The purpose of this circle is to explore why apathy toward climate change persists and how it affects the capacity of communities and individuals to cultivate resilience.

This dialogue invites participants to reflect on personal and collective responses to climate disruption, share experiences of disengagement or inaction, and consider how motivation, awareness, and social structures influence adaptive behavior. It seeks to identify strategies that overcome apathy, strengthen engagement, and support adaptive capacity while respecting traditional and place-based knowledge.

Dialogue Lead: Rob Southcott and Jack Anderson

The purpose of this circle is to explore how meaningful our community is for our wellbeing. And how our well-being is meaningful for our community.

Mental Health begins with self-care. Too often, helping others or being caught up in a project, we might neglect our own needs. We might find ourselves too rigid or too loose, out of balance and more vulnerable, less effective.

The road to burnout begins with fatigue, poor sleep, minor aches and pains, headaches, gut issues and lack of energy. This can manifest in a loss of enthusiasm, flagging interest, a sense of disconnection and/or overwhelm, anxiety and reluctance to engage.

You may find yourself forgetting things, skipping meals and/or binging on unhealthy snacks, eating on the run. You will likely feel rundown and quite possibly lonely.

All this leads right into cognitive dissonance, feelings of resentment, inadequacy, numbness, hopelessness, depression and despair. Apathy and avoidance is what we find at the end of this road.

What We Can Do To

·       stay engaged and energized

·       regain balance, healthy boundaries

·       enough rest, fun, time outside, good food

·       more joy, pleasure, laughter, connection

·       music, moving, shaking

Dialogue Lead: Magdelanye Azrael

At some point, you might have heard the phrase: “race is a social construct.” After hundreds of years of colonialism, slavery, and land theft, the Canadians of yesterday have saddled us with definitions of race. We tend to understand them through experience, rather than scholarship. In your facilitators’ eyes, this has resulted in very alienating everyday circumstances. In each circumstance, each of us have our own unique and individual ways of articulating, defining, and processing our racial experience. In this circle, we aim to create a collaborative space. In this space, we are all encouraged to add to one another’s tapestry of understanding regarding the all-too-real impacts of racial hierarchy, social control, and genocide.

Dialogue Leads: Ace Harry and Amira Abouelalla

Do you ever wonder what the job of a councillor involves? 

Think you might have what it takes to serve our city in this leadership role?

We're launching a data finding mission to uncover the key information you need to make your decision. Join urban planner Lisa Moffatt, President of qathet Community Voices and a 20-year local government policy professional, for a session designed to gather your most pressing questions.

• What are your biggest fears? (e.g., time commitment, public scrutiny, not knowing how council meetings operate)

• What vital details are missing? (e.g., campaign financing rules, council pay, what is within local governments jurisdiction)

• What is the job actually like? (e.g., day-to-day work, work-life balance, relationships with other levels of government)

Help us design future sessions that deliver the exact information you need to move from "curious" to "candidate."

Note: although Lisa is an experienced planning professional, she has not held public office at the local government level and will do her best to answer questions, though this is more about collecting information so questions can be answered at a later time.

Participants will receive a preliminary information package with some basic information about election timelines (e.g., nomination and fundraising periods), local government jurisdiction and provincial acts that govern municipalities, and council procedures bylaw.

 Dialogue Lead: Lisa Moffatt

Join us for a hands-on effort to protect our local ecosystems by removing invasive English Ivy. Invasive plants outcompete native vegetation, disrupt wildlife habitat, and reduce the overall health and resilience of our forest. By working together, we can help restore the balance and biodiversity of the place we all love and depend on. 

The pull is open to all ages and experience levels. We’ll provide guidance on identifying and safely removing English Ivy, along with tools, gloves and other supplies. Bring gardening gloves and garden clippers if you have them. Proper footwear and raingear are recommended to ensure everyone stays comfortable and safe while working outdoors. 

Being in the forest and giving back connects us to this place and each other.

And you might find that pulling ivy is surprisingly satisfying!!

Lead: Kate Sutherland and other members of the Valentine Mountain Ivy Pull Group

A conversation around the histories passed down through settler (non-Indigenous) families that connect themselves to their new homelands. History proves that humans have a tendency to repeat patterns of colonial violence, even if their ancestors have faced similar circumstances. We want to explore some connected questions such as: What ways are we still knowingly/ unknowingly engaging in these oppressive systems? How do settlers reconcile a feeling of being “from” a place with the heritage of their immigrant ancestors? How do these stories interact with the histories of Indigenous displacement in those same places?

Dialogue Leads: Shyanne Ashton-Hopkins and Cailin O’Hern

Movies influence our thinking, manipulate our emotions, and can even function as outright propaganda. For example, a film may use cinematic techniques to encourage the viewer's identification with its protagonist. A film's soundtrack can implicitly instruct the audience how they should feel about the events unfolding in the story. And certain films, like Casablanca (1942), are explicitly made to encourage public support for a cause: e.g., to encourage American citizens’ support for their nation to join the Allied cause during WWII.

Should we be more informed about how movies influence our worldviews? How can we develop the skills to enjoy movies with active, critical minds rather than as passive recipients of their messaging? This dialogue circle offers participants an opportunity to reflect on how movies influence our understanding of the world around us.

Dialogue Lead: Emma-Morgan Thorp

In this conversation we will explore the resistance and resilience of Palestinians and First Nations peoples in the face of an ongoing genocide and in the struggle for freedom and autonomy.  An impactful resource that these two groups share has been the use of self-representation in the media to challenge the prevailing mainstream narrative.  

When self-representation is present, communities can take agency to document experiences, share knowledge,  advocate for, and connect with other communities free from the biases inherent in the Western/Colonialist paradigm.

Legacy and Social media platforms rely on cognitive flooding designed to overwhelm, mislead, disconnect and distract us.  What are the avenues available to enable us to step away from our "addiction" to the western oriented point of view presented by dominant political structures and media? 

Dialogue Lead: Linda Shaben