All of you looking for an intensive Art of Hosting experience, we are now accepting registration for the June 6-9 event in Edmonton, Alberta. Please join Teresa Posakony, Tennson Woolf, Corrinna Chetley-Irwin, Mary Johnson, Chantal Normand, and I for four days of learning, connecting and practice around hosting nad harvesting conversations that matter for wise action.
There is an omlet in this weeks batch of feed food:
- Christopher Niemann repurposes Google Map aethetics to make cleaver pictures.
- Jordon Cooper points to a beautiful tilt-pan movie of my favourite city: New York.
- Laura McGrath’s blog. A new friend and colleague.
Forwarded to me by my colleague Ray Gordezky, with whom I am part of a team looking convening people around polar bears in Northern Labrador and Quebec.
The Moon Speaks of Polar Bears
Hailey Leithauser
Some things are better defined
by what they are not,
as when snow heaping the world
replaces the world, becoming
no longer a rooftop, no longer a narrow
gravel shoreline or road,
even in times, in places,
no longer the black breathing
of the sea.
In this way the polar bear
stealing her difficult, beautiful life
from the ridges
and drifts, the colorless
plateau around her,
teaches her young to hunt
by sliding her belly
flat along the frozen light,
blunting her cloudlike
respiration, covering
with one comic paw
the dark flesh of her nose,
so well suited to her artifice
that the oily
seals collecting the ice
are pulled by an intimate
landscape, soundless
and ravenous and white.
Hosting an Open Space gathering in Kamloops today with about 40 people who work hard around issues of child and youth health. We are exploring ways to connect differently and do our work at the next level. The conversations have started and the topics are rich. I thought I would put the list here and see if any of you readers in blog land have resources to offer that we can forward to the folks meeting here today. And if you are in Kamloops and do this work, come on up to Thompson Rivers University and join the conversation.
Session 1
11:00 – 12:15
- How to develop intergenerational programming (ie seniors and youth)
- How do we engage children who come from families dealing with addictions?
- How can we drastically improve reading instruction in your child’s school? These top 5 items from research can be supported in a half-hour daily routine in the classroom.
- How do we start the process to develop a children’s charter in Kamloops?
- What opportunities are out there to use youth wilderness programs to engage youth in meaningful community development?
- How do we better connect youth/schools to the local food system? For example: engaging shcools to start gardnes or increasing local food sold in schools?
- How to create a culture to encourage families at perinatal stage to have access to services and supports which are integrated with traditional service providers?
Session 2
12:15-1:45
- Wow! Statistics!
- I would like to better understand our needs and gaps so that I can better support the community.
- How do we develop and sustain our networks? What are the possibilities of our networks?
- How to create service for parents with disabilities?
- How can we reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases in sexually active youth?
Session 3
1:45-3:00
- How to develop fitness/physical literacy program for 2.5 to 5 year olds?
- How to keep children and youth engagement authentic, original and fresh so they have the agenda and don’t get bored?
- How do we better connect school and community centres and programs for collaborative work?
- How do we reduce stigma attached to social programs to include more children youth and family?
- Teachers and youth workers as gardners, hiking guides and community development professionals.
- How do we collectively support and empower parents in our communities to recognize that they have such a crucial role?
My friend Dustin Rivers is an inspiration. He’s an autodidact, an artist, a catalyst in his community. I’ve known him for about six years, since he was a young teenager. He has always had a remarkable presence and a strong voice and a deep commitment to the thriving resiliance of Skwxwu7mesh culture and language. Over the years he has been developing a number of his skills, including hosting skills so that he could lead community development efforts.
He recently hooked up with Evan and Willem from Where Are Your Keys? a language fluency game that builds skills using sign language and simple phrases. It’s a powerful learning game, and Dustin saw immediate applications for the Skwxwu7mesh language and he decided to host Evan and Willem and begin the process of waking up the native and ancient language of the territory in which I live.
Here are some links to posts and videos of Dustin at work with friends and family in his community:
- The Skwxwu7mesh Language Project kicks off.
- The game being played.
- Evan and Willem debriefing and thinking about their experiences with Dustin and the community, episode one and two.
- Dustin’s poster inviting folks to the weekly session.