In our final learning lab together, changemakers welcomed back Amsey Maracle from the Centre for First Nations Governance to build upon our community engagement and civic participation skills, which changemakers will soon be deploying in the next leg of our program journey.

Amsey introduced changemakers to valuable and specialized tools that will help us engage within our communities. Using the five pillars of the inherent right to self government as our guide, change makers practiced open-space technology and world cafe tools discovering how effective they are for engaging communities to define and plan a collective path forward. Together we wrapped our skills, passion and creative problem solving around central priorities within our change maker group and developed solutions for community well-being using World Cafe facilitation tools and Land Use/Environmental Stewardship using Open Space.

The Five Pillars of the Inherent Right to Self Government are:

• The People
• The Land
• Jurisdiction & Laws
• Governing systems
• Resources

World Cafe

Changemakers applied these five pillars by participating first in a World Cafe facilitation exercise – a method for creating a living network of collaborative dialogue around questions.

As we worked through the activity the pillars were applied as our guide asking the follow questions to help us discover wellbeing solutions:

•How can we make our people feel safe and prioritize their wellbeing in our communities?

•How can the land help us foster community safety and wellbeing?

•What is the connection between laws and jurisdiction and community safety and wellbeing?

•How are we going to manage community safety and wellbeing in our communities?

•What gifts, talents, skills, experience and resources are needed for community safety and wellbeing? How can we respect and include each others’ gifts?

Changemakers used important issues facing their communities concerning the environment such as the Deep Geological Repository, Electric Vehicles, and Ethical Forestry.

Open Space Technology

Following a deeply engaging and productive World Cafe session Amsey led change makers through the application of Open Space as we added these specialized skills to our toolboxes. Open Space is another excellent tool for changemakers to bring back to our communities as we work together to identify and address local priorities. Open Space Technology is ” a philosophy, a practice and a process that enables groups of any size to self-organize around complex, important issues and accomplish something.“

Changemakers used important issues facing their communities concerning the environment such as the Deep Geological Repository, Electric Vehicles, and Ethical Forestry.

This being the final learning lab for changemakers, we are now on our way to the Ignite weekend to test out skills from all their past learning labs so we can be prepared to do our work in community.

For more information about the work of the Centre For First Nations Governance

Visit: https://fngovernance.org/

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