Blogs
Oct 26th, 2007 - 18:36:33 | Kyle Simunovic
feedmy life is borning....haha, really its not. just pathetic tonight because its friday and Im sitting here finishing my newletter for the kool krew in ontario!! whoot! shout out to ontario....
yes, it is 6:36 PM on Friday night and Kyle is sitting at his desk in his house writing his newsletter...thats dedication! ;)
Oct 25th, 2007 - 14:05:07 | Aurora Herrera
Suspended between the urge to kick myself for not bringing my recorder into the room to capture, what I thought were words of golden progress, and the rapture which held me in the room - it was the words of Bill Sparks that broke my trance.
However, because I did not have my recorder I shall paraphrase:
"This conference is about youth and how they want to design their future and implement the things they want."
That statement gave me an intense feeling of happiness.
The Global Citizens Forum, organized by the OCIC - Ontario Council for International Cooperation -
kicked off today with the International Participants Welcome at Oxfam Canada.
Participants from Haiti, Jamaica, Uganda, El Salvador and India were present. I felt such tremendous respect for those participants because they came all the way here to engage in an exchange of knowledge, confident that they had as much to offer as they would take.
About 30-40 people attended the welcome.
The food was great and we were all just about to network after all of the introductions when we were told to leave the building!
Coming out of the room, smoke hung in the air. We were directed to take our bags and exit down the stairs. One of the last things I heard before I left was someone exclaiming,
"Hot, sexy networking!"
I smiled and thought "You bet our ideas can start a fire!"
Well, the firemen eventually came - after about 10 minutes. During this time, I networked with Sol - who is one of the creators of 4Real - a production picked up by MTV and CTV about amazing youth who are making a difference under difficult circumstances. I spoke to him about the tools on the TIG site and what CLC Canada does and he seemed really interested - YAY.
I felt good that even though there may have been a fire going on and destroying material things inside the building, we were creating something that could never be destroyed - an idea and a connection that could make a difference.
The forum continues tonight! So more to come including pictures and podcasts.
Please see the documents section for a list of the international participants.
Oct 24th, 2007 - 09:38:58 | Jessie-Lee Langille
Hi all!
So overall my first month here in Edmonton has been a great learning experience. Beyond attending the two conferences that I commented on earlier, I have been making initial contact with organizations and planning for an upcoming events. Being close to the University of Alberta is proving to be a great advantage as I have the opportunity of coordinating with some great events that are already being planned. Next week I'm delivering a workshop on "Identity, Culture and Community" for the annual High School Leadership conference hosted by the student's union at the UofA. If any of you have any experience in this area, I'll be emailing the team soon (if it hasn't gone out already) to ask for some help! Few other things planned for November including a trip to Calgary for the Centre for Affordable Sanitation Technology Youth Summit and hopefully a few other coordinated events with Jonathon (West Coast Online connector!), and a Climate Change Workshop with Green Peace Alberta and hopefully an HIV/AIDS Guide to Action workshop here at the UofA. I'm really looking forward to having some online support as I'm having the personal challenge of managing both at the moment!
As a suggestion to the CLC team and a follow up from our orientation, I'm wondering if anyone might be interested in scheduling a online chat session to discuss ideas with each other. I would love to have more 'live' contact with team members! Bob, I agree networking is definitely a huge part of beginning this work. I've found that actually going out to events have worked best at establishing a good initial connection. That and using the contacts I have established to ask for recommendations. Otherwise, I've been relying on initial email contact and setting up meetings with key organizations. I'm hoping that setting up a networking meeting in the next few weeks will also help improve communications amongst organizations.
Look forward to speaking with you all soon!
Jessie-Lee
Oct 23rd, 2007 - 23:05:56 | Bob
Hey Gang
My first month has been busy and exciting. I have been spending a lot of time getting myself familiarized with the TIG site, researching on the different organisations in Vancouver, and other basic stuff to get myself in the CLC headspace.
Already I've made contact with two interesting organizations, and have looked into ways that we can collaborate.
On Oct 5 Kimia and I met with a representative from Project Stitch, an organization that puts together a yearly "Digital Quilt" in order to raise awareness about HIV/AIDs. They are having their yearly big event on Dec 1, and we talked about the different ways that we could collaborate. Likely we will use the regional newsletter to advertise their event, held this year at the Cafe Deux Soleil in Vancouver. I also told them I would send the word out through my networks and see if I could help them find a band or performer.
That same day Kimia and I met with Shannon Ross from the Vancouver Community Network (VCN), and organization that manages free public computer sites in order to service demographics that usually do not have access to internet, and to provide them with tech support and training in basic computer literacy. Shannon invited us to come back the following week and give a brief and causal open forum discussion on global problems and local solutions as well as a presentation on TIG and CLC. The presentation and forum were to be given to her interns who manage the VCN compute sites, with the hope that we could use the interns and the sites as resources for future workshops.
The forum was a bit disjointed, and I went on too long (out of nervousness) during the TIG presentation, but other than that the day went fairly well. Well enough that Shannon confirmed that we would have another workshop on Nov 16 in order to collaborate with interns on how we might be able to do work through their respective sites this coming year. I am still in the process of organizing all of that with Shannon, but I am excited about the coming few weeks to see how it all pans out.
This Thursday I have a meeting for the first working session of the 2007-2008 YouthPolitik working group. YouthPolitik is a program initiated by the City of Vancouver whose goal is to engage youth in municipal government and train them to design projects to initiate meaningful change in their community. The project this year runs from February until July, and Taking It Global is registered as a community partner. I am still unsure about exactly how I will be helping with YouthPolitik (though Kimia gave me some ideas) but I look forward to this Thursday when I may be better able to understand my role in the program.
There is still much more that I have to do this month, like tlak about last year's CLC with the old BC coordinator, and make contact with Check Your Head BC about having a Climate Change Guide To Action workshop in late Nov/early Dec. However, i am confident I can get everything done so long as can find some way to forgoe sleep.
So that's a bit of what I've been up to. More important than that, I would like to ask some of the team what methods they've been using for networking and making contact with new people and organizations. I ask because I find this to be the most foreboding aspect of the job, and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts and opinions.
what are approaches for networking that work for you?
Have fun CLC team!
Bob
Oct 23rd, 2007 - 14:11:32 | Chelsea
Opinion Piece- OCIC meeting
By: Chelsea Lam
The Ontario Council for International Cooperation (OCIC) meeting on October 15th was a learning experience, considering it was one of the first professional meetings I’ve attended. When I entered the room for the OCIC meeting I quickly realized that it was not going to be a huge meeting, considering the size of the room they had provided.
I learned a lot within the first 10 minutes since everyone in the room introduced themselves briefly. I quickly learned about a couple organizations that I had never heard of before, such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
The meeting quickly turned towards the topic about International Development Week (IDW). Kim and Chris who organized the meeting gave us a brief overview on how the project went last year. I found out that the project had focused too much on Toronto citizens and gave no focus to other cities and regions across Canada. I also found out that some of the events last year were poorly organized. For example, they started a book club, but never followed through; the organizers never thought about how they would keep track of the people who participated in this book club.
One of the questions which CIDA had raised was that they wanted IDW to have a broader reach this year. This was a reasonable request, but Kim and Chris mentioned right afterwards that they wanted members to have as little labor as possible. This meant participants would be doing the majority of the work. Everyone in the meeting had plenty of ideas. However I thought it was unrealistic if participants did the majority of the work, because the amount of money they were given which ranged only between $18.000-25.000 (this did not include pay for staff and other materials for projects).
This year’s theme for IDW is education, but one question we raised was what does education mean to Ontario citizens? In the beginning this project aimed itself at no particular audience or age group. At the end of the meeting we thought that if it was targeted towards youth it would draw in more numbers, and also have a larger impact towards the project. Also for this project we wanted youth to have access to any information. For example, one goal was to bring communities together and decrease isolation. I thought the project towards youth was a great idea, but it did not really benefit the CLC program because we have already built our online and off-line programs on TIG’s modern web-site. Since IDW seemed to only focus on Ontario, I did not think it would expand CLC’s program. Our mandate has a national focus.
I think this meeting was a learning experience for me. Since their proposal was due in a week, the meeting was very compact with information and confusing. We spent the whole meeting brainstorming with people who had wonderful ideas, but the project was very limited because of financial limitations, and the ideas did not seem realistic. I think if OCIC needs a network for this project in the future, TIG could definitely help with capacity building.
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