Mayor's Forum Series on Building Resilient Communities

Strategizing Towards Resilient Community

In the face of a future of change, opportunities, threats, stresses, and unknowns, this Waterloo-based, citizen-driven collaborative process of inquiry and dialogue asks:

What community-wide strategies can we develop that can be wise, smart and powerful enough to serve our visions of community resilient around the values that are important to us?

‘Strategizing depends on a rich and complex web of conversations that cuts across previously isolated pockets of knowledge and creates new and unexpected combinations of insight.’ Gary Hamel

You’re invited to join in the Mayor's Forum Series on Building Resilient Communities, an initiative hosted by:

• City of Waterloo Mayor Brenda Halloran, and
• TransitionKW, our local Transition Town initiative, along with other partners.

Come to one, two, or all three of these day-long events in Waterloo. While they form a process that will build on each event, you can still come to only one or join in at the later dates. We expect numbers of attendees to increase at each event.

This process is using Waterloo as a core working example, and at the same time we believe the learning and dialogue will be useful in relation to any community of any size or any geographical location.

How to Register

• First Event: Saturday, April 2, 2011 (Winston Churchill Public School, 100 Milford Drive, Waterloo)
• Second Event: Saturday, May 7, 2011 (Wilfred Laurier University - Turret, 75 University Avenue West, Waterloo)
• Third Event: Saturday, June 18, 2011 (Wilfred Laurier University - Turret, 75 University Avenue West, Waterloo)

Aims and Questions

The aim of these forums is to initiate an ongoing ‘rich and complex web of conversations’ to explore and strategize around these questions:

• How can forum participants from many diverse areas of community interest and activity work together to assist and empower one another effectively in all the various areas of our concern and caring?
• What needs to happen to insure that ‘we’ – the community as a whole – really understand the collective values and needs of the entire community?
• What common goals do we focus our energies on that
  • are most likely to generate in our communities the qualities of life that we all value most highly in living together, and
  • at the same time will give us the greatest or best buffers against threats, risk, change or shocks?
• How as a community can we close the gap between what we say we value and what we actually do?
• How, when we know our goals, can we then can develop strategies wise, smart, and powerful enough to serve our visions of community – Waterloo or any other – resilient around common values, in light of the future?

Who are these forums for?

They are for you – for anyone – if you

• have a desire for a more environmentally, socially, and economically resilient community.
• wish to work, and/or are already working, within your community in meaningful and powerful ways for your hopes and desires for the future.
• want to unlock our community potential to build a better future together for ourselves and future generations around the values that are important to us.

What will happen?

We’ll explore and strategize together in a wide variety of forms of conversation, questioning, dialogue and information-sharing. It will be a participatory process that can include any or all of conversation cafes, world-café, and open space or ‘unconferencing’ events. There will be short presentations, live or on video, and artist and musician events. We will reflect on our ongoing experience and plan for the future through graphic recording and various forms for capturing and re-presenting emerging ideas.

Desired and Expected Outcomes

The focus is on

• making connections among the people who come.
• thinking together as a learning community around the future we want and the goals and strategies that can serve that future.
• generating an infrastructure for an ongoing, post-forum, exponentially expanding, community-wide dialogue specifically around a resilient Waterloo that will continue past these events and allow increasing numbers of the Waterloo community to engage in the ongoing ‘rich and complex web of conversations’. The new website www.resilientwaterloo.ca being developed by the Upstart Collaboratory will available to support the development of this dialogue infrastructure.
• practice tools for initiating empowering community conversation and dialogue from the level of small groups to neighbourhoods to regions and beyond.
• becoming clearer about what our common goals are as caring community members that can also serve our diverse interests. Specifically, what do we focus our energies on that
  • will most likely generate in our communities the qualities of life that we value most deeply in living together, and
  • will give us the greatest or best buffers against threats, risk, change or shocks?
• participatory planning: aspects of the form of the second and third forums are not fixed, and will depend on what happens on the first day. Attendees on April 2 will be invited to help shape the subsequent days if they wish. Early conversations with attendees are already shaping the first day – you can contact us now if you wish to be part of the current conversations at resilientcommunities@transitionkw.ca.

Other Partners

• Laurier Students Public Interest Research Group (LSPIRG)
• Waterloo Public Interest Research Group (WPIRG)
• Upstart Collaboratory for Collaborative Culture Designing
• Social Planning Council of Kitchener-Waterloo

Sponsors

TransitionKW would like to sincerely thank the below sponsors for helping us with the funding of this event series.

Benefactors

Research In Motion (RIM)

Sustainers

Bailey's Local Foods
The Silver Spoon
Ten Thousand Villages

 

TransitionKW is part of a global movement working towards local community resilience.
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