The demographic shift is alive in Canada and the United States. We are an urban nation with 81% of Canadians living in cities. (2011 census). Join Ben Hecht, CEO, Living Cities and Mark Holmgren, Director, Vibrant Communities as they discuss how to build cities that are resilient, engaging and proactively achieving dramatically better results for low income residents. Ben will share examples from across the United States where Living Cities partners have shifted the traditional paradigms to harness impact investing and are re-building civic infrastructure using technology and innovation. Ben will also share his perspectives on how the innovation economy can play a role in disrupting inequality in cities. 

Register for Disrupt Cities

About Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht was appointed President & CEO of Living Cities in July, 2007. Since that time, the organization has adopted a broad, integrative agenda that harnesses the collective knowledge of its 22 member foundations and financial institutions to benefit low income people and the cities where they live. Living Cities deploys a unique blend of more than $140 million in grants, loans and influence to re-engineer obsolete public systems and connect low-income people and underinvested places to opportunity.

Prior to joining Living Cities, Mr. Hecht co-founded One Economy Corporation, a non-profit organization focused on connecting low-income people to the economic mainstream through innovative online content and increased broadband access. As President, from 2000-2007, Mr. Hecht led the growth of the organization from 4 employees to a $12 million organization with 50+ staff, online media properties serving more than 150,000 low-income people a month, and programs in 40 states, the Middle East and Africa.

Immediately before One Economy, Mr. Hecht was Senior Vice President at the Enterprise Foundation. There, he led the organization’s efforts beyond housing into childcare, workforce development and economic development and oversaw the expansion of the organization’s revolving loan fund from $30 million to $200 million.

About Mark Holmgren

Mark recently began working with Tamarack Institute as the Director of Vibrant Communities. Mark's focus is to create and support a connected learning community of 100 Canadian cities or regions with multi-sector roundtables addressing poverty reduction in their communities. The goal is to foster aligned poverty reduction strategies in cities, provinces and the federal government resulting in reduced poverty for 1 million Canadians.

A proven visionary and innovator, Mark has extensive experience as a big picture thinker, strategist, and facilitator. He brings to Tamarack a long history of experience with social housing development, the development of services aimed at poverty and homelessness elimination, and the identification and launch of strategies that are mission and values focused. He has taught at McEwan University (strategic planning and executive non-profit leadership) and was also a consult for the university in the area of curriculum review and re-design.

12pm to 1pm Eastern Time

Ontario has taken a major step in the right direction with the passage of Bill 6: Infrastructure for Jobs and Prosperity Act. A large coalition of community partners has been advocating for community benefits to be included in this bill. That’s because Community Benefit Agreements (CBAs) support communities by creating jobs and training opportunities and supporting social enterprise activity and other community amenities. CBAs offer an opportunity to engage marginalized populations, including youth and newcomers, in a range of quality job opportunities as part of a large infrastructure investment.

This achievement is the result of cross-sectoral collaboration of many community agencies, nonprofits, labour groups and social enterprise leaders working together. 

We’re inviting nonprofits across Ontario to join a one hour webinar with Alejandra Bravo, Director of Leadership and Training at the Broadbent Institute to discuss how community benefit agreements work, how they can help nonprofits, and why the coalition felt it was important to have community benefits mentioned in Bill 6.

Cost: $30 for ONN Members/ $60 for Nonmembers
Presenter: Alejandra Bravo, Director of Leadership and Training at the Broadbent Institute

Register for the Community Benefit Agreements webinar

During this one hour webinar, you can learn:

• How Community Benefit Agreements work
• Why are Community Benefit Agreements important for the nonprofit sector
• What are the opportunities for nonprofits to get involved in pushing for community benefits
• Where are the emerging opportunities in communities across Ontario

About the presenter

Alejandra Bravo is Director of Leadership and Training at the Broadbent Institute.

Prior to this, she was Manager of Leadership & Learning at Maytree, where she designed and delivered training for emerging leaders to participate actively in civic and political life.

Alejandra is a member of the Toronto District School Board’s Inner City Advisory Committee and an advisor to Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Ontario. She has a 25-year history of working for progressive social change with grassroots, immigrant, and labour groups. Alejandra has worked as a community organizer, political staff and has been a City Council candidate in Toronto.

She is a graduate of the University of Toronto.

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A Vibrant Communities National Gathering

Citizens and their Mayors in both big and small cities are making poverty reduction a priority and just about every progressive city council in Canada is working on or is planning some form of a poverty reduction strategy.

According to the National Post, Medicine Hat just became the first city in Canada to end homelessness. Big city mayors like Don Iveson in Edmonton and John Tory in Toronto have just launched major strategies, and mayors Walter Sendzik in St. Catharines and Matt Brown in London have announced new advisory panels on poverty reduction. These are just a few examples of recent successes led by mayors. 

Cities* Reducing Poverty: When Mayors Lead will bring together mayors, provincial and territorial representatives, poverty reduction roundtable members, and interested individuals across the country in an effort to:

• Raise awareness about the issue of urban poverty;
• Present solutions and examples from cities that are addressing urban poverty effectively; and
• Develop recommendations for provinces and the federal government to help cities tackle poverty.

Register for Cities Reducing Poverty

Let's leverage our collective efforts and build the movement to reduce poverty across Canada.

* The word cities is used mainly to differentiate local poverty reduction efforts from provincial and federal initiatives and strategies. Please note that the event will feature communities of all sizes and smaller and rural municipalities have intentionally been invited to attend in addition to big cities.

Attend this unique gathering where:

• Big and small city mayors will attend and share their stories
• Brock Carlton (FCM) and Paul Born (Tamarack) will present a key paper on cities reducing poverty
• Aboriginal poverty will form a key part of the learning agenda
• You'll hear stories about community innovation techniques leading to poverty reduction
• You'll spend an entire afternoon touring unique sites in Edmonton to hear the story of their poverty reduction strategy and then meet the amazing people behind it

9am Pacific Time | Noon Eastern Time

Join the Real Economy Lab, the Next System Project and the New Economy Coalition for an interactive webinar discussion on mapping the next system.

The inability of traditional politics and policies to address fundamental challenges has fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation, generating increasing numbers of sophisticated and thoughtful initiatives that build from the bottom and begin to suggest new possibilities for addressing deep social, economic and ecological problems. Thus we encounter the caring economy, the sharing economy, the provisioning economy, the restorative economy, the regenerative economy, the sustaining economy, the collaborative economy, the solidarity economy, the steady-state economy, the gift economy, the resilient economy, the participatory economy, the new economy, and the many, many organizations engaged in related activities.

There are calls for a Great and Just Transition, or for reclamation of the Commons. Many of these approaches already have significant constituencies and work underway. Creative thinking by researchers and engaged scholars is also contributing to the ferment. Although they vary widely in emphases and approaches, there is a good deal of commonality. These movements seek an economy that gives true priority to people, place, and planet.

Taking the next step in collective development will require better information on the array of organizations and initiatives active in this space as well as efforts to identify potential areas of cooperation and collaboration. Beyond that loom questions of scale and replicability. The Real Economy Lab (REL) has been surveying the landscape and identifying the linkages and is seeking to provide an interactive platform where the cumulative knowledge, aims, and resources of these movements can be drawn together in order to seek common ground and drive coordinated action.

In this webinar REL will present their work to date and invite you to join them and a panel of leading thinkers and practitioners in discussing these issues. We will hear about the work of REL as a connector of change makers in the next economy space, working to raise awareness and understanding of new economy theory and practice and help connect the thinkers and doers in this world for collaboration and movement building. REL will explain its theory of change and unique role in this evolving new economy ecosystem and walk us through one of their core tools, the mindmapping of the next economy ecosystem.

Register for the Mapping the New Economy webinar

Participants will also discuss questions that explore the value of mapping the next system:

1. Problem statement – What are the leading / recurring challenges in organizing more coherent effort and coalition building within and across this movement? What are the obstacles / challenges that crop up?
2. Underlying causes - What do we have in common? What principles, values and alternative economic paradigms motivate our actions, and where are we ultimately aligned? How do we talk about this more openly?
3. Solution framing – How can people and organizations build on one another’s efforts and collaboratively work towards a more capable, credible, and coherent movement for systemic change? What are leading theories of change?
4. Solution space – Where are we seeing inspiring or illustrative success stories and convergences underway in the movement? How can we measure progress and promote positive outcomes?
5. Improving the odds – How might the work of REL better support practitioners and thinkers in the next economy world? What tools, data, or support are missing from the system we all work in?

Featuring Moderator:

Gus Speth, Co-chair of the Next System Project

Panelists

• Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation
• Ferananda Ibarra, VillageLab / Metacurrency Project
• Michelle Mascarenhas Swan, Movement Generation
• Jules Peck, Real Economy Lab
• Ed Whitfield, Fund for Democratic Communities

8am - 9:30am Pacific Time

Join Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins along with transition organizers from all around the country for an informative telephone conference about the role of Transition in the climate justice movement and the Paris talks. Hopkins will share lessons from his timely new book, '21 Stories for Transition.'

Register for '21 Stories of Transition' with Rob Hopkins

November 1st sees the publication of a landmark new publication from Transition Network.  '21 Stories of Transition: how a movement of communities is coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world' is published in advance of the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris in December, and is a joyous and inspiring celebration of what the Transition movement has become.  Here Rob Hopkins, who harvested the stories contained in the book, introduces it: 

It tells 21 stories of 39 Transition projects in 15 countries, drawing out some staggering insights into their impacts (for example, between them, our 21 stories alone have saved car travel equivalent to driving to the Moon and back 3 times, installed renewable energy equivalent to that needed by 4,000 homes, put over £1 million of local currencies into circulation, and generated over 18,500 hours of volunteer input).  But those are just the measurable impacts.  So much of what these groups do is much harder to measure, but just as important.  

More Information on the book here