[All] Strategizing Towards a Resilient Community

Mon Mar 21 10:24:59 EDT 2011

Hello GREN!

Although I know some of you, I have not attended any of your meetings so I'm
sure there are many of you I haven't met. In any case, Susan Koswan
suggested last week that I join your email list though last week, so I
thought I'd take advantage of this to let you know about an event series
I've been helping organize.

The event series is called the "Mayor's Forum Series on Building Resilient
Communities" and it is being organized by TransitionKW in partnership with
Mayor Brenda Halloran of the City of Waterloo, LSPIRG, WPIRG, and the Social
Planning Council of Kitchener-Waterloo. It is planned to occur this spring
on three Saturdays, falling on April 2, May 7, June 18. 

To provide some background, TransitionKW is part of a larger worldwide
"Transition Town" movement (http://transitionnetwork.org
<http://transitionnetwork.org/> ) that started in the United Kingdom and is
gaining traction in North America. In keeping with the mandate of these
initiatives, we are focused on enhancing our local ability to be flexible,
resilient, and responsive to changes in a manner that optimizes our capacity
to thrive over the long-term. As the title of the series suggests, our goal
with these events is to foster community resiliency. By resiliency, we mean
the ability to adopt to changes, challenges, and stresses, whether they be
environmental, social, and/or economic.

We understand that there is the potential that people may feel inundated
with event requests and wonder why this event would be worth their while in
attending. While there is no 'silver bullet' towards addressing many of the
community challenges we now face, this event series aims to help steer us on
the right track by encouraging a more 'holistic' approach for achieving
local resiliency. Through bringing people together from diverse backgrounds
(i.e. from not-for-profits, neighbourhood organizations, businesses,
government staff, councilors, and students) and interests (i.e.
transportation, food, energy, water, poverty, housing, and health and
safety), we hope that we can pool our talents and resources around this goal
and as a result be more effective in our efforts. More importantly perhaps,
achieving the goal of resiliency requires a shared vision of what kind of a
community we'd like to achieve, and therefore significant community
interaction, if we are to be truly successful.

Further details on the event series are provided below. Feel free to email
me/have others do so with any questions. I should mention that as much as
possible, we're trying to get the word out quickly. The first event of the
series as I mentioned is Saturday, April 2nd, which is just short of two
weeks away! (If people could sign up by Tuesday, March 29th, that would be
best, for logistical purposes).

Take care,

Alisa McClurg

Chair (Waterloo Mayor's Event Committee)
TransitionKW

http://www.transitionkw.ca/mayorsforumseries.html

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

Mayor's Forum Series on Building Resilient Communities - Strategizing
Towards Resilient Community

Is this email not displaying correctly?
View it in your browser
<http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=6bbe8ca003478b24d4baa153a&id=0d4e98274c
&e=> . 

<http://gallery.mailchimp.com/653153ae841fd11de66ad181a/images/transparent.g
if> 	

You're invited to the Waterloo

Mayor's Forum Series on Building Resilient Communities

Saturdays April 2, May 7 , June 18
9:30 am – 4:30 pm (registration 9:00 am)
Lunch included
Waterloo locations

Register  <> here!	

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 TransitionTown 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  <http://mayorsforumseries-april2.eventbrite.com> Event: Saturday,
April 2, 2011
Second  <http://mayorsforumseries-may7.eventbrite.com> Event: Saturday, May
7, 2011
Third  <http://mayorsforumseries-june18.eventbrite.com> Event: Saturday,
June 18, 2011

Also:

*	Go to  <http://www.resilientwaterloo.ca/> www.resilientwaterloo.ca,
hosted by The Upstart Collaboratory for Collaborative Culture Designing, to
find out more about the Mayor’s Forum Series, to follow the development of
the Mayor’s Forum Series on Building Resilient Communities over the next
months, and to engage in online thinking together about a resilient
Waterloo. 

*	 <http://eepurl.com/cYX9A> Sign up for the Resilient Waterloo
newsletter to follow the process as it unfolds in the next three months and
beyond. 

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 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
<http://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 at transitionkw.ca
<mailto:resilientcommunities at transitionkw.ca?subject=Conversation> . 

Other Partners

Laurier Students Public  <http://www.lspirg.ca> Interest Research Group
(LSPIRG)
Waterloo Public Interest  <http://www.wpirg.org> Research Group (WPIRG)
Social  <http://www.waterlooregion.org/spc/kw/> Planning Council of
Kitchener-Waterloo
Upstart  <http://www.upstartcollaboratory.org> Collaboratory for
Collaborative Culture Designing

Register Now and Spread the Word!

We encourage you to sign up <>  right away, especially for the first day,
Saturday April 2. Please also forward this invitation through your networks,
and personally contact people you think would want to be part of, or know
about, these events.

Sincerely,

Alisa McClurg
Chair (Waterloo Mayor's Event Committee)
TransitionKW
resilientcommunities at transitionkw.ca

 follow  <http://www.twitter.com/ResilientWtrloo/> on Twitter |
<http://eepurl.com/cYX9A> Sign up for the Resilient Waterloo newsletter |
forward
<http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=6bbe8ca003478b24d4baa153a&id=0d4
e98274c&e=> to a friend  

You're receiving this email because you've expressed interest in the
Waterloo community and are potentially interested in the Mayor's Forum
Series on Building Resilient Communities.

<http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?aid=6bbe8ca003478b24d4baa153a&afl=
1> Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp 

 view
<http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=6bbe8ca003478b24d4baa153a&id=0d4e98274c
&e=> email in browser   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gren.ca/pipermail/all_gren.ca/attachments/20110321/26e3b8f1/attachment.html>