8am to 6:30pm Pacific Time

Increasing cultural, economic, and political linkages are bringing urban centres closer together in the Pacific Northwest. From evolving trends in Indigenous politics and transportation needs, to established issues of climate adaptation and housing affordability, this year's conference will convene discussions and examine solutions for these challenges facing our region.

SCARP’s annual symposium brings together students, practitioners, and academics from across British Columbia to engage in discussion and debate on key challenges in planning. It brings together academics, researchers and students for meaningful conversations and collaboration. 2015 will mark the seventh year of the SCARP Symposium. 

This year’s Symposium will look beyond municipal, provincial, and national boundaries to encompass the entire Pacific Northwest. Increasing cultural, economic and political linkages are bringing urban regions closer together in the Pacific Northwest. While the Cascadia bioregion has long had ample natural resources, pressures of population growth and climate change are forcing the region to evaluate how to best manage its natural assets. Major legal rulings on the rights of First Nations and trade agreements, protests for and against epoch-making economic development projects, and the running issues of substantial poverty and unaffordable housing, accessibility and mobility, and food systems in our sprawling conurbations all spell opportunities and threats in the region.

This Symposium will integrate Indigenous and environmental perspectives, as well as the dynamic narratives around economic development in Cascadia. This event will also explore commonalities, disparities, and overall trends in the Pacific Northwest in the area of housing, urban transportation, Indigenous resurgence, governance, sustainability, and prosperity.

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Keynote Speakers:

Sam Adams is the former mayor of the City of Portland, Oregon (2009-2012) where he was a key gay rights and environmental advocate for the region. Adams is now the Executive Director at the City Club of Portland, an organization dedicated to the civic integrity of the city.

Douglas White is a member and former Chief of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in Nanaimo, BC and is best known for his expertise in Indigenous legal issues. He continues to practice law and negotiation today, and simultaneously acts as Director of the Centre for Pre-Confederation Treaties and Reconciliation at Vancouver Island University

10am to 12pm Eastern Time

This webinar is the sixth in a series of conversations hosted by Sustain Ontario relating to municipal level food policy in Ontario.

Local food procurement generally refers to purchasing initiatives, tools, or policy that function to increase the amount of local food purchased by any number of public institutions.  Each year, millions of public dollars are spent on food for municipally funded and organized facilities including public cafeterias, childcare centres, convention centres, and long term care facilities.  By looking for ways to redirect some of this money back into local food economies, there is a huge potential to build a more vibrant local food system.

We know that local food procurement is a very complicated and multifaceted topic, and by no means do we intend to cover everything in one webinar.  Instead, we have decided to address three themes that continue to come up from across our network, namely:

• The process of food purchasing for the public sector,
• Establishing local food purchasing policy, and
• Managing international trade regulations and existing purchasing policies.

We hope that by addressing these issues, we might encourage municipal leaders across the province to ask the right questions, think outside of the box, and develop more meaningful local procurement plans for the future.

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Panelists

• Dan Munshaw, Manager of Supply Management for the City of Thunder Bay
• Hayley Lapalme, Program Designer and Facilitator for My Sustainable Canada
• Wendy Smith, Contract Specialist for MEALsource
• Sandra Hamilton, Business Consultant and Strategic Marketer
• Brendan Wylie-Toal, Greenbelt Fund BPS Grant Program Specialist

Discussion Facilitator

Janice Janiec, Project Manager Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance and lead consultant on Sustain Ontario’s Broader Public Sector Local Procurement Project

BACKGROUND

Crowdfunding can be used to finance a variety of purposes, from the small-scale support needed for specific projects or initiatives to larger start-up capital for small and medium-sized enterprise. It can tap into your organization’s existing fan base and it can help you to access investors who are interested in your idea.

WealthWorks is a 21st-century approach to community economic development. It brings together and connects a community’s assets to meet market demand in ways that build livelihoods that last. In this webinar Christi Electris shares what was learned through the WealthWorks Crowdfunding Action-Learning Program and how your organization can use crowdfunding to finance projects and initiatives.

Equity crowdfunding is a growing area of interest in Canada, with securities regulators across the country proposing rules to regulate the raising of limited amounts of capital, and the selling of shares, through crowdfunding websites. In this webinar Carlos Pinto Lobo talks about the two different regulation models in Canada and the implications these models have on Canada’s social economy.

SPEAKERS

Christi Electris, Croatan Institute

Christi is founding team member at Croatan Institute, a new center for advanced social and environmental research and engagement focusing on the nexus of sustainability and finance, and holds a dual appointment with the Tellus Institute, a sustainability think-tank in Boston. She consults on a variety of environmental and social issues, including energy, climate, agriculture, sustainability indicators, and corporate redesign. Christi has done extensive research and writing on sustainable and responsible investing, helping develop a new framework for social and environmental impact investing across asset classes, known as Total Portfolio Activation, and, as part of a multi-stakeholder initiative, is currently working to demonstrate the impact of public equity engagement through the development of a new reporting framework for investors.  A computer scientist and quantitative policy analyst by training, she has designed policy scenario analyses with environmental and social impacts, including the most recent update of Tellus Institute's global sustainability scenarios, and has consulted on a variety of website and database development projects. She developed and ran a social media and outreach strategy for author Marjorie Kelly's release of her most recent book, and is currently running the Tellus Institute’s campaign for the Great Transition Initiative online journal. As part of the Ford Foundation-funded WealthWorks rural development program, she studied enterprise finance models and place-based investing across the country, and out of that work developed and conducted several trainings on crowdfunding to support new investment into place-based rural value chains.

Carlos Pinto Lobo, MaRS Centre for Impact Investing

Carlos is an accomplished, compliance, governance and risk management professional with over 25 years of extensive experience in the financial services industry, including futures, options, retail compliance, LCM, SOX, credit, operational risk management, anti-money laundering, privacy regulations and successful business solutions. Carlos has had previous roles as a Director and VP at CIBC, Deutsche Bank AG, Alpha ATS, and BMO InvestorLine Inc., as well as been a guest speaker at a variety of industry related events. He has also been instrumental in the development of regulatory regimes and groundbreaking industry initiatives. He is currently the SVX Compliance Officer with the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing.

Additional Resources

WealthWorks Approach

• Enterprise Financing for WealthWorks Value Chains: Overview & Guide
• Training modules developed by the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group.
• Financing the Evolving Role of the Value Chain Coordinator
• Place-Based Investment for Resilient Rural Development
• www.WealthWorks.org

Croatan Crowdfunding Resources

• Guide to Crowdfunding for WealthWorks Value Chains, including list of U.S.-centered crowdfunding and online fundraising platforms
• Croatan Institute Publications
• Report on the Crowdfunding Action Learning Program: Lessons Learned

Equity Crowdfunding in Canada

• Two Equity Crowdfunding Models for Canada
• Other blog posts from Carlos Pinto Lobo

Other Resources

• A Guide to Community Capital
• 2015 Canadian Crowdfunding Summit – Toronto, March 3^rd
• 2015 Canadian Crowdfunding Summit Slide Deck
  • Optimized for Web (~20MB):  PDF download
  • Office ready (~50MB):  PDF download
• National Crowdfunding Assocation of Canada
• Intro to Crowdfunding for Nonprofits
• What nonprofits need to know about crowdfunding

Free Webinar
12pm-1:30pm ET

This webinar provides an overview of Québec’s approach to regional development from before confederation to the current period. We will focus on the establishment of the National Rural Policy in 2001 and its evolution since that period of time. Topics covered will include the institutional and cultural roots of the Rural Policy, its key features, its impacts and legacy, its transitions to current conditions, and its prospects for the future. The discussion will consider various explanations for the success of the policy and the implications it has for regional policy, development, and programs in general.

On February 23rd, 2015, the RPLC will present:

Bruno Jean, a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Rural Development at L'Université du Québec à Rimouski. He was the first Scientific Director of the inter-university research group at the Centre de Recherche sur le Développement Territorial. His areas of specialization and research include the New Rural Economy, rurality, rural development of marginalized regions, family farming, rural policy, and rural governance. He contributed to the OECD Quebec rural policy review and published a paper in a recent OECD book on rural innovation. See: OECD, Innovation and Modernising the Rural Economy, 2014: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264205390-en

Bill Reimer is a Professor Emeritus at Concordia University in Montréal and Adjunct Professor at Brandon University. He is the Director of the Rural Policy Learning Commons (http://rplc-capr.ca), a 7-year international partnership of more than 90 researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, and organizations interested in rural and northern issues.  From 1997 to 2008 he directed a Canadian national research project on the New Rural Economy which included 13 universities, 35 partners, and 32 rural communities from all parts of Canada (http://nre.concordia.ca). For details of his work go to: http://www.billreimer.net/workshop/
 
Audience: Provincial and Municipal Staff & Elected Officials, Academic Community, Economic Development Practitioners, Community Organizations, and Non-Profit Organisations.

For more information or to register:
woodss at brandonu.ca | 204-571-8521
Join the online Webinar - RSVP by February 20th, 2015

12:00-1:00pm Eastern Time

Judith Marcuse’s webinar will explore the burgeoning connections between art, innovation, and social change by highlighting some of the work being done in communities across Canada and internationally that employ art-making as a central strategy. Her work explores the question of how we can use a cultural lens and arts-infused practices to create more dynamic, healthy and creative cities.

Marcuse will explore what it means to integrate art perspectives and practices into change agendas in order to inform and enrich our approaches to social innovation. She will also highlight her recent work with organizations such as Cirque du Soleil’s NGO, One Drop, and in strategic planning for the City of Vancouver.

Arts-infused facilitation and other arts-based strategies can effectively address the complexity of the many challenges we face in the development of cross-sector collaboration (and in many other forms of change work). Marcuse will share insights about partnerships between arts and non-arts organizations, as well as the role that arts facilitation can take in the creation of inclusive policy and governance models.

And, because we are in the realm of vision and imagination, she will share a few simple methods to help enliven our own work habits and perspectives.

Register here

About Judith Marcuse
Judith Marcuse’s career spans more than 40 years of professional work as a dancer, choreographer, director, producer, teacher, writer, consultant and lecturer in Canada and abroad. She has created over 100 original works for live performance by dance, theatre and opera companies as well as for film and television and has produced seven large-scale, international arts festivals. Her repertory contemporary dance company toured extensively in Canada and abroad for 15 years, while also producing community residencies and youth programs. Among many initiatives her youth-focused, five-year, issue-based ICE, FIRE and EARTH projects involved thousands of youth in workshops, national touring, television production and community collaborations.

Founder and Co-Director of the International Centre of Art for Social Change, she is a Senior Fellow of Ashoka International. Among her many honours, she has received the Lee and Chalmers Canadian choreographic awards and an honorary doctorate from Simon Fraser University. She is an Adjunct Professor and Artist in Residence at SFU and is leading the ASC! Project, a five-year research initiative on art for social change in Canada.

Marcuse has pioneered the application of arts-infused dialogue and other creative approaches for cross-sector collaboration and consults for private and public sector organizations across Canada and abroad.

12pm - 1:30pm Pacific Time

BALLE's search for the best social innovation of our time takes us to the people for whom the mainstream economy has never worked. Low income and communities of color have a rich legacy of advancing economic principles of fairness, sustainability, and democracy. These communities, who have historically been oppressed, have taken resourcefulness and creativity to a new level and will be our guides to a new economy.

This webinar is the first of a monthly series shedding light on What Works. The aim of the series is to give Localist leaders tools and insights to replicate and build upon proven solutions towards an economy with equity at its core. Hear about work being done to eliminate systemic barriers, invest in good jobs, and create a democratic economy where workers have just as many rights as those providing the capital. Learn how you and your organization can create thriving economies that align workers, anchor institutions, and independent business for shared prosperity. Participate in this important discussion about what we can learn from traditionally marginalized communities and why these communities must be removed from the margins for all of us to truly prosper.

SPEAKERS

• Crystal German, Vice President of Economic Inclusion, Cincinnato USA Regional Chamber of Commerce's Minority Business Accelerator
• Adele London, Business Advisor, Good Work Network
• Jay Bad Heart Bull, President/CEO, Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI)

Register now

Cost
BALLE Champion Member - FREE
BALLE Localist Member - $10
General Public - $20

Champion and Localist members please use your member code to recieve your discounted webinar pricing. Please contact Jocelyn Wong at jocelyn at bealocalist.org if you have questions regarding your member code.

BALLE Champion Members Go Deeper
After the webinar, BALLE Champion members will receive access to a 30-minute exclusive call with the presenters to ask more probing questions and get more 1-on-1 time with these leading lights of Localism. Call-in number to be provided upon registration.

Just another reason why it pays to be a BALLE Champion member. Learn more about Champion member benefits here.

Webinar instructions will be sent to you via email upon registration completion.