Creating Community Connectors Workshop
Seventeen people from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds attended this workshop. They came from Upper Kent, Plaster Rock, Perth-Andover, Kilburn and Bath.
With the help of the CVCIN facilitators, all took part in exercises designed to help identify their greatest concerns for their communities, and how they might best bring their own gifts into play to help others.
The great thing about conversations is that they can go somewhere or they can go nowhere, and that’s how you find out what’s really important to you!
The exercises were illuminating, and, as we discovered, there were a few main themes that most people in the workshop felt were our current society’s most important issues and biggest problems to solve.
This workshop was about Community Empowerment, and recognizing that these are our own communities…. and we local citizens make them or break them.
map with the ideas and gifts we all bring to our communities…..
Gifts of the Head are what we think about, Gifts of the Hand are what we can do, and Gifts of the Heart are what we care most about.
Some of the workshop participants work in client based fields, and they described how many people they are seeing now who are having to decide whether they will buy food for their family or pay their power bill… should they go hungry or freeze that week.
Other major concerns are literacy rates (According to Statistics Canada, 53 percent of high school graduates in NB are functionally illiterate), child care, access to locally sourced food and gardens, and living in responsible and sustainable ways.
We discussed how the folks in our communities used to work together and held barn raisings and cooperated in other group efforts to benefit the community as a whole.
We don’t need outside support. We must learn and build our own social connections. We need more Community Advocates and Mentors to teach life skills to empower our youth.
We need to break free of our consumerist paradigm and re-invent our future.
Our culture is the measure through which our society assists our least fortunate in which the sick, invalid, old or poor people are taken care of. In short, it is the measure of our collective unselfishness.
This workshop connected a diverse group with the common goal to help effect positive changes in their communities in many different ways. Every movement for change starts with individual effort….so if you have an idea, get involved!
It is unbelievable what a dedicated group with a common goal can attain in a short time.
blockquote> “If isn’t good for everyone it isn’t good.” Old Cherokee saying
