It's the final post on Deepening Community Edmonton. I really enjoyed the experience and am really enjoying reliving it through reflection. Hopefully others who haven't attended have found something from it.
The final morning was with Paul Born. Founder and President of Tamarack and author of Deepening Community, which this lovely gathering was modeled around. Paul was kind enough to gift us all a copy of his new book. Very much looking forward to our book clubs on this. The morning was a perfect cap to what was an amazing week.
Paul gave us the books so we wouldn't have to worry about taking notes during his session. While I can't remember all of the details of the amazing stories he told us or the facts for the research he conducted (all can be found on the aforelinked book website), I did walk away with some very important things.
- Whatever the problem, community is the answer. Meg Wheatley. Enough said.
- The measure of successful cities of the future will be the resilience of its communities. This will mean shifting away from financial sources of measuring societal worth and shifting to economics f happiness. Check out the work being done by Mark Anielski on how we do this. Cool fact. He ends his presentations by singing "the more we get together". We did this during our last morning and it felt great.
- Paul is often asked what is the most important thing a person can do to make a difference. His answer: "Make chicken soup for your neighbour when they are sick." This means we'd have to know our neighbour enough to know a) they are sick and b) the kind of soup they prefer. So simple and yet how many of us can say we could do this.
And that was it. 2.5 days of opening up our hearts and minds to get our hands ready to go back and lean into Deepening Community as the answer for any number of societal challenges and wicked problems we're all facing.
It's simple and when we have the right answer it should be.
p.s. Tamarack has SO many amazing events that are coming up. From free webinars pretty much every week to other in-person workshops like this. You can find all of them here on their website. You can also continue or dive into the learning by joining their learning community on this topic here.
Being a Force for Good 