ChangeCampTO: Designing a Civic Engagement Toolkit

I would like to invite community-based organizers in southern Ontario to join us at an event in Toronto coming up on February 16th.

ChangeCampTO: Designing a Civic Engagement Toolkit
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 from 5:30 PM – 9:00 PM
Toronto Reference Library, Appel Salon
http://changecampto2010.eventbrite.com/

In a fun-but-focused 3 hours, registered attendees will contribute to the creation of a toolkit for a self-organizing, people-driven, nonpartisan movement for positive change in Toronto and beyond.

We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations across the City of Toronto and beyond through community-based leadership.

We are tentatively calling this open toolkit “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box”. This idea was born in a ChangeLab session at last year’s ChangeCamp, and this year we plan to make it real.

If you are new to ChangeCamp and want to learn about its history please visit ChangeCamp.ca.

As one of the organizers of ChangeCamp, I look at the prorogation of Parliament as a symptom of a deeper problem of cultural and systemic apathy in our society. In its wake, I declared war on Canadian complacency.

I have also seen in the CAPP movement that responded, the potential power of people self-organizing in their communities thanks to the web. We aren’t complacent. We care. But we can do more.

In my view, these issues are nonpartisan. Prorogation wasn’t just about the Conservatives and the issues of the day, it’s about a deeper problem of the cynical abuse of power that is made possible by a complacency that is deeply cultural.

The question that all of us at some point have to ask ourselves is: What have I done to contribute to the very thing I complain about or want to change?

So, we turn our attention away from our leaders and Parliament Hill towards ourselves and our communities. We look to develop in ourselves and each other a new kind of nonpartisan leadership, one with a genuine capacity to engage one another in conversations that matter, to create new possibilities.

If ChangeCamp has patron saints, they are Peter Block and Clay Shirky. We want to enable a self-organizing movement of people who work to create spaces for their fellow citizens to have conversations that matter, both face-to-face and online, enabled by new forms of communication.

I invite you to join us.

ChangeCamp.ca
ChangeCamp on Facebook
ChangeCamp on Twitter