Pre-Recorded Webinar - Released on October 30th

Speakers: Megan Courtney and Liz Weaver

In this webinar, Megan and Liz will reflect on 25 years of collective wisdom in community change from Canada to New Zealand. Based on their experiences, you'll hear about some of the most important shifts in the community change landscape and what that means for your own initiatives. Most importantly, Megan and Liz will provide insight into challenges, themes, and principles that they believe will affect the next decade of community change work.

Register for Global Perspectives on Community Change Webinar

This webinar is a great opportunity to hear from important voices in the community change landscape, and to benefit from different perspectives on the past, present, and future of community change work. This webinar builds on the paper Reflections on Community Change: Two Countries, Two Perspectives, One Vision for Moving Forward. 

Speakers

Megan Courtney

Megan Courtney is a founding member of the Inspiring Communities core team, and (amongst many things!) leads co-ordination of IC Team activities. She’s a firm believer in the power of local people and places to do amazing things and loves working alongside communities to help make locally-led action happen. 

Liz Weaver

Liz Weaver is the Co-CEO of Tamarack Institute where she is leading the Tamarack Learning Centre.Liz is well-known for her thought leadership on Collective Impact and is the author of several popular and academic papers on the topic.

Adopted by the General Assembly in 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is regarded as the most comprehensive international instrument on the rights of Indigenous peoples. In Canada, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission speaks to UNDRIP as the framework for reconciliation and calls on the federal government of Canada to develop a national action plan and strategies to achieve UNDRIP. 

Register for UNDRIP: A Webinar on the Canadian Context and Implications for Reconciliation and for Protecting Canada’s Environment

This webinar, co-hosted by Sustainability Network and the Canadian Environmental Grantmakers’ Network, is intended to increase our understanding of UNDRIP in the Canadian context, as well as it implications for collective efforts to advance reconciliation and protect Canada’s environment. 

Presenters 

 Danika Littlechild 
Consulting Legal Counsel, International Indian Treaty Council

 Eli Enns
Indigenous Circle of Experts for The Pathway to Canada Target 1 

 Jessica Clogg
Executive Director, West Coast Environmental Law

 Kris Archie Moderator
Circle on Philanthropy and Indigenous Peoples in Canada 

10am to 11am Pacific Time

In the last of five webinars by the Asian American Solidarity Economies Project, speakers will share cooperative planning and startup experiences as nonprofit organizations with an organizing focus.

Register for Incubating Cooperatives

Speakers:

Lan Dinh, VietLead

Lolita Andrada Lledo, Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California

Facilitators:

Yvonne Yen Liu, Solidarity Research Center 
Yvonne is the co-founder and research director of Solidarity Research Center, a worker self-directed nonprofit that advances solidarity economies. She serves on the board of the US Solidarity Economy Network and was named the 2018 Activist-in-Residence Fellow at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. 

Parag Rajendra Khandhar, Asian American Solidarity Economies Project 
Parag is a founding principal of Gilmore Khandhar, LLC, a law firm focused on legal, policy, and advocacy tools to advance economic justice, racial equity, and social transformation. He teaches at George Washington University Law School. Parag co-founded Baltimore Activating Solidarity Economies (BASE) and the Asian American Solidarity Economies Network (AASE).

Asian American Solidarity Economies is a project of Solidarity Research Center in partnership with UCLA Asian American Studies Center and National CAPACD. For more information about our five-part webinar series, see our website.

1pm to 2pm Eastern Time

In the fourth of five webinars by the Asian American Solidarity Economies project, our speakers will discuss legacy business conversions into cooperatives and how existing micro-business can work together in cooperative ways.

Register for the Legacy Conversions and Micro Businesses webinar

Speakers:

Shevanthi (Shev) Daniel-Rabkin (Democracy at Work Institute) is passionate about the intersection of sustainable business and economic development. Her work spans over fifteen years in community and labor organizing, and strategic capacity building with nonprofit and small businesses. She previously served as Lead Manager of Worker Cooperative Initiative at Pinchot University – Center for Inclusive Entrepreneurship, and also helped develop a Cooperative Management Certificate program at Pinchot University. Shevanthi has managed and implemented large-scale labor organizing and worker justice campaigns with SEIU1199 NW, and programs centered on civil rights and social justice leadership, in rural and urban centers across the country, as well as solidarity work in South Africa, Nicaragua and Ethiopia. Shevanthi is also a co-founder of the O’Dell Education Center, a nonviolence direct action and leadership academy in Washington State, owned and operated by the Institute for Community Leadership. She is also Executive Board member at the Center for Women in Democracy, strengthening women’s capacity and leadership in public and private sector. Shevanthi has an MBA in Sustainable Business from Pinchot University and BA in History and Anthropology from University of Washington.

Soyun Park (Micro Business Network) is an organizer, a trainer, an organization builder and a movement strategist. She has over 25 years of experience with youth and community organizing in Black and Brown communities to affect local, state, and national policy change on racial and economic justice issues and immigrant rights issues.Over the last few years, Soyun has been focused on community economic development, working with owner operator micro businesses fighting predatory development in DC. A natural ally of neighborhood residents and workers, she has mobilized micro business owners in support of progressive worker policies, against public utility rate increases, and to push the largest electric holding company in the US to provide sustainable alternatives. She is also working in Baltimore with Korean owned liquor storeowners and the surrounding Black communities to identify solutions to city policies that perpetuate anti-Blackness and racial triangulation. She grew up in this country as the daughter of an immigrant shop owner and brings this experience into her political and organizing work to make an impact. She lives East of the River in DC with her two beautiful children.

Facilitators:

Yvonne Yen Liu (Solidarity Research Center) is the co-founder and research director of Solidarity Research Center, a worker self-directed nonprofit that advances solidarity economies. She serves on the board of the US Solidarity Economy Network and was named the 2018 Activist-in-Residence Fellow at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

Parag Rajendra Khandhar (Asian American Solidarity Economies Project) Parag is a founding principal of Gilmore Khandhar, LLC, a law firm focused on legal, policy, and advocacy tools to advance economic justice, racial equity, and social transformation. He teaches at George Washington University Law School. Parag co-founded Baltimore Activating Solidarity Economies (BASE) and the Asian American Solidarity Economies Network (AASE).

Asian American Solidarity Economies Webinar Series is a project of Solidarity Research Center in partnership with UCLA Asian American Studies Center and National CAPACD.

9am to 5pm (both days)
Ashukan Cultural Centre

Once upon a time, a passionate person named Lou wanted to do what they could to make a difference in the world. So, Lou, ready to get to work, joined an organization with awesome values. Lou was told that if they wanted to help people and communities make change happen, they first needed to develop strategies, action plans and targets. And, so they did.  Along the way, Lou noticed that every time they finished a project, the targets had changed and so had the world… just enough for the strategy not to be relevant anymore. And, so they had to start the planning process all over again. Slowly, Lou’s passion fizzled and the value-driven organization became more and more busy planning and less and less available to do work that mattered. The real change they wanted to make seemed further and further away…  

Does this story sound familiar?

We are inviting you to live a different story: a story where you question what we’ve been told about how change needs to happen. A story that reminds us that we don’t really have the answers and to let go of certainties about where we are trying to get to and how to get there. A story that focuses instead on experimentation, testing small ideas, learning from failure and rapidly picking up on good ideas to do good work. We are inviting you to explore your work from a perspective that recognizes complexity.

Register for Working in Complexity: How do we take action when everything is uncertain?

In this two-day workshop we will be exploring:

• When everything is uncertain, how do we know what to do?
• How do we create strategies that are adaptive, responsive and take us in the direction of what works?
• How do we create a culture in which it is ok to not know “the answer” or even how to move forward?
• How can we shift from highlighting only our successes to valuing learning from our failures?
• How can we develop listening and sensemaking practices that will help us act with more wisdom?

Over the two days we are offering:

• A foundational understanding of what we mean when talking about working in a complex system and how to make change happen—within our organizations, in our communities and in our activism.
• Tools and tactics to help lead and take action differently
• An opportunity to dig into our resilience, adaptiveness and confidence in responding to ongoing uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Connection and community with social change peers that can sustain us after we each return to do the hard work in our communities

Facilitators:

Chris Corrigan is a principal partner of British Columbia-based Harvest Moon Consultants, Ltd., a specialized consultancy working with organizations and communities to bring high quality facilitation, strategic thinking and participatory processes to complex challenges.  Since 1996, he has worked primarily with governments, not-for-profits, Indigenous communities and social enterprises. Chris’s expertise is in the use of large-scale facilitation methods to create participatory processes for complex strategic work. He has worked extensively in community, public and employee engagement and creates dialogue-based tools and processes informed by complexity theory to help leaders and teams make decisions in uncertain contexts.

Bronagh Gallagher brings over 15 years experience of working with communities and in the voluntary sector in Glasgow, Scotland. She is an experienced facilitator with a particular interest in how we use good process to work on issues of social justice, equity, and structural, systemic change. Bitten by the complexity bug several years ago, Bronagh has been in an ongoing inquiry as to what this emerging, but radical, new field can tell us about how social change happens and how we can put it into practice.

2pm to 3pm Central Time

The concept of food sovereignty and its connections with diverse rural and Indigenous communities have, until very recently, been underappreciated and unrecognized in government policy. This webinar reviews the concept of food sovereignty and its history, central tenets and contentions. Challenges with institutionalizing food sovereignty are considered, including the challenges in and contributions by diverse rural and Indigenous communities. 

Register for Understanding Food Sovereignty and Policy Through a Community Lens

The current development of A Food Policy for Canada and the case of Nishnawbe Aski Nations are presented as opportunities to apply rural and Indigenous lenses to questions about how principles of food sovereignty might be recognized and supported by public policy. Policy recommendations that reflect food sovereignty principles and rural and Indigenous priorities are suggested with a focus on the need for democratic engagement, attention to place and power, and value driven actions for food providers, people and nature. Finally, action-oriented, community-driven future research related to the articulation, operationalization and measurement of food sovereignty is proposed.