A community at work

Over the past few weeks I have been working hard in Victoria facilitating the Aboriginal engagement strategy for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement.The work unfolded in two stages, with the first stage being three focus groups on economic, physical and social issues. We used the ICA Focused Conversations methodology to deepen and inquire into the participants experience of their community. Objective data was recorded as mind maps which we then overlay with data harvested from the reflective, interpretive and decisional parts of the conversations.

Following the focus groups, we conducted a large 1.5 day community meeting to gather issues and challenges from the community itself. The first day was an Open Space meeting which brought 60 people together including a number of homeless and virtually homeless folks. This was followed on day two with a World Cafe which we called an “Action Cafe” aimed at discovering strategies for keeping this process alive within the larger development agreement process. We knew we had the right people in the room when at lunch an announcement was made that “a shopping cart was illegally parked!”

Following the conclusion of the cafe, we had fiddling and dancing from some Metis performers and Coast Salish and Kwagiulth drum songs from Victoria’s Unity Drummers.

It has been a rich experience working on this project. For more information, see what one of the community groups, the Inner City Aboriginal Society, wrote about our work. And for more photos, visit the Flickr page for “A Community at Work.”