Learning Lab:  Lunch and Learn

Success Patterns for Community Development

October 16th, 2019:

11:30am – 1:30pm

@ 117 Front Street Wolfville, NS

(In case of inclement weather we will convene in the Wolfville Memorial Library, 21 Elm St, Wolfville NS)

Ever notice that when you ask for advice and share your passion you’re more likely to get money and when you ask for money your more likely to get advice? Ever feel like you’ve hit a roadblock in large institutions, but suddenly things move along when a “bridger” comes into the picture who gets your vision for your project and helps you navigate the system? 

The Front Street Community Oven in Wolfville, NS experienced this too, and have found and used patterns that made the Front Street Community Oven project a success. Duncan Ebata and Ann Steiger of the Front Street Community Oven Project would like to talk with you about these patterns. They will share what worked for the Front Street Community Oven, in the shape of success patterns, that you can apply to your work as well. These are patterns they’ve learned from top community developers in the world, strategies they saw work for other community oven projects, and patterns they found in our own work with the Front Street Community Oven project. This will be candid, fresh, replicable in many contexts, and from recent experience.

Topics that we will cover:

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  Navigating by-laws, politicians, and regulators (our oven sits on town land)

  
  


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  Community fundraising to get the things, volunteer hours, money and various professional skills needed (our in-kind support has been approximately $120,000 from Sep 2017 – to Sep 1, 2019 – not including board time or Town of Wolfville support)

  
  


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  Generating excitement and getting buy-in from the community for a project most people simply couldn’t imagine (“What’s a community oven? Why would we need that? Who would ever use it? I don’t see it! That won’t work here!”)

  
  


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  Engaging worried stakeholders (“What about my business? Impact of smoke?”)

  
  


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  Creating engagement and maintaining energy with the board

  
  

Hosts

Duncan Ebata, BBA, Community Builder & Host

Duncan Ebata is a social entrepreneur, systems thinker, experience host and food community builder at Shift! Food, Front Street Community Oven, Earth Rhythms. Before getting into his current work, Duncan spent his last 8 years doing marketing work in the regenerative and organic agriculture space. Duncan is passionate about culinary community building, team building, building deeper connections and re-authoring community narratives, regenerative tourism, building upstream community food security projects, lowering the barriers to healthy eating, and building social innovator capacity. He is excited about creative co-cooking, story telling, re-authoring, experiential tourism development, and facilitation, as a means to re-connect and re-author what it means to be in community, our new economy, and our world. Duncan invites you to find out more and more resources at http://duncanebata.com 

Anne Stieger, BA, MEd, Facilitator and Pattern Language Developer
http://annestieger.com

Dana Perry, Central Region Convenor, Digital Public Relations Lead
Community Sector Council of Nova Scotia
http://ions.ca

Paula Mackay, BA, BEd, MEd
Experiential Learning Project Coordinator
Nova Scotia Community College
Institute of Technology Campus

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