What does resilience look like in our cities and communities? What kinds of changes do youth want to see to make that possible? What kinds of projects and initiatives do young folks want to spearhead to make our communities more resilient?

These are some of the questions that our June-July cohort of City Shapers: Resilient Communities explored.

City Shapers was a cohort-based, civic education program that brought together 18 to 30 year olds from across Metro Vancouver to learn about civic engagement and how cities work. Together, we explored both formal and informal ways of getting involved and collectively shaping the future of our communities, from activism to online dialogues to running for political office.

After receiving overwhelming interest in the May-June cohort of the program, we decided to offer a second cohort to meet the need we were seeing. This June-July cohort got to build off the projects and learnings from the first cohort, and developed their own projects to improve community resilience. Post-program several project groups have continued their work with support from CityHive’s Project Hub. 

The Program

This cohort of the City Shapers program was held over eight weekday evening sessions in June and July 2020. After spending the first three sessions exploring current issues in community resilience, the cohort put their learning to practice by co-creating projects (from events to policy briefs) to tackle resilience in different ways and support engagement at the community or local level.

The Final Community Event took place on Thursday, July 23rd online, and included six young community organizers as conversation catalysts.

Presenting Sponsor

This program was delivered in partnership with SFU Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue’s Strengthening Canadian Democracy Project with support from the Vancouver Foundation.