This March and April, we will be travelling to each of our five Local Futures partner communities to run workshops with community stakeholders and municipal leadership. The communities include:
- The City of Halifax, Nova Scotia
- The City of Kingston, Ontario
- The City of Yorkton, Saskatchewan
- The City of Kitchener, Ontario
- The Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region, British Columbia (which includes the City of Parksville, the Town of Qualicum Beach, the Snaw-naw-as First Nation, the Snuneymuxw First Nation, the Qualicum First Nation, and the Regional District of Nanaimo)
These workshops are a great chance to explore how the SDGs support the work of community stakeholders, the opportunities and challenges the community faces (and how these change over the next 20 years), and the types of collaboration taking place in the area that help advance shared goals. The workshops are designed to be interactive and engaging with discussion themes included in the development of the Voluntary Local Review for each partner community (released Fall ’26-Winter ’27).
As part of the workshops, we also plan to run a short systems mapping exercise, exploring the underlying connections between community challenges and the levers of influence to help overcome those challenges. Systems maps are a great tool to go beyond disciplines and help question deeply held assumptions about the patterns within the system.
We are excited to ground our Local Futures work in conversations in communities across the country. We’ll post a summary report back from these conversations later this spring once we’ve had time to analyze insights.
Example of a System Map
This system map was developed by Kaitlin Webber, Sam Petrie, and Emma McDougall exploring the dynamics of transit-induced gentrification in the Light Rail Train (LRT) Corridor in Waterloo Region for the Map the System Contest.