Hi everyone,

Just wanted to send a quick update.

I am currently at the national YouthScape gathering in Montreal. What's YouthScape you might ask?

Well it's a national program also funded by McConnell, that aims to building resilient Canadian communities by engaging youth. There are five YouthScape communities and each has a convening or lead organization: Calgary (Child and Youth Friendly Calgary), Saskatoon (Communities for Children), Thunder Bay (Action for Neighborhood Change), Montreal (Boscoville) and Halifax (Heartwood Centre for Community Youth Development). Each community has designed its own unique program to engage young people -in a meaningful way - in their communities. Check out http://projects.takingitglobal.org/iicrd to learn more!

Anyhow, Eriel (aboriginal coordinator for CLC), Steve (Quebec Online Community Connector) and myself are attending the YouthScape meeting on behalf of TIG and the CLC program. TakingITGlobal is partnered with the International Institute for Child Rights and Development as the support team for YouthScape. TIG's role is to facilitate the national piece of YouthScape to building a learning community and supporting national communications between the YouthScape communities. We're doing that by helping them to effective use our online community and specifically the project pages to organize, mobilize, collaborate and share their growing knowledge with one another.

So... I'm super excited to be in Montreal right now and getting to meet everyone who makes up YouthScape across Canada. TIG's role will be to document all learnings at the gathering in the form of podcasts, video, blogs, photos, etc and train YouthScape folks on how to upload these resources to their project pages.

We've already began! Tonight was the welcoming session and afterwards we did 5 interviews, one person from each community, we asked what the one thing is that they are hoping to take away from this gathering/experience.

Everyone brings such different knowledge and experiences with them... i have already felt inspired by people's reflections on what it truly means to build, learn, share with one another. Philip Cook, the Executive Director of IICRD said that what he hopes to take away from the gathering is how you truly bridge youth empowerment efforts and community building... how is it that one can drive the other? The success of YouthScape really depends on their understanding of how the participation of youth, especially marginalized youth, is pivotal in community building...

Anyway, i'll have more updates over the next few days!

Cheers,

Kimia