Organizers of a community development conference are hoping to tap into the groundswell of work compiled over the past few years to build a better future for Powell River.
“I think Groundswell will help advance that more rapidly because it is bringing people together,” said organizer Alison Taplay. “It’s a very unusual collaboration of really quite diverse groups and people in the social, business and environment communities.”
Taplay said that a key idea the conference is built on is a sustainability model where economic, social and environmental well-being are all treated and considered equally in making a better future.
She also sees the conference as a catalyst for engaging a broad group of people. “If you stick to the principles of working more collaboratively and keep expanding the people who are involved, instead of just the people you think can help, all these amazing things happen,” she said.
She hopes the conference will bring more business people to the table. “This is not a social services or a school district project,” she said. It is about balancing the economic outcomes with the social and environmental ones as communities move forward, she added. “Instead of debating one over the other, you should be trying to balance all three. That’s when we do our best work for our community’s future.”
Claudia Medina, the filmmaker who wrote Defining Diversity, Creating Community, will be at the conference filming with the goal of producing a 10-minute documentary of the day.
Tla’amin (Sliammon) First Nation elders Eugene Louie and Dr. Elsie Paul will help open the conference. Guest speaker will be Vancouver-based author and social entrepreneur Al Etmanski. He is president and co-founder of Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network (PLAN), which assists families across Canada and globally address the financial and social well-being of their relatives with disabilities, particularly after their parents die. He proposed and led the successful campaign to establish the world’s first savings plan for people with disabilities, the Registered Disability Savings Plan.
The conference will include two moderated panels, a world café and breakout workshops.
One of the moderated panels, Emerging Heroes, is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things and will focus on what pushed people to take actions and where their vision came from. Framing Our Future is a youth-focused panel discussion on what young people are talking about for the future of the city.
The conference will then turn into world café discussion groups to allow participants to talk about the ideas they have been hearing throughout the day and make new connections. At the end of the session, appointed listeners from each discussion will present a synopsis to the whole group.
Lunch will be provided and participants will be able to view displays from local businesses about their community initiatives.
After lunch the conference will split up into breakout groups which participants choose when registering. Workshops include: Engaging through Art, Photo Voices, Nature-Based Learning, Business Best Practices and First Nations Experience and Timelines.
The Groundswell conference runs from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm Wednesday, January 29 at Vancouver Island University’s Powell River campus.
Since registrations for the free conference opened already 25 per cent of the tickets have been requested. Readers can register online for the conference or call 604.485.2878.
