MC 1 of 5 Regional Leads Appointed With Canadian Urban Institute
I am excited to announce that I have accepted a regional lead appointment from Canadian Urban Institute for the next few months to help amplify municipal perspectives from the prairies! They have selected a handful of awesome and diverse voices from across the country to help guide their organization and set them up to be of service and of use to city planners and trouble makers like me! Here are the other regions that have leads: Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies (me lol), Alberta, British Columbia.
The way I see it, I want to be able to answer this question, from a prairie perspective: how can cities recover from this pandemic?
Municipal Systems & The Prairies
I have always been passionate about systems. Once I identify a challenge and which corresponding component of the system is responsible or has jurisdiction for that challenge, I can get to learning! Who's in charge of this system? How do people access their services? How do decisions get made? How are mistakes corrected? At a city or municipal level these questions can be directed at the mayor, city councillors, city administration and most tellingly the municipal budget. To this end I love discovering how systems operate, how to affect change and how we can get people who live negative realities - because of the blindspots in those systems - to have a meaningful seat at the table to help design, deliver and evaluate programs or services that affect them. Earlier this year while researching, I came across the work of Canadian Urban Institute. Specifically I found the mapping feature they created to track the municipal responses to covid19 called City Watch. I love data, evidence and interactive maps, so if you do too please check out the resource and see what it says about your region!
City Talk
I was also invited to be a panelist for their City Talk series discussing the role that young people must play in an urban recovery from this pandemic. And just today! I watched my favourite webinar of the whole coronavirus-physical-distancing-do-everything-from-home era, and that was the city talk panel organized by Jay Pitter discussing systemic racism and the Black Lives Matter movement's ripple effects on municipal planning. The mayor focused city talks continue, every Friday there's a mayor that gets featured alongside CUI CEO Mary Rowe and this Friday it's my favourite mayor, Naheed Nenshi from Calgary! He's so great, check the event out.
#COVID100
I also would like for those interested to save the date for JUNE 19th because CUI has a ton of panels and live educational events planned around 100 days since our 100th cased of the novel coronavirus in Canada. I learned today that coronavirus is disproportionately affecting cities, which makes tons of sense considering density and the inability for many people to physically distance. I'll be hosting an hour long event on that day here in Winnipeg where I'm hoping I can shine a light on some of our local awesomeness! More details will be released about each regional event in the coming days.
Your feedback
This is just the beginning. I'll be with CUI in this role until September 2020. Please send me an email if you have any suggestions for the organization on items that they could be focusing on, or awesome examples from the prairies that we may want to amplify nationally. I want to take this opportunity to celebrate the awesome things happening at a municipal level, learn about the things that are working in other jurisdictions and ensure that the circle that informs city planning on this country widens to include those most affected by these policies.
Email me at mc@michaelredheadchampagne.com or get at me on social media @northendmc [Twitter / Instagram / Facebook]
Talk to you soon!
