Contract Available: Dialogue for a Change Course Facilitator
This fall/winter Sustainable Calgary will offer a course to help Calgarians adopt lifestyle changes aligned to requirements of a sustainable world. We seek a facilitator to foster discussions and encourage participants to turn grief & disempowerment into personal agency and change.
Facilitator skillset includes the following:
Exhibiting relational literacy
Nurturing conversations
Fostering trust, vulnerability
Adhering to time constraints
Attending to grounding exercises and session evaluations
Fostering persistence among participants
It would be an asset if interested parties can demonstrate content specialization and be an active participant in pilot evaluation and debriefs. The workshop comprises four, two-hour evening sessions over four consecutive weeks, to run twice in the fall 2024 and once in the winter 2025. The curriculum, session themes, program outline, content and readings, and desired outcomes are already developed and open to adaptation by the facilitator in consultation with Sustainable Calgary.
Level of Compensation for the role depends on experience.
To apply, please send expression of interest and CV to info@sustainablecalgary.org
Inquiries can be directed to Noel Keough at nkeough@ucalgary.ca
Dialogue for a Change: Supporting Calgarians on the journey to personal change for a more sustainable world
The Dialogue for a Change strategy will be to facilitate engagement at a personal level, both as an end in itself and as an invitation to support Sustainable Calgary’s efforts at systemic change.
Two Drivers for This Strategy
1. At a global level, most measures of biodiversity, climate change, equality, and democracy have worsened over the past 25 years. Sustainable Calgary’s State of Our City reports paint the same picture for Calgary, with deterioration in most indicators outweighing real gains in some domains.
2. We see a need in our city to support individuals, families, communities, and organizations who have a desire to adopt more sustainable ways of living but feel isolated, unsupported, or lacking the tools to achieve the desired change. Most surveys show that the majority of Canadians and Albertans favour action on climate change and inequality. But in a culture where economic growth, consumption, and growing precarity of our livelihoods dominate, it is hard for individuals to go against the grain or even to find information and tools to help them on that journey.
Each Dialogue for a Change series (repeated every two months) will consist of four weekly facilitated sessions (2 hrs per session) designed for those wishing to engage in change at a personal level. The series will allow space to discuss the grief and anxiety associated with our unsustainable world, confront the disempowerment associated with grief and anxiety, share experiences related to lifestyle changes that move us toward a more sustainable world, explore tools for change making, and make the links to systems change. Topics will include travel, housing, food, global citizenship, and consumption.
Session 1: How Are You Feeling? Beyond Ecological Anxiety and Grief
Session 2: One Earth Living: The Housing – Transportation – Food – Energy Nexus
Session 3: Living in the Blue Zone: The Health – Happiness – Relationship Nexus
Session 4: Sustainability and Resilience: The Democracy – Equality – Climate Change Nexus
We will run the first and second pilots in fall 2024 and the third pilot in winter 2025.
Outcomes: What Does Success Look Like?
Ultimately, Sustainable Calgary’s goal is to support the creation of a self-sustaining, ongoing community engagement program dedicated to Dialogue for a Change. The strategy will be to recruit the leadership for this program from the participants in the program. Over time, this organization could create local affiliates at a quadrant, community cluster, community, or even neighbourhood level – building relationships and creating sustainable, meaningful nurturing lifestyles.
The Dialogue for a Change aligns with Sustainable Calgary’s mission, vision, and principles.
Mission
The window of opportunity for Calgary’s gradual transition to a sustainable future has closed. We must now embark on a rapid transition or face the real prospect of significantly compromised quality of life and livelihoods and a precarious future for our children and their city.
Through research, education, advocacy and action (REAacT), Sustainable Calgary works to create the capacity for an urgent/rapid and radical transformation of how we live, work and play in a world of unprecedented systemic challenges, including the climate emergency, social and economic injustice, and weakened democratic institutions.
Vision
Calgary is a place where each and every citizen, in all stages of life, experiences a sense of belonging and safety and derives a sense of joy in contributing to the community in whatever way they choose. All Calgarians enjoy a high quality of life and a sense of pride in our city, pursuing diverse lifestyles that are within the limits of the finite planet we call home while not impinging on the opportunity for other communities in the global village to achieve the same.
Principles
A sustainable community maintains a healthy environment including clean, air, water, soil and spaces.
In a sustainable community there is access to work that is meaningful and sufficient to meet basic needs and services and to provide the means to participate in community life.
A sustainable community maintains social benefits (health, education, recreation, and safety) and the opportunity to achieve a sense of meaning and purpose in life without discrimination.
A sustainable community fosters participation in governance and input into decision-making.
A sustainable community acts responsibly in its relations with other communities.
A sustainable Calgary acknowledges its part in the history of racism/white privilege, the oppression and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the crimes of colonialism globally, and works to rectify these historical injustices as full partners in Treaty 7 and members of our global community of communities.
Live simply so that others may simply live.– Mahatma Gandhi