Those involved in planning the recent Organizing for Justice Conference, held at various venues around Centretown, are hopeful the event will mobilize people to work toward building a healthier community.
The four-day event, aimed at strengthening community activism in the Ottawa area, took place from Oct. 15 to Oct. 18. It was the second annual conference of its kind, and organizers hope to build on this year's success as they start planning for 2010.
“We got a lot of good feedback from the people who were there,” says Greg Macdougall, one of the organizers of the event.
Macdougall says the organizers took a lesson from this year's panel discussion, and will apply it when planning next year's event. All the participants of this year's event will have the opportunity to provide feedback to the organizers online about how they would like next year's event to take shape. It's not even certain it will take the format of a conference, he says.
“When you're being inclusive, it's not a matter of just having people be part of something, it's having their contribution into what the thing actually is,” says Macdougall. “Definitely we'll learn from what happened this year and last year and try and move forward with that.”
Organizing for Justice is billed as advocating for social, environmental and economic justice.
“Social health, economic health and environmental health are the three main factors that contribute to healthy communities,” says Macdougall.
The English-language events were held at the main branch of the Ottawa Public Library, the Atomic Rooster and the old Ottawa Technical High School respectively. French events were held in Gatineau.
Beenash Jafri, one of the founders of the Anti-Racist Environmental Coalition was one of the speakers at the panel discussion entitled Grassroots Solutions to the Economic and Environmental Crises.
“A different approach to contrast surviving environmental degradation and panic about resources running out,” said Jafri, “would be to say 'how do we equitably share and distribute resources?'”
Emily Howard, who attended the panel discussion, supports the event.
“I think these sorts of talks are really necessary,” says Howard. She says the panel did a good job of explaining why it was important to critique solutions to climate change issues and examine who really benefits.
Howard said she also made some contacts, and will consider getting more involved in community activism in the future.
“Solutions really need to come from grassroots,” says Howard.
Admission to the conference was free. It was run on a budget of about $5,000, which was provided by the event's sponsors, says Macdougall.
Four local organizations banded together to organize the event, including Common Cause, the Socialist Project, and both the University of Ottawa and the Carleton University chapters of the Ontario Public Interest Research Group.
More information is available at the event's website, www.organizingforjustice.ca.