Glenn's blog

I've just finished up the courses for the SFU Certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement and am now beginning my practicum – the final piece of the certificate. I've written a bit about this program before, but this seems like a good time to recap as I am planning where to go from here.

What I learned:

Course #1 (Amy Lang): What is dialogue? A language and frameworks that enabled us to talk about and evaluate dialogue and planning processes.

Course #2 (Vince Verlaan): How do you plan an engagement process that is representative? The importance of powerful questions, framing, and invitations. Commitment to dialogue and engagement and the importance of advocating for participatory processes in many areas. Don't be afraid to kick the door open, but also be aware of the softer and nurturing side.

Course #3 (Charles Dobson): We need to be effective and build grassroots capacity for action. It is difficult to sustain activism and community engagement, and we need to pay attention to sustaining them beyond crisis situations.

Course #4 (Peter Boothroyd): Planning participatory processes. Plant little participatory practices that can grow and influence other processes. By working together we can collectively achieve more than we can working individually.

Open Space and World Cafe Workshop (Chris Corrigan): Incredibly useful and two great tools that I will use as I plan future events. Circles are powerful, and as we talk ideas come out that none of us thought of on our own. The group is greater than the sum of its parts.

What happens now?

I am beginning work on my practicum project, which will likely be a participatory process that will plan and hold a series of engagement events in the Vancouver area animal rights community. These events will be collaboratively planned, and may have as their objective the articulation of the community goals and objectives for animal rights. I'm still early in the process of talking to people and mapping out the possible perspectives. We may work towards possible scenarios of animal rights, or perhaps a map of goals and a visualization of where our goals overlap. All of this with the purpose of making us more effective as a community and a movement. If you are interested or have any ideas about this, please get in touch.

This project isn't about pushing my perspective or my goals on to the community, but rather about creating a stronger and more effective community through a participatory process. I guess I am somewhat pushing my perspectives about the value of collaboration and strong community, but I am not pushing for any particular perspective about the goals of animal rights or how we can get there.

There may be increased energy coming out of Animal Advocacy Camp, which I am hoping to build on and carry forward into these next events, at the same time as we can work to embed collaboration and shared vision into our work.

Let's build a new world together!