2020 Reflections – October Alumni Gathering

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The Alumni gathering and social impact summit was designed by a small group of graduates and participants and we are grateful to them for their thoughtful ideas and contributions that made the event a success: Rebecca Ataya, Sheila Best, Maria Cargnelli, Connie Epp, Dayna Long, Lynne Mansell, Maureen Mackell, Wedlidi Speck and Annemarie Travers. The event brought together 80 people, drawn from every one of the eight cohorts we have hosted. We also welcomed three guests who served as ‘witnesses’ to the process and learning. Thanks to Stacie Prescott from Options Community Services (and one of the original 2020 advisors), Trilby Smith from Vancouver Foundation’s Fostering Change initiative and Al Etmanski, social innovator.

Unfortunately our live stream coverage to 25 additional registrants did not work due to problems with the company we retained to provide this service. We are so sorry that this did not work and are now trying to salvage recordings from Al Etmanski’ s presentation to at least share this teaching. Apologies to those who tried to make sense of the live stream!

We had three intentions for the gathering: connection, learning and action:

  • Connect people across cohorts into a broader 2020 community.
  • Provide people with some tangible learnings, skills, practices that will enhance or affirm their leadership toolkit, and with a vision/inspiration and strategies for broader systems change.
  • Engage people in collective work for social impact and build the movement.

To support this, we convened an array of world café discussions, knowledge ‘camps’ and action tables. Over the next week we will complete the proceedings and share this broadly with the broader 2020 community. A number of people wanted to continue connecting to explore ways to work together and differently to bring about positive social impacts in areas that are important to them. The intention here is to work within our spheres of influence and try out small probes that will help us identify ways to – for example – embed trauma informed practice in our work, re-imagine foster care, extend 2020 opportunities to youth leaders, etc. We hope to support the leadership movement by living into the 6 patterns that Al Etmanski referenced in his talk at the gathering and that are detailed in his book Impact (see communiqué 7 for a summary). More next week!