Participatory Evaluation

Building on the past two days the third workshop day will focus on appropriating evaluation theory to the practicalities of community change work. To what extent can theoretical models be applied in practice to help us track continuous improvement of innovative community initiatives?

 We will do this by looking at examples on how to evaluate using 90 day campaigns, prototypes, shared measurements, app development, lessons learned and sense making from the data and evaluation.  We will look at the practicalities of how to work side by side with evaluators, front line workers, and the work of your organization and with those trying to make long term change within their communities. Finally we will look at how to effectively leverage evaluation as a tool for advocacy and communication for funders, decision makers and stakeholders to ensure long term community change.

Session Goals: 

• Explore how to make evaluation work for your organization and community
• Reflect and asses on how to make your work more meaningful and have impact
• How to transfer you learning back into your work, your organization and community

Community Innovation | Three Big Ideas: Empathy, Ideation, Experimentation

Learn how design-based methods are shaping the work of community change, and how you can use these methods to build, test, and scale new approaches. This workshop will focus on hands-on, practical tools and approaches that you can use right away

Session Goals:

• Understand the basic principles behind design-based methods for community innovation
• Understand where, when, and why these methods are appropriate
• Learn how to use these methods in practice
• Have the opportunity to tailor these tools to your own needs through practice

Tell me more about the Advanced Learning Stream

Our advanced learning stream is designed for experienced community changemakers who are working in systems change. These sessions will be facilitated by a rotating cast of experienced faculty. The workshops are designed to engage senior leaders in each of the five interconnected practices essential for moving the needle on complex systems. 

The advanced learning series will be limited enrolment so sign up early to reserve your spot. 

More information on the advanced learning stream will be released soon. 

Tell me more about the Keynote by George Aye
The Future of Community Change: Overcoming Power and Privilege

As a community changemaker, have you ever stopped to wonder where the power lies in your project? What are you trying to achieve, and for whom? How does your place of power (as a creator and an individual) hinder your ability to relate to those you are trying to help? We often use power unknowingly in the work of change. But, when we recognize the influence of our training, politics, access, and privilege we allow ourselves to understand our clients, communities, and abilities more deeply. During this intimate conversation, George Aye of Greater Good Studio will help us understand the mechanics of power and how to wield it with care as we move forward in our community change efforts.