Living a Creative Life Congress 2025

Tyson Bankert: And so a little bit about me, my name is Tyson Bankert. If you come to any Recess Calgary events, my art name is Coach T and I’ve been running this program since, for the last eight years, and it started off as just an opportunity for artists or for not for artists, but for anyone, the public to come and play. I think our childhood imagination is something that we need to tap into more, not just for myself, but for others. And like any creative endeavor, you start kind of seeing yourself as an artist, and so that’s how I’ve sort of developed the last eight years. And some of the things the ingredients that I use is imagination, play, placemaking, third spaces and a little bit of like disruption because I like being a troublemaker. And so a lot of the collectives, I was always like, just, just do it, just go and like, do the thing. And that’s really my, the spirit I have. And this has been such a great opportunity to ignite the city in a way that, I’m a political nerd, I watch the City Council every Tuesday pretty much, so this was like a really great, convergence of both of the things that I really, enjoy, which is play and politics. So. I’ll hand it off to Rachel. 

Rachel Gita Karp: Yeah. I’m Rachel Gita Karp, I work at a nonprofit called the Center for Artistic Activism, we share a lot of the ethos of Recess, and we’re all about helping people like you bring more creativity and innovation to social justice work, and we do that through workshops and trainings, we also do research into what’s really working in activism right now, and put out resources so that as many people as possible can benefit. 

I’m guessing I’m newer to most of you, so just a little bit more about us. We have supported tons of different issues over the years. One of my focuses has been on protecting the freedom to vote in the United States and supporting civic engagement worldwide, but we always trust the people that we’re working on to be the experts in what’s going to resonate for their communities, and that was what we brought to the wonderful work in Creating Our Calgary. And this approach has led us to work all over the world in person, in dozens of countries, on six of the seven continents, and we’ve reached thousands and thousands of people.  

And to bring some visuals into what that looks like, we have just a very short video. 

(video) 

And so thanks. And so, Tyson and I worked together on Creating Our Calgary. Tell us about it. 

Tyson:  I’ll also say now watching that video after doing the program, I’m like, oh, yeah, this is kind of what happened, actually. That’s great. That’s fantastic. I watched the first time like, okay, let’s see what happens. And that’s totally the vibe for those of us who were in this program. 

So, yeah, just to kind of give you a little bit of the highlights here as we start to dig in. Phase One was our kickoff, so in June there was a three-day intensive with the collectives who’ll you’ll learn more about, where Rachel came down or came up and helped to train the collectives on what they want to do. 

So there was prototyping, there was visioning, there was this goal, there was exercise, we walked around the city and activated some potential spaces, which was a lot of fun. And then over the summertime it was really about supporting, the different collectives on what their projects were, meeting with them monthly and engaging more like, what would it mean to, to deepen their activation. So, there were lots of different prototypes that happened as well.  

And then, of course, there was the election, which was on October 20, where the, kind of the couple weeks heading up to that election, each collective did a particular thing which you’ll all experience over the course of our day today, so I won’t spoil that for you, but it was really about getting out to vote, right? Getting other people to see themselves in the civic process, whatever that might look like, and it happened in a bunch of different ways that we will share. But what I think what was really, important about just sort of from the framing is like that is sort of where we were leading them to, it was like, hey, we have this election, you know, it’s one thing to start to do your prototype in June or July, but really helping them get activated, so that way it was as quick, as the closest thing to the election as possible. And then we are in phase four, which is the Congress and our evaluation strategy of what happened, and that’s also what we will share.  

And so this is the crew, you’ll learn more about them throughout the day, but the five collectives, really, we were really more interested in not necessarily in a project or a program they had to offer, but more of like, where’s that state of readiness for you to reflect on how you can start to use your art practice in this in, in this way for activism, typically for the municipal election? 

These are some of the different things that we were measuring on when we were asking folks to, to apply. All right.  

I’m going to ask some of the, each one has a representative, to come up and help us share the story. So, Crate-ive Crew, Christy, come up, and I forget who the order, but Zaria, Error 404… 

Rachel: Send up the people. 

Tyson: Yes, send up your people, Tee, Ayo Collective, Mao from Triple A Club, you all get the couch, by the way. Yes. You all get the couches.  

All right, so we had five collectives. There was 16 of them in total. We had 30 different events, 14 community partners, so once again, that building of the impact, and we reached over 17,500 Calgarians. 

So really, the conversation that we had with folks, and we’ll expand more on this, is really their commitment to vote, learning how to engage through our local government. Right. There’s so many folks maybe don’t know what it is that they need to care about and who to share that with, and then really envisioning as you may have saw downstairs, like for the youth vote, what do they want to see what’s important to them, and then really believing in the power that that they have as individuals.  

Rachel: And these collectives accomplished all of these wonderful things through artistic activism. And just a note on how we at the Center for Artistic Activism think about what that means, we use it in a very particular way, and it exists on a spectrum, and on one end of the spectrum is art about activism, which really focuses on creating an emotional response and audiences or focuses on that effect of things, and on the other end of the spectrum is activism with a little bit of art, which focuses on a direct activist outcome, so the effect. 

And just a little more about each end of that spectrum, so art about activism of course, art can be about any number of things, but this art about activism, it might be like a mural about a certain issue or a performance about politics and, I make those and I’m not knocking them in any way, but that’s not exactly what we mean when we say artistic activism. And on the other end is like a traditional activist method with just a little bit of art added on top, so like a protest that has really beautiful signs and everyone loves their protest signs, but by artistic activism we mean that like art and creativity are embedded in every single part of the process to have a really direct outcome.  

So between these extremes, there’s this whole world of artistic activism that combines the emotional response to create the real outcome. And we call that, it’s a term that the founders of my nonprofit made called æffect. So it’s getting at the emotions to really move people to take the actions that we need to have outcomes. 

And it might not look like art in the way that we think of art being, but it uses all of the artistic sensibilities and skills and creativities in a process to get us to a place of making real, direct change in our communities.  

And if you’re wondering, well, how do you make an artistic activism project? We took our collectives through a process that we identify four specific things, and yeah, Tyson, you’re going to take us through that. Great. 

Tyson: There are goals, objectives, strategies and tactics. And so they’re all terms I’m sure that most of you have heard before in different ways, but this is really ideas that we were drawing on to help support, the art, not only in your own practices, but also like the, the collectives and in their strategies. 

So, when we think about goals, you know, that goal is that big thing, right? It is the thing in which we all kind of wake up, our why, right? It is really that idea that we can, what do we want to win? What do we want to end up happening? And I think, for example, with Creating Our Calgary, it really was that we had a goal of a vibrant culture of civic participation in Calgary, led by artists. That was our goal.  

Rachel: Yeah. So just to summarize, goal is this utopian vision, it’s kind of it might be where you ended up when we did the Imagine Winning exercise. If you reached it, there’d be nothing to do, it’s pretty unifying for the most part. Like people might fight over, oh, it should be this bill or this bill, but like a Calgary where artists are really involved in civic culture, I think that’s really hard to fight with, but it’s very far away.  

Tyson: Yeah. And then and that being so far away, oftentimes we need those baby steps, those milestones to help us get us there, and so that’s why we have objectives. And so our objectives, which really aren’t just a to do list of things, it’s more about what are those different pieces in which we can help get us to that goal. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that obviously for each of you, and then also really short term, right. So there are things that can be done, those small wins that will get us there to that goal. And so our goal, oftentimes our goals or maybe years and our objectives are a lot shorter time periods. 

And so for us at Creating Our Calgary, the objectives really were about having 15 artists, it was about their practice, and it was about civic participation, so all those other pieces really were helpful objectives in helping us achieve the overall goal, which is more of a vibrant, artistic Calgary.  

Rachel: And then when you have that greater goal and the specific steps you want to take, then you think about your strategy, which is the way that you want to approach achieving the objectives towards the goal. 

And there are countless possible strategies. It could be about the medium that you use, like, lawyers are going to use legal strategies or artists, you’re going to use artistic strategies. It can also connect to the values that you have, so it might be that you want to approach the people you’re trying to reach in a really personal way, or you want to really pull on emotions, you want to be collaborative. You want to call people in instead of out. You want to demonstrate this better world that’s possible. It can also be like very practical. Like sometimes you have to do things really fast or really cheap, and that goes on and on. So again, strategy are the ways that you approach things. They align with your values, and they might be for one particular objective or action that you have, or it could be for a whole campaign.  

And so one of our strategies when we were planning Creating Our Calgary was that we wanted to tap into existing networks and build on them, and so that’s why we decided initially we thought maybe we work with individual artists, but then we decided to sort of use the powers of artist collectives. 

And then once you’re clear on all of those things, you can come up with your individual tactics, which is like, the march, the mural, the performance, the Recess play, the individual things that you’re going to do that adhere to the strategy that try to get you to achieve your objective, all in service of your greater goal.  

And if you have all of those things, you get a creative campaign. And all of our collectives did that.  

Tyson: Yeah. So we’re going to have a little bit of a roundtable chat with you all, to hear a little bit more about exactly how they put what we just shared with you into practice. 

And so I want to know from each of you a little bit, a couple of minutes each, about what was your goal? Also, knowing that everyone here will also be able to be experiencing that later on in the afternoon. So I’m going to just go this way.  

Tee, you can start us off if you feel comfortable, you have it written down, you’re very prepared, and so I’d just love to know, yeah, share with everyone what was what was your goal? Yeah, just the goal, and then we’ll dig a bit deeper.  

Tee Griffin: So, for this program, our collective wanted to explore arts, how people, engage with art and how art make people want to talk more about civic engagement and their, you know, duties as citizens. 

We really wanted to make sure to make space for diverse voices, especially people in the BIPOC community. So, yeah, so, we really wanted to make sure that voices that are usually overlooked had room for, to express themselves and make sure, like, their voices mattered in these conversations.  

Tyson: Great. And thank you Tee. All right. 

Ayo Collective. Lex? 

Lex Hilderman: My name is Lex, I’m from Fem Assembly. In thinking about the goals that we had, I think reflecting back, it’s like it’s so long ago, but now we’re here. But I think something that we were really focused on is just the amplification of Fem-lived experiences. And that’s across intersectional backgrounds. 

Our group has various intersections, and so we were really looking at, yeah, how those intersections play and really trying to amplify those voices. And especially looking at like, the politics that we have right now and the representation of those voices in politics, I think became even more present. Yeah.  

Mao Kun Chen: Hello everyone. My name is Mao and I’m from Triple A Club. So in our collective our goal is how to, how can we use art to make newcomer, specific Chinese, come more engage with Calgary and civic engagement and also feel more belonging to the city.  

Tyson: Awesome. Thanks, Mao.  

Christy Herdman: Hello. My name is Christy. I’m part of the Crate-ive Crew, and for us, we wanted to amplify youth voices because we found that in the civic realm, a lot of the time youth voices are unheard or not as being a part of the process, so we wanted to take the time to really connect with youth and give them an opportunity to share and know that their voices mattered. 

Zaria Rajha: Hello everyone. Can you hear me? I am Zaria and I’m part of the Error 404 Collective, there’s Mario there. Our goal, I guess, started with the moment like, when we start reading that application we wanted to apply and would like Oh, that’s really interesting. Like, it’s different, like, oh, how do we make art be part of a civic engagement? It’s a new for us. It was like new for us. And that made us so interested in applying. And then, yeah, I mean, like how, like our main goal was for sure to learn, like, we’re kind of, like fairly new artist here in, in Calgary, so we wanted to learn what civic engagement was like for us as artists and start. And then we thought like how art can actually bring change or how can art actually make a difference. 

So our goal was like to make people move and be moved for their city. So I guess like, yeah, that was our goal.  

Tyson: So thank you everyone. And so you heard here where there’s lots of different goals, there were, there was different types of demographics of people, ways in which you did it, different ideas of what that looked like. And so, you know, our job was really to help boil that down, like okay, what does that actually look like on the ground? And so we definitely used some more strategies to help you to help you do that.  

Rachel: And so one of the ways we did that is to help the collectives get really specific around objectives, which Tyson talked about, because a lot of times, people come to the Center for Artistic Activism, and they’re really excited about an idea that they have for something to do, and it could be really great, but if you remember the map that had goals and objectives and strategies, if you just start with a tactic, it’s all alone up there and you don’t really know what it’s working towards or what impact it’s going to have. It’s kind of starting at the bottom instead of at the top. And so it might be a really great idea, but it might not really lead to an artistic activist campaign that achieves some kind of direct activist outcome. 

And so we always go back to objectives like, really, what are you trying to achieve? And a great way and something that we also took the collectives with to make sure that your objective is doing the most work for you is to make it be a SMARTIE objective, and that’s an acronym that is used in various fields. So has anyone heard it before? 

Yeah? Okay, love that. Well feel free to shout out what the things stand for. So people sometimes use different words for the letters, but I’ll go through it. So first you want it to be really Specific, so like as many details as possible as you can put in about the outcome you want to achieve, the better. 

Then you also want it to be Measurable. So there is something in there that will let you know if you’ve achieved the outcome or not, it could be that you want to reach a very certain number of people, or you want a very specific thing to occur.  

You also want it to be Achievable, like within the realm of time that you have and personnel that you have and funding that you have, but what I love is that some people say that A stands for ambitious. And so I think that’s also really great. You want it to be within the realm of possibility, but also something that’s like pushing you to try new things because the issues that we’re all working on need that kind of ambition and that innovation.  

It wants to be Relevant to your greater goal that you made sure to have. 

It needs to have some deadline involved. For one, like who gets anything done if there isn’t a deadline, but also a lot of these issues have really important deadlines, like we all worked on an election, and there was one final day to vote. So if you weren’t getting things done by then, you were out of luck.  

And then it wants to be Inclusive. So it’s working with people who are most directly impacted and really giving them power. 

And Equitable, so it’s looking at things and trying to solve things from the root level.  

And we really, really harp on this because, you know, it’s so important to have that vision of the world. But objectives are what can make that vision real, they make it really clear for you what you’re trying to achieve. We were working with some folks, or I was at the Center earlier this week, and they had all these different tactic ideas for what to do for a certain program. And I was just like, well, what are what are your objectives? Like, what do you want to do? And when you have that parameter in place, it can really help, you know, okay, this tactic is going to put me in the right direction and get me in front of the people I’m trying to reach, and this one, maybe not so much.  

Also, good objectives are really inspiring because they let other people know that you know what you’re trying to do, and it’s like, and that you probably can do it or you have a clear vision for it, and so they want to join you. And then it’ll help you know if you should keep going on the path you’re going on or if maybe the thing you’re trying isn’t working and there’s something else you could try instead.  

Tyson: Okay, so now that you all have that little refresher as well, the question I have for each of you is, can you name one or two of the SMARTIES objectives that you maybe used in your campaign. 

So, yeah, just thinking a little bit about, you know, I mean, I won’t repeat the question, so hopefully you have an answer for them. If not, if something new emerges, that’s okay too. We’re being as authentic as possible. Yeah. I’m curious to know, we’ll work way back this way, actually. So, one or two kind of ways in which you used the SMARTIE. 

Zaria: I would choose Relevant, for our objective. I feel like in the room, we were all, like, amazing artists, and we do amazing art. How the art can be relevant to civic engagement. I guess that was kind of like a challenge. Each collective, like, it wasn’t easy, like, how do we make our art civic engagement? So I guess it started with creating a name for us, like the name of our project was Make Your Move Matter. So I feel like the name kind of like speak itself, make your move matter. And we tried, like to stick to the plan as much as we can. Like we want people to get moved while also moving toward a goal of making a move for their city. 

It wasn’t easy. It started with an objective and then another objective. We want to do workshops and then change to something else, which was great. But with the help and the support of all the collectives that were in the room, kind of like stick to the plan and make it relevant. Civic engagement. I don’t know if that answer the question. 

Tyson: And thank you, Zaria. And I think I also just I wanted to I think what I heard that she was like, how specific you ended up becoming because I think although there was lots of different ideas, but you and Mario both had like how to incorporate your art practice as dancers into this sort of very not rigid, but like very clear way of which to get out the vote. 

So I really yeah, I really saw like that being something even the name being really important to how you thought about and what you do. For sure.  

Zaria: Thank you.  

Christy: Oh my turn. Okay. I guess I would choose Inclusive, because for us, from the start, we had a very clear message that all messages and all ideas were welcome. And so there was really no bad ideas. And so when we connected with the youth, we sort of decided from the very start that we weren’t going to edit the content of the youth, we’re going to make sure they were sharing their authentic voice. So any submission that came through, it was in their own handwriting, we weren’t editing for grammar or spelling, or if it was like the legibility of their handwriting, we weren’t changing any of that, we were making sure that it was very authentic, and even at times we might have things that were misspelled, or if we noticed that sometimes they were sharing something, that perhaps it was out of the realm of what a civic politician could change or had the power to influence, we just wanted to still include those, because we wanted to make sure that the youth understood that their voice did matter, and everything they were sharing was going to be shared. 

Tyson: Thank you.  

Mao: So for our collective, I want to talk about Measurable and Equitable. So at the beginning of the of the project, we already know that Chinese people, especially if they are newcomers, their civic engagement rate is pretty low. We understand that because me and Ziya, my teammate, is also a Chinese immigrant newcomer, but how we could not represent to all the Chinese. So how can we make this more clear? And then we designed a survey. The survey was trying to figure out what type of activity they like, why they’re not going out to engage with the civic. Is it because the language? Is it because the time or is it because the location, or if they just simply feel it’s not relevant? So that’s for us that’s the root of their problem.  

And based on those surveys, we designed an equity, equitable, method to helping to break this barrier. So what we did to make things more equitable is we build up the, we reduced the language barrier, and then we delivered all the information in Mandarin mainly, and also we created the platform for people to have easy access. Because probably if you have, like, for immigration, Chinese people, you know, your friends, you know, they’re using a platform called WeChat, it’s basically Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Slack, all the things combined. So, basically 90% of Chinese people were seeking information in this platform. 

So we formed a group chat with 100 people. So we shared the information with them, every week, so to make things very accessible. And then we created the toolkit, which our team made, and we’ll explain that more, to help them understand the civic a bit more. 

Lex: I was trying to think of which one to talk about, I think before I decide, I think something that was popping up for me was one of the initial activities that we did with Rachel and Tyson was the Evil Genie activity, which had us get really specific about our objective, and I think that was something that we really struggled with in the beginning, is how specific we needed to be about the group that we were trying to speak to, about, like the time frame and like how the overall project would be interacting with those groups of people. 

And so I think the Evil Genie exercise really helped us in getting specific and basically how it went was you would present an objective and another person would come in and be the devil’s advocate and would say but what about this?… 

Tyson: Do you want to tackle this, Lex? 

Lex: Oh, God. Yeah, sure. Okay.  

Tyson: All right. Go ahead.  

Lex: Oh, God. All right. Well, we’re going to reach 100 people in the next two months. We’re going to reach 100 people with Fem- lived experience and get them more engaged.  

Tyson: Okay. So now in this scenario, I’m the evil genie. So I heard you, you said you want to reach 100 people with Fem-lived experiences. Okay, you reached 100 people. Your wish is granted. However, it’s all people in Edmonton.  

Lex: Okay, okay. Revision. We’re going to reach 100 people with Fem-lived experience in the central Calgary area over the next two months. 

Tyson: To vote, right?  

Lex: Revision. We’re gonna reach 100 people with Fem-lived experience over the next few months in the central Calgary area and get them more civically engaged.  

Tyson: Great, so, beautiful. Rachel, if you want to… 

Rachel: I mean, you can poke holes any kinds of ways. It’s like, they’re all too young to vote, so does that still fit? What civic engagement means to you? Or they all don’t believe in voting or. Yeah. So but yeah. And it all just makes the objective stronger.  

Lex: Yeah. So I think so yeah, with that I think that like being really specific was really important to us in one articulating that group. So we had started with like, women, but then we wanted to also be reaching gender diverse people because that is part of our intersections in our group. And we wanted to reach multiple backgrounds of people as well. And so I think getting specific about it, being people with Fem-lived experience, but also then thinking about how do you even identify that group in terms of our activation became very difficult unless you were at a woman-specific centre or things like that. 

And so we ended up focusing more on universities because we were thinking further about how do we get more people with those lived experiences into positions of power, in order to help amplify those voices more, especially for voices who don’t necessarily have the ability to amplify their own voice, whether that’s because they’re not able to vote in the elections or they have barriers to how they can actually engage, civically. And so how do we get them engaged and also amplify their voices through others in that community?  

Tyson: Yeah, great. Thank you. And I think that’s really back to like the R of like that relevancy of like what exactly are we? Not only are we being specific about it, but why is it important. Yeah. Go ahead. 

Tee: Okay. My turn. So I feel like one of the things was Measurable. When we first started, one of our goals was we wanted to be able to reach about 150 people, but in the BIPOC community, Calgarians in the northeast. We were quite specific about the area that we wanted to serve. And whilst we were planning and thinking of the placards and all the chairs and all of the things that included in this project, we kept that in mind the entire time. 

I would also say Inclusive, because one thing we really, that really mattered to us was that our project was something that felt real to our community, something that they would actually engage with and feel like a part of. So people got to, like, actually share their story, share why they don’t vote, share their thoughts on voting, and share their own stories, as well as listen to other people from their community share you know, stories about why they don’t vote or why they do vote. And I feel like that really helped people to really want to be engaged with the arts, as well as the civic process. So, yeah, I would say Measurable.  

Tyson: Great. Awesome, fantastic. All right. We’re going to get into our questions around the, I have a I have a couple questions for each of you, well one quick question for each of you, but I will say we have we have a little bit more time, so like, if we’re gonna, you know, I might throw a couple curveballs, I got a little bit of a conversation, you know, so I know we have like one question for each of you, but we’re going to, I’m going to tease out a little bit, because I know each of your stories and how your collectives came to create your activations, and I think, there’s so many like, it’s sort of like in the best way possible out of trauma as well as, like, being able to, like, get there. And I think that is part of the experience as well, right.  So I think it happens that like the public sees this thing and they go, yeah, great, that was a great experience, I’m thinking of voting. But the reality, for all of the many of the people that we all engaged with over this time, it took so much work. And so I also want to honour the fact that we have some time to maybe share a little bit more about that experience. So I welcome that as we go through our conversation. 

But I will ask those questions to begin with and either of you have sort of, a thought or comment about that particular topic, by all means, feel free to share. But I will start with Lex.  

So, you, when we were thinking about the election and thinking about how as much of this as, you know, how polarized things can be and you know that me really nervous, trepidation like, I’m going to start talking to people about how to vote or, or it’s going to bring up all of these issues. And I think that’s really important about this project was that we were able to have those conversations. But I’m just wondering for you, why was art and creativity a way to be helpful tools to help people civically engaged?  

Lex: I thought about this question. I think that something that was really, like, potent for our group was that polarization piece. I think because we speak to a lot of feminism issues, that can be very polarizing for various groups of people. And I think especially at this time, I’ve noticed that coming up more, and kind of like a little bit of a push against feminist thought, which I think is kind of crazy at this point in time. But I think through our projects and like through I think a lot of our prototyping, we were like in constant debate about how, how much do we sit back and just do the easy route, or how much do we actually push the boundaries and get people thinking about it and potentially putting ourselves into more dangerous situations because of that polarization and those conversations that could take place? 

And in one of our activations we had staged a protest, basically protesting the billionaire businessman as like our evil nemesis, which is a very like, polarizing thing to do. And it raises a lot of questions, I think, but some people are not ready for those questions always. And so we were kind of sitting back trying to think of like, what kind of conversations would come up, are we ready to engage in those conversations, and how much is that a productive conversation or not? 

And we ended up moving away from that because of, like, we didn’t want to facilitate more anger and upset, especially at this time. And so we chose a different route of, you know, changing up our activation, to make it more about this engagement piece and facilitating conversations on the more positive side, and I think that like for ours, it was kind of grappling with like how much art do we put in? Like, we want it to still have our art in it and be that whole thing. We didn’t want to be on one side of the spectrum or the other in terms of our activism. And I think that really it was through the ways that we were doing our art subtly underneath that we were able to facilitate those conversations better, and really, the art became the conversations themselves. And so we were supported by the art that we were doing in terms of building the space and building the scene for people to engage in, but then it was really the conversations coming out of it that really influenced that more. 

Tyson: Without spoiling, like, Doctor Votes, which is what people will experience later on, I think the, the billionaire idea that we were in, I think it was, I forget the park that we were in, but we all practiced our tactic, our objective, and we were practicing and the billionaire and we were all yeah, we hate those billionaires and there was a whole like put them in jail! Yeah… 

Lex: Yeah, put billionaires in jail.  

Tyson: And it was kind of this, this performance art piece. But I think one of the things that all of you had and once again, you will see later on, which I think the anger kind of maybe prompted some people within that billionaire conversation, although it’s very real, and also, I think what we, all of you had joy in your conversations that you were trying to really embed it in, rather than maybe some things that felt maybe controversial. And so I think when we think about arts and creativity, it’s that like ability to actually get people feeling, light, even despite sort of like the, the hard things that also have to do with being civically engaged.  

Lex: Absolutely.  

Tyson: Anyone else want to like, share anything about, like to that question or comment about how and what that looks like for you? And if not, that’s okay. 

No. Okay. All right. Okay. We’ll go to the next one, which is Zaria actually, and so we had all of these prototypes, not just for the three days, but I also know throughout the summertime you were practicing and testing things out and trying again. And so I’m just wondering how prototypes helped serve your final activation. 

Zaria: Prototypes are very fun. Yes. I encourage every artist to try prototype before they do their actual work. I would start with the one that we did in the three days workshops. It was a chance like to kind of like actually make people experience how this activation might look like. So we tried it in Arts Commons, so was being there, and it’s very essential because it made us like, pay attention to details. We didn’t think about for ourselves. And it was really interesting to see how non-dancers were very interested in taking part in the project and they were like ready to move their bodies. Yeah, and they shared a lot of good feedback to how to go forward, how to change things. A lot of positive comments, a lot of evil genies were there. So, yeah, it’s very essential to, to try, especially in like in such a topic like art for civic engagement, I feel like was new, I’ve never done something like this before, like prototyping and it was very, very helpful for how did we move with our project forward, especially like with a part where we, like, had the sticky notes and everyone was like ready to share after they moved, were ready to share something of what they want to change in the city. So this is something we didn’t really thought about, but they were willing to write new comments about what they’re willing to change in their city.  

Tyson: Yeah, great. Thank you. I’ll just add that I think that the with the prototypes, are we you know, when we were doing our training, we were we were going around the city really in different places because ultimately what we want to do is engage the public, right? And knowing that it wasn’t just a, hey, come in and sign up and register for this, we wanted to really have to go bump up against these really great and then meaningful installations to help them think about their space in the city. And I think what one of the things, just wondering if anyone else has comments about the prototyping piece, was like the where of it, like have you did your practice reflect on like the where. This is like a new question, but I’m just like… 

Lex: Location?  

Tyson: Yeah. Location. 

Lex: I feel like we were like constantly considering the location for the first bit, especially as we were like cycling through our various ideas, and in our prototype we ended up only doing it at one location, but I think it had there was a certain feeling of like, it was really scary getting out onto the street to do that, like we were very much in close quarters. We like, wanted to be in a safe space doing it. But it takes, yeah, I think it does take that like extra step to go out onto the street and just allow people to come up, and I think it’s kind of magical when people do. And even thinking about when we were in the program and being on the street, we had people engaging with us in different ways, and it brings up various conversations, like even, we did a prototype and we had security guards come up to us, and just, I guess getting the perspective of like, what can happen and like it happens the moment you step onto the street, no matter if you’re doing it for real or not. Yeah. 

Tyson: Just for context for people, we were across the little park, along Centre Street station. It’s not, I mean, it’s a private park, I guess, but we were just like, practicing. Everyone was just showing their sort of initial ideas, and the security guard was like, what are you all doing here? And we were like, well, we were just hanging out. I thought it was a park, and he was like well you have signs. And I was like, oh, like even just like, what becomes political or this idea of like, who do we and end up engaging because of potential like, you know, curiosities but also maybe like anger as well.  

Rachel: But then Tyson just told the security guard, oh, well, we’ll be done in a few minutes and completely calmed them down. And they kept watching us, but I think another thing we learned from these projects was like the guerilla side of things, go for it. And so that was like a great example of you can make it work.  

Tyson: All right. We’ll go to the next question. Unless anyone else has any comments with that? Okay. Christy, it’s on to you. 

So the next question I have is sort of community building efforts, which you all did right, reaching out to other folks in the community to help support your activation. But how did those for you in your campaign help to leverage what you ended up doing? And how did that sort of shape your approach over time?  

Christy: Well, I guess for us, our approach was definitely shaped by the people and places. So every experience has sort of evolved and changed. So from the start, we didn’t really think that just having a fixed plan was going to work initially, we wanted to make sure we were flexible and able to sort of change, but we originally started, this, our idea was going to be that we were going to have like a classroom-based initiative. We were going to get in the classroom, so we were working with teachers. So the teachers actually were helping us to let us know what the students were curious about, we were able to get feedback from the students to know, like, does this work? Do you like things about this workshop? and things like that. But then of course, when schedules started to shift and we had to change because of the strike, we had to be proactive and engage with other organizations. 

So we reached out to the Calgary Public Library as well as the YMCA, and we connected with Night Light as well. So all of these opportunities gave us more chances to connect with spaces that we never knew were available, audiences that we hadn’t planned on. And so it just really gave us like a broader reach. And so, for example, when we connected with, Night Light, we realized that we couldn’t gather a lot of youth voices, but we didn’t want to be sort of like turning people away, we wanted to make sure it was still inclusive. So we collected voices from the Calgary community in the whole, so it gave us way more voices than we’d sort of planned, but it also gave us an opportunity to shift what our normal plan was of just a workshop and having sort of a reduced time commitment, because we knew people would want to sort of move about the Night Light and see more things, instead of just being sort of hunkered down for an hour and a half with us. 

So we gave them sort of a chance to be part of a community art activation, but they could just sort of simply add their voice with sort of a transparency, sort of similar to what you see downstairs that we set up here. And then we also for the workshops, all of that because of participant feedback, and participant engagement, the projector itself, that we were having people craft and make, just sort of noticing that we were first introducing something that was very boxy and it wasn’t something that we found that participants were excited to take with them, then we sort of modified that idea to put it into a cup, and then realizing that they wanted something more technical and more advanced, so we added a push button idea. So just constantly changing and evolving with the workshop as well as even spaces. So when we had the opportunity to be part of the mayoral debate, we were wanting to respect the parameters of the venue, so we had to sort of change that idea but we were able to creative problem solve and come up with a way to actually collect voices and showcases in real time digitally, which is something that we hadn’t shown before. 

So just constantly being like, I guess, having different connections and different opportunities gave us more and more chances to evolve and change the project. So I guess the collaborative nature of being part of Project Your Voice really created a community-driven feel overall.  

Tyson: Yeah, awesome. Thanks for sharing. And I would say too, my experience of watching it evolve and the different ways I went to the library, I went to the to the debate and, and it was interesting, which like how you were able to get those voices and like where like even like just like where you project it, right? And I think about, you know, and it was during like the strike, right. And so you had this youth voice being really important and really bubbling up to the surface that wasn’t about the election specifically, but it also became this other thing potentially as well, that other people could read into it. So it was yeah, I thought that I was once again, it was like, that wasn’t even the, the goal per se or the objective, and it still ended up having impact in different ways as well. 

All right. Anyone else want to share about community building and engaging with other folks or what that maybe looked like, how that rubbed off on your activation.  

All right, well, speaking of community building, Mao and her group, Triple A, they really, I think for me, a lot of your tactics, what I observed were like connecting with different people, bringing people together. And so you really encouraged that sort of, sense of belonging. And I even felt that when I showed up to the final activation, and yes, I’m just wondering what that meant for you and creating that sense of belonging throughout. That’s because I think that’s also art, too, right?  

Mao: Yeah. So for our group, we tried a lot of different ways to make people feel belongs and inclusive. My teammate we’ll talk about more in our presentation, but more specifically when we were talking about the group chat in the previous warm up activities before the final activation. So back to the SMARTIE method, we use measurement when we have these surveys. So we really believe making people belong, feel belonging, is through participation. When they participate, they can have, create a more share experience in happy memories and make them connect to the city and the group they are. So but, what’s actually the barrier or what’s actually what they want to get from the activity? How can we push them go there? It’s the biggest problem. So in the survey there’s one question like if we have an art activity, what type of things you’ll want to get out of is it you’ll want Mandarin speakers or you’ll want food or what actually you’re expecting. So the result it was very interesting. 71.2% of people they want to be able to make friends. That means newcomers are really very lonely. And then there’s a 78.5% people say they don’t want a public speaking, which says Chinese newcomers want to making friends in the event without actually talking.  

So that’s where like wow, that is a really difficult task for us. So but actually if you’re thinking about it the other way, they probably just don’t want to publicly talk because a lot of and you’ll come with a worry about the language. They worry that their culture is different, they feel awkward, but they are really craving connections. 

So what we do is we formed this group chat, we got all the Chinese people in one group chat, so they don’t need to worry about the language. And then second, we change the group chat name, we called it Calgary Art Hooping Buddies rather than Participant Audience. So we rather than say, oh, you need to go to this fun event with us, we’re more like, oh, and you want, I want to go into this event, anyone want to go with me? So in that way, they reduce the expectation and won’t feel like we’re the authority, we won’t, they need to follow the figures, we’re more like friends, we’re hanging out together. So we share a lot of Calgary events, that we think fit in Chinese immigrant newcomers, as they don’t want to be very public, by themselves. 

One of those events, the first couple times we took them is the Back Alley dancing event, and all of the Chinese girls was just stood up there and awkward looking at each other and don’t move at all. So in a future group chat share, we cut of those very like active events where you need a lot of movement and need public facing event, it’s more like a private, cozy event so they are more comfortable to go with us, like three or four people. So we kind of have like really close chat with people.  

Once they become very familiar to each other and then they see the group chat is a safe place, so they actually began to asking like a lot of our questions in a group chat, like, where can I buy this oil painting and where is, do you have any dance, dance teacher recommend so that this become like a community hub that people can share what they need. 

And then later on we received a lot of feedback. They told us, oh, I love this group so much because I know what to do in the next Friday. I was like, oh, I don’t know why nobody come with us. So we just come, we’re still friends. Okay. That’s good. As long as they feel belongs to here and we’re happy.  

Tyson: All right, I’m going to throw in and pull another question here before I get, okay, and I think hopefully you all maybe have thought a little bit about this because when we initially, when I was prompted with this, with this opportunity, it really was about, okay, we’re going to maybe be able to support X amount of artists, 15 or 16 artists who are all individuals, and then we were then going to then get them all paired up and seeing and identify interest and like that to me it was like, oh, that sounds a lot harder. What would it look like to just have, be in a collective? And I guess I’m wondering from, from maybe some of you, that collective piece, because each of you kind of came in at different ways of being at what is considered a collective, right. Some of you are a bit more, further along in that in those relationships, some of you are, you know, married to the people you’re in collectives with. So I’m just wondering, like, what was that like? Because oftentimes I think we think artists are actually individuals, I’m an artist and I do these particular practice in these particular ways, so I’m just wondering a little bit about that collective piece, because I think that was what was also maybe really unique about this program.  

Tee: Okay, I can start. Great. By the way, everyone, if you didn’t notice, I have the flu, I apologize. I love my collective and it might make it easier that we all have relationships outside of the collective, like, we’re all friends and we work together, but, it felt like, you know, when you’re in a group project at university and then everybody’s just on the go and like, about, they’re doing their own parts and like, everything just comes to fruition and it’s just so perfect. That’s how I felt the entire time working with these guys. 

And I was saying to Helen today that even with the entire, like, project, meeting everybody that was in their separate collectives as well, it felt like we were all handpicked to be friends, like everyone is so pleasant. And every meeting we had was just truly, always wonderful. But yeah, it made the project a lot easier because it’s very easy for a project like this to get overwhelming. There’s a lot of moving parts, but with everybody and everybody doing their own part and showing up in their best selves, it went wonderfully in my opinion.  

Tyson: Great, and we’re looking forward to hearing more about it later on. Anyone else want to share about like, that collective piece and, and those relationships that maybe formed because of your having to work with those people. 

Lex: I can share. Fem Assembly, it like, took a long break before we got into this project. We were kind of all just like taking a step back to, like, regroup and then, like, figure out what the next steps were. So we hadn’t really come back together until this project. And we had Christina, one of our members, approach us and asked if we wanted to do it, and so it was actually a really beautiful way of coming back together and getting to, like, think about what is the next step for Fem moving forward.  

And yeah, I think after like, having not done a lot of group work in the past year, it always just reminds me how beautiful it is to collaborate with people and it becomes so much less about, like, what you’re doing and, like, I guess, like, in some ways a little more like logistical side, because you get to have fun while you’re doing it, and bouncing ideas off of each other. The responsibility feels like a lighter weight.  

And so I think that, like coming into this project, I think on one hand it was like so much about continuing to build the relationships and the depth within our collective as well as us being able to grow as an overall cohort collective, and I agree, it was, I think, coming out of even our initial weekend, like the intensive, like everyone was like, we don’t get to see each other anymore? 

Like there’s so much beautiful thought that came from it. And it felt like a really safe space to be able to explore ideas, both individually, as well as within our collectives and being able to bring those forward because that space was there for it. Yeah.  

Tyson: Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Anyone else want to share about, the collective experience? 

Zaria: I just want to say, like, we are in the process, we’re not friends, like we’re not husband and wife, and we fight a lot. And there is always like this criticism to each other. And which is good. Yeah. Which was like fun. Like, I want to make an idea, I want to like an idea and, it’s interesting, it’s fun. The good thing is, like, there is a criticism in there, and even though we’re, like, husband and wife and eventually agree on something and, yeah, it takes a lot. And I think this project basically, like, made us know each other more because, like, in life, I cannot be, like a critical thinker, but in projects like, I can be like, I can think very quickly, I guess, Mario figure out that thing about me, about my personality, which he doesn’t really know about in life. Which is a really beautiful journey. Like this, project. Yeah. Just wanted to share that. 

Christy: For me, my collective really was made up of family. It’s like I got my partner, James, my sister Sherry, and my niece, Olivia. And really, they have helped me in the past doing different, like, art activations and things like that. Maybe more voluntold than actually… So I think this project actually allowed them to be part of actually the brainstorming and coming up with ideas and seeing how my brain works and actually being part of it too. So that was wonderful. 

Tyson: Now. Can I also add this comment when I went to, the Night Light event, you had your booth, which was like the, you know, your business, and then there was this, your project on another booth. And so it was just so interesting because I know your art practice and I’ve, you know, bumped into you at all kinds of different places over the years and I know what you do, but it was really cool to see all of them just doing their thing, and just like supporting this work specifically, and just that like that, that yeah, it the reality that once we I think are so empowered to be creative and like having that space you just like get with it, right. You just, it happens. And it was really cool to see something like, oh I’m not I’m, I’m not, I’m not an artist, no, forget all of that. You just can like, you know, raise your hand, get involved and whatever that might look like. So cool. It’s really cool to see that whole family affair is awesome. 

Mao, do you want to share?  

Mao: Yeah. So, my collective is Ziya and Chris. There is my longtime friend. We’ve been together, hang out together for eight years, and then we’ve been with Chris, we date each other for eight years. So three of us, all grad graduate from the same school, same program, so we know each other a long, long, long time. 

And me and Chris have been collaborating for like about five years, we also get in a lot of fights. And when we applied to this project, we’re thinking, what if we get Ziya into our fight? That’d be great. So, we kind of have like a very rough idea about what we want to do, and then I talk to Ziya of course, she’s my best friend, and then we have exactly the same, similar idea about this project. So we’re like, okay, Ziya, you’re in the fight.  

And then I think for overall I feel it’s nice that have different people, we have different skill set, and then we can we do the things more efficiently rather than one people need to do every single thing because everyone can show different type of energy to doing same things, right. 

So for in this way we feel just a lot of more efficient. And then also from the collaboration process we learn each other a lot more, too, because sometimes you want like in daily life as friends or as like me and Chris just do our own project, it’s different to like three of us or four of us working together, like I know them more and then I know Chris more and then we know what, even the Chinese community more so I think this, collaboration process is very valuable. 

Tyson: Well, thanks for all of you sharing that. I think, when I was thinking about when I think about, like the idea of tag, you’re it, it was because I was seeing all these really awesome relationships being formed and producing art together. I mean, oh, I want have more opportunities to like, do art with people and I think that’s so that, you know, it was so really inspiring for me to see in which, having been sort of an individual artist for so long, in a lot of ways, being able to really be inspired to kind of build on those connections. 

All right. So we’re going to go to our last question, which is for you, Tee, so congratulations, we won. And we’re thinking about building towards 2029, right, the next civic election. But like, what are you all and maybe Ayo, but like, what do you feel like we can be doing in the interim. Now that, like, we’re, we’re at this space of like, opportunity around inspiring others to get civically engaged. What does that maybe look like?  

Tee: Congratulations to everyone involved with the win. I feel like one of the things that we learned with this project was that Calgarians are very willing and ready to engage with art that sparks conversations about civic engagement. And I don’t want that fire to die down, so in the meantime, while we’re waiting for the next municipal election in 2029, I think that this is like prime time to, you know, prep ourselves and grow more with our engagement with the community. We should foster those relationships that we already made or created during this process. And, you know, maybe do more workshops, maybe if CADA has some extra money that they’d be willing to give to us, we could, you know, make, do more programs and engage more people in the community, do little projects here and there that, you know, continue these conversations in preparation for the next municipal election so that, you know, it doesn’t just it’s not just the thing that we do, maybe the year or the month before the election, it’s something that is constantly being talked about and constantly, you know, oiling that wheel so people know that this is their duty and that they should not be ashamed to come out and vote. It’s cool, it’s cool to be part of the political process. And I think that the more that we do, you know, any kind of more art pieces, more projects, you know, engage more artists in this sector, the city is very willing to accept civic engagement in the form that we are putting it out. 

So, yeah, that would be my thought. 

Rachel: Yeah. We did a lot of analysis about this program, and all of us were all involved and filling out pretty detailed reports. And some of the main takeaways were that there really is a huge appetite for this kind of work. And so for anyone in the audience who wasn’t involved but is interested in being involved, like, I think you’ll be met with a lot of great response from your community. And especially you all found success doing things in public spaces, those might be online public spaces like the chat that you founded or other public spaces and getting people to engage in conversation. And like this, there’s this idea of not talking at anyone about civic participation but really talking with them. And there are all these, like, fun, creative, artistic ways that you can bring people in, like really striking visuals, which you’ll see as you see the collectives, and this curiosity and playfulness and that people really want to be in community together, even if they’re strangers.  

Tyson: You know, I want to say thank you to each of you, for sharing and coming up here and being part of this panel. And I think to, Tee, the question, I prompt you with is like 2029, absolutely, let’s go for it. But I think to the conversation, that Patti really started us off today, it’s like there are there’s the next crisis, there’s the next thing and civic participation can take many forms of getting people involved in their civic life, whatever that might look like, and I want to be able to see more art being part of that conversation, because I think what we really demonstrated today, or what we’ve done for the last six months, is that that is a conduit in which so many people get to experience and to consider what this means and what this looks like, versus just sort of being told to point talked at. And I think so many of our activism, that, you know, so Rachel demands actually art and creativity, and I really want to, give you all a round of applause for coming up and sharing about your experience. You may all leave. 

Patti: All right. Thank you all very much for that. We’re gonna break for lunch shortly. But before we do that, we did want to provide you with an opportunity to hear a little bit more about the projects directly from the, it wasn’t me, I didn’t do anything, directly to the artists who are, who led those projects and created them. 

So, what we’re going to do is, before we break, I want to invite two of the artist collectives to give you a very short presentation about their activations. So we’ll start with Crate-ive Crew who will talk about their project, and then we’ll have Triple A come up and talk about their project. So, Christy, are you bringing the gang or is it you, the whole family? 

Fantastic. 

James Carless: Hello. Oh, there we go. All right, so we’ll, yeah, we’re, the Crate-ive Crew with Project Your Voice. So we’ll share a quick video that maybe give a little bit of a flavour of what the project actually looked like on the ground. 

(video) 

Perfect. So, hopefully, thanks very much, so hopefully that gave you a sense of, yeah, just what the variety of activations are, what our capture process was, what our presentation process was. And hopefully it maybe looked a little bit familiar, as some of you may have engaged with a micro version of our activation downstairs.  

So just to back things up a little bit, so we are the Crate-ive Crew, I’ll do a few introductions here. I’m James Carless, I’m a creative director and designer, and I try to bring a community-minded focus into my work as much as possible. And then we have Christy Herdman, she is an art therapist, and she’s the creator of Crate Art Therapy. And we also have Sherry, who has a science background, is passionate about STEM, she’s also a youth community leader with the Girl Guides. And then to keep the family rolling, we also have Olivia Kenneway here. So she was our representative of sort of the youth community. So we didn’t feel it was right that it was just adults coming in, so we brought her on, and she was essential in bringing our activations to life and also keeping us honest and telling us when her ideas were maybe not relevant to the community we were trying to engage with. 

So, yeah, just to go back, how did we actually get here in the first place? And you had a little bit of a flavour of this from Christy’s conversation in that round table. But the challenge we highlighted in those initial sort of intensives was that youth voices often go unheard in civic conversations. And yeah, it’s really sort of upsetting just because, yeah, the decisions made by civic leaders today have a really, you know, oversized impact in their futures, so we should be maybe taking them those voices to heart and hearing them and being able to elevate those. So we saw that as sort of as a central challenge for our group.  

So what was our solution? So our idea was to turn self-expression into visible impact. And the idea is to project those youth messages of hope and change into art and light and light being really essential, we thought that was a, you know, sort of a key part of bringing the, animating those ideas further, maybe capturing, that engagement and interest with the community are trying to engage with.  

So, as you’ve been kind of hearing throughout this whole thing about SMARTIE and planning and objectives, you know, we made a plan. So, you know, we had this idea, okay, what youth. Okay. How many? So ultimately we said, okay, we want to engage first time or maybe coming of age voters and youth. So in that 13 to 22, so people that are maybe this would be their first election or those that are going to be coming up to voting age soon. We wanted to still capture that, but we did want to, you know, box yourselves in a little bit. 

We also wanted to set a goal of representing a diverse set of communities. So that meant, you know, multiple activations. We realized doing one would only capture a very small group within a very small region. So we wanted to move around a bit and make sure we were getting a little bit of diversity in adding that inclusive, consideration into the work. 

And so ultimately we wanted to, our like measurable objective was to gather 100 voices by October 20. And again, we’re starting in June here, so we said, okay, that feels sizable enough, but also actually very achievable.  

So then we have our goal. We know who we’re speaking with, yes it’s time to put the plan into action. And so you probably noticed downstairs we started out by we wanted to ask one simple but important question: what kind of city would you vote for? And this was by design. We wanted to keep the question quite simple because we didn’t want to influence where the conversations may lead to the voices or what was, you know, passionate, what these youth were passionate about. So we kept it quite simple. Now, this wasn’t the only thing we asked what you experienced downstairs, we simply posed the question. In the workshop environment, there’s quite a bit of framing education, we go through the actual craft as well, but ultimately it sort of boils down to this singular question.  

And then we have the question as sort of highlighted there. We used art and STEM and light to illuminate responses. So that meant, you know, we as we’ve sort of highlighted, Christy touched on it, you know, we’re adapting to different environments. 

So in some environments were crafting small handmade projectors, we did use overhead transparencies, which you saw downstairs. Again, we want to just keep reinforcing that idea of projection, light and, you know, illuminating and blowing up those voices.  

We made box-style LED projectors early on, which you can actually see in that photo there. And Christy again highlighted that we actually had to change that a little bit because maybe people weren’t, maybe the youth were maybe engaging with it as much or as interesting. So and also at, at some of the mayoral debates, showing real time digital projections again, to kind of adapt to the environment, we were sort of working in.  

So I’ll pass it over to Sherry and she’ll kind of run through the results here. Yeah. 

Sherry Kenneway: Thanks, James. Yeah. So we were quite delighted with our results. In total, for our specific demographic of youth ages 13 to 22, we were able to collect 209 messages. But I do want to highlight at Night Light, like mentioned previously, we didn’t turn away anyone, so in total, we collected 538 different messages. So that’s pretty exciting. That was way more than we thought. And we actually ran out of materials before Night Light was even over. So it was exciting.  

We had a total of 18 different activations. Ten of these were workshops where we did them at schools, where we worked with teachers. We worked with three different schools. We would have loved to have done a few more, but the strike kind of hindered that, so we kind of pivoted. We used community spaces, community centres, the library, the YMCA. So we were able to do a few more workshops there.  

As well, we had six pop up events, including Night Light. We did some at the Central Library for the mayoral debate. Jack Singer Hall for the mayoral debate. More at the YMCA, as well you sort of saw that we did some large-scale projections where we were able to just. Oh, sorry. We’re able to show our overall finished project of all the voices that we had collected. So we did that at Tompkins Park on 17^th Ave., that was fun. As well. We went and tried to go as big as we could, and we went down the street to Western Canada High School, and I don’t know if that was one of my favourite parts of it, just seeing it so big and being able to share. We had students come by and it was like a Saturday night, but they’re like, hey, what’s going on? So that was a pretty exciting part. It was also fun at the mayoral debates where we actually got to talk to Jeromy Farkas, at one point he came up, this is before he was mayor and was really like, what’s going on? So, that was exciting too, to not only collect voices, but then to actually talk to people who might be able to make an impact.  

So our key takeaways from this project, this hands-on art, it really, we invited people to help collaborate and develop our art project with us, as this hands-on art invites a deeper participation than just discussion alone. 

So it was a great way to get people talking. We used the phrase, hey, would you like to come help us with an art project? And we found that really invited people in and they were like, yeah, what’s your art project about? And then we could get them talking about it and, explaining that we were trying to increase civic engagement and it was really, really a great way to get those conversations going. 

One of the biggest things we learned was the ability to pivot. We had to keep on changing, the prototypes were excellent, that whole strategy. And so we were continuing to pivot in a whole bunch of different ways. But I feel like every single way we kept that objective in mind and were able to meet our goals by adapting to all the different audiences.  

Light was definitely a powerful tool. We were excited about the light, but it definitely drew everybody in and it was just so fun. Like at Night Light, we had this kind of mini little projector that we could put the person’s message and it would show up on the backside of the tent. And people were just so excited to, like, run around and see their message on the tent and to see it up there. So that was really powerful. And, and it just, some people didn’t even want to participate that way, but they love to just stand back and watch and see all the other messages. So it was definitely a great media to share, share the voices.  

So definitely art we found to be an effective tool in activism. Simple, creative acts can definitely amplify voices and inspire civic connections. So I think we were, we’ve met our goal. And it was really, really amazing experience.  

Our final thought: when you invite people to make something together, they don’t just share their ideas, they share themselves. And that’s what we found. We found lots of people just wanted to keep on talking about different civic engagement, whether it be little kids who are excited to tell you about how they love soccer and they wanted more soccer fields, or whether it was older folks who wanted to talk to you about bike lanes, or even potholes, parks, like everyone knew. we just like it was that conversation. But you know what? Like yeah. Just continue this dialog. Yeah. For those that didn’t actually share their ideas just watching like I don’t know. Oh yeah I didn’t think about that. Yeah really just press for the conversation as it did. I did for sure. So we just want to thank CADA for giving us this opportunity. This has been amazing.  

Olivia Kenneway: Thank you. That’s our presentation. Please check out our Instagram to see our activations.  

James: We’ve got all the some of the responses on there. So if you want to see what some of the youth, were submitting for, thank you very much. Thanks again. 

Patti: Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks Crate-ive Collective.  

Triple A, now we’re going to hear from Triple A, who’s coming down for that? 

Mao: Hello everyone. We are Triple A, my name is Mao, Ziya, and that’s Chris. Yeah. So, you can see, our activation is exploring how, art composed, belonging for Chinese and East Asian Calgarians for this whole project, with more focus on the Chinese first immigrations. So we have a couple different activities including Civic Toolkit, which, we’ll explain more, and though so community art hoops is basically like, we share the art event and then we take people to there. And also our final activation is hands on ceramic tile painting workshop.  

So our main goal is we’re really trying to get Chinese people to go out and then to do a lot of events that was, a lot of events that are create for mass public that a lot of time Chinese people have a hard time to access. 

Yeah. So in, in our three-day activation with Rachel and Tyson, which really helped us to clear our mind and have a better understanding what we need to do and also clear object or clear objectives and using the SMARTIE measurement, which is all very helpful. So in this image you can see like the first one is we did a lot of brainstorming about our strategies and a way in which know what we are going to do, what I the hoops we’re going to look like. 

And then also we did the like a tiny prototype with the sticky notes, which is, with all our other five, our other four group together. It’s really helpful for us to design a future event. So through the discussion we’re having that three-day, we feel like there’s three main barriers for Chinese people that not going out for first generation Chinese immigrants. So we thought first one was the language barrier because English is not our first language. And then also, information accessible. And then the third one would be like a structural barrier as well. Like, as we know how Chinese civic engagement would be like, automatically different from here.  

So that’s what we thought, but the result is kind of different. That’s not actually the top three. And then we are going to share about the next how do we build up the WeChat.  

Ziya Lin: Yes. So after having those reflections and discussion, we decided to start with some warming up activities. Firstly, we created a WeChat group, and this group is called the Triple A Art Club, and we grew this group quickly to over 100 members in about one month or just a couple of weeks.  

So after having this foundation, we started to share some  cultural or civic events in the group in Mandarin, and because our idea of having this social media group is very simple because we wanted to send a message to other people that we are the friends who want to just share the fun art event with them and also want to go with them together. 

And so after having this community foundation, we started to bring the things in action, and we organized a monthly art trip, which was we bring the people to, like a small trip around the city to bringing them for example, to bring them to the Clay Club for the workshops, and to bring them to, and then there’s like, a VR boxing event, activities at Quickdraw, and also like some outdoor night market and music events.  

And there was the, our first trip was very impressive because I remember that day we would end up the day by a bubble tea chatting until 1am. So, magical energy from the bubble tea. Yes. Highly recommend it if you feel is exhausted.  

So, okay, so that experience told us that our people, our community people they actually crave social connection and our format, format of creating an art club, this method works because it creates a comfortable environment setting for people to socialize. And for the next, for further understanding our community, we also yes, thank you, we also created an online survey, and the goal of this survey, we just wanted to understand, what really keeps people away from the civic activities and what they actually need.  

And for this survey, we totally received around 59 responses, and there are some details I wanted to highlight here. The first one is about 41.1% of people said that civic engagement is very important to them, but they don’t know how to participate in. And the second one is about 46.4% of people suppose their knowledge about the municipal systems is very little, and don’t know how they could access the civic platforms or the related resources. So these results of the survey help us to figure out key barriers that we need to break, these barriers, including the language barrier, the lack of accessible information and the low perceived relevance.  

And this insight guided our next step, which was where we created a Civic Toolkit for our community. And this toolkit, it is listing all Calgary’s municipal, cultural and community support information and resources. And all this information is written in both English and Mandarin. And we hosted this toolkit on a permanent website and generate the website link as a QR code for making it easily to access to. 

And after doing all the preparation warming up activities, we also did a rehearsal for our final activation, which is we called it like a prototype workshop. We invited nine participants to attend this workshop prototype and also received many constructive feedback from these participants. 

The participants told us that this kind of events or the programs that led to Creating Our Calgary can make them feel more connected to the city, and they expected to have more and more this kind of program in future. From their feedback, we also learned that the location of the workshop venue does matter. People told us that if the venue is in somewhere they are familiar with, they could feel more comfortable, those areas, those venues, places such as the Calgary’s downtown area or the university spaces.  

Since we also recognize the many Chinese immigrants in Calgary are the university alumni, so we decided to choose the university campus as the final location for our final activation, and decided to collaborate with a student association, which is the Chinese Graduate Student Association. They help us to book the venue, managing the catering, which allowed us to have for more time and energy, focusing on their preparing the campaign materials and refining our final workshops.  

And this is there are all the words created during the prototype workshop that was, where we, amazing and where we were very impressive by people’s creativity. 

And for the next part, I will pass it over to Chris to share about our final activation workshops and what the challenges we met.  

Chris Savage: Awesome. Okay. Thanks, everybody. So as you mentioned, she’s sort of leaving off right after the prototype when we finished and we got a lot of really important feedback from that to help us develop the final activation. 

So we began with sort of developing our campaign. We wanted a way to give, make sure the participants could access the civic toolkit as easily as possible. So on the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll see a postcard there, the front on the top and the back on the bottom. We designed the postcard as we heard from some people that had signed up for the workshop, that there were a lot of young families coming as well, which we didn’t expect, but were really excited. 

So, we designed this postcard to also be a colouring page, just in case some kids got a little bit restless and wanted something else to do. We have some of those with us downstairs, we have a little table in the community living room. So, come over and do some colouring later on this afternoon if you like. 

So with that, yeah, we finished that design, got our poster ready, created some nametags for the volunteers and the rest of the team for the final activation and began to establish our marketing campaign. But before I get into that, one last thing on the bottom right-hand side of the screen, this was something that came out of the prototype. 

A lot of the attendees were artists themselves or people that work within the arts. So the feedback was super valuable that they offered us. And one of the big things, that they suggested was that because, people may be coming to this activation without any artistic experience or background, they may not feel comfortable drawing right on the tile, explaining their civic connection to Calgary, so we just, designed a little placemat to have at each spot of the workshop so people could do a little bit of sketching, and designing before they, they worked on their tile.  

We ended up choosing a tile workshop, just because of the connection back to China. Ceramics have such a long history within China, and Mao and I also run a ceramics studio together, so it felt like quite a natural fit. And Ziya works in craft and art as well. So it was something that was very familiar to us and was also very approachable for a lot of newcomers, maybe making them feel comfortable and maybe, give them a sense of home. 

So we had this like 10-point marketing plan and we were really excited to start rolling that out. And of course the WeChat group had already grown quite substantially at that time already. So, you know, we initially just posted the link, with only 40 spots for the workshop. That was where we started at. And within a day it had already filled up. So we thought, okay, this is great, people are definitely connecting with the workshop that we’ve designed. And so we opened up 10 more spots and they filled up within hours, and then we had to cap it at 62. We found our room at the University of Calgary, and the max amount of people that we could have in for the fire code was 74, so 62 attendees with the seven volunteers and ourselves, brought us right up to that maximum.  

So, this was really encouraging and really also a little bit kind of scary as it was, very much real at this point. And, you know, the amount of people that we had originally prepared for it, we had quite a few, quite a few more folks that were going to join us.  

So, that really set things in motion and got us into kind of high gear to prepare for the workshop. So on the final activation day, after we set up the room with the volunteers, Mao and Ziya led a little presentation all around civic engagement. It was delivered in Mandarin, the majority of the folks that joined were Mandarin speaking, but we also had volunteers around that could help translate into Cantonese as well as English for anybody that maybe wasn’t fluent in either of those, dialects. 

So they began off with the presentation and then led into a little bit of a workshop demo, and then for the rest of the afternoon people were kind of off to the races working on their tiles. So guided by the prompts, there were a couple of options all related to, like, what makes them feel a sense of belonging here to Calgary. 

So while they were working away on their tiles, either sketching on the placemat first or maybe doing a little colouring on the postcard to get kind of warmed up, ourselves and the volunteers were kind of circulating around helping people, think about some ideas as well as, you know, did a little bit of, drawing with them as well. 

Our volunteer team was really incredible. I think it’s really important to give them some acknowledgment and a shout-out here, (Chris names the volunteers) were really essential in making the day the success that it was. This wonderful photo is of (Chris names a volunteer) helping out some of the young participants with their tile drawings. 

So it was like a really energized environment. People were really quite active after the initial sort of like, creative focus had worn up, people were very, engaged, cruising around, chatting with one another, and at this time, towards the end, we handed out a survey. So the initial survey we did online through the WeChat group, and then we did a second kind of like close-out survey, on the day of the event with all the participants. So there’s definitely some overlap in terms of the individuals. Maybe we had a couple that did both, but we got some really interesting data sets from kind of like before, as well as after that, we’ll look into a little bit here. So this is just an image of some of the volunteers collecting up the surveys.  

In order to entice people to fill those out, you know, and I think we experienced this ourselves as well, you’re asked to do a survey at the end of something, and it’s maybe not the most exciting thing, or maybe just like you want to get out there, you have your tile done and you just want to you want to take off and go home or go grab a snack. So to entice people to actually fill out those surveys, we did some little draws, prize draws right at the end, and that really ensured that, we got a pretty good sample size. 

So also towards the end of the survey and on the left-hand side, it’s just a shot of, some sketching that had been done, as well as a little bit of coloring on one of the postcards. We encouraged folks to bring their tiles to the back, I was set up with a little photo station. While I wasn’t taking photos around the room, I was chatting to folks about their tile design as well as capturing them. 

We, initially, our plan was to find a space to display all these tiles afterwards, but after a lot of conversations with our group, and the cohort through our monthly meetings, we decided that it might be nicer for people to have something to walk away with that day, and if we could get some digital documentation, it would open up some possibilities, to potentially do something with that in the future. 

So this next image shows about 36 of the tiles that were completed on the day of the final activation. Not everybody wanted to have their tile photographed, and that was completely okay. But, for me, that was my favourite part of the day as I had the chance to kind of, like, talk to a lot of people about their drawings, and, you know, how that related to their, yeah, their life here in Calgary and how they engage with, with the civics.  

So one of my favourites, is a dinosaur drawing kind of in the upper left there by Archie. He was a young boy that had come with his mum to the workshop, and when he brought that tile up on his own to have it photographed, I was like pretty excited to chat to him about this dinosaur. I thought I, you know, had a good understanding of, of dinosaurs, you know, been to the Royal Tyrrell and down to Dinosaur Park, so I thought, oh, great, we’re going to have a really awesome conversation here. So, when he when he approached, I said, wow, this is a really, really incredible dinosaur, is this, is this a T-Rex? And very quickly he shut that down and corrected me. He gave me, like, the proper name, I can’t recall exactly what it was, but he was very much an expert, so it was really wonderful to be able to learn from him through that.  

A couple of other themes that kind of immersed or revealed themselves through looking at a lot of the tiles after we had compiled, this image, the natural environment is really important to people, the ability to experience that with their families and their pets. And the other big one was, kind of like, you know, a safe place to call home where they can sort of enjoy themselves, be themselves, you know, engage with maybe their favourite sports teams or perhaps their favourite anime or cartoons. 

So we were really happy with how, this all came out and had a lot at this point, had a lot of data to kind of sift through. So we spent, pretty much the time between that final activation and some of our, the final meeting with the cohort, Creating Our Calgary cohort, unpacking a little bit of that data and trying to understand a little bit about where some of the changes had happened. 

We were really excited with the post-activation survey results and are just going to share a little bit of, some of the comparative data that came out of it. So at the beginning, right, this is the, on the left-hand side at the top there, that image is the same question as the first, from the first survey. So, at that point there were 41, a little over 41%. They believe that it was somewhat important, but they maybe didn’t know how to engage with it. After the final activation, the presentation and the tile painting process, we found that from the 39 responses we got, just under 70%, described it as being very important and that they had a better understanding of how to engage. 

So this, is something that we are still kind of going through a little bit, and digesting and thinking about, you know, how that can impact, the collective moving forward and future projects.  

So this is just sort of a side-by-side comparison, showing quite a bit of the overall growth that we saw between those surveys. So like, tons of increases in knowing how to contact city council, just under a 30% increase from the people that we engaged with.  

So, yeah, it was really rewarding to get to look at this data afterwards. And, yeah, it’s going to help us choose some of the directions moving forward and, to talk a little bit more about that, I’ll pass things off to Mao. 

Mao: So, at the end of our presentation, I really feel like this project, we spent a lot of time, and then I feel there’s a big future for us. Like the WeChat still going on, we still share a lot of, like, where to do and where to see in Calgary and then people become making friends to each other, which is great, and even better is like now we have some organizations approach to us and say, oh, we really like you, what you do and do interesting collaboration with us. One is diversity, another one is Calgary, it’s Asian Heritage Foundation. And then the other one, very exciting is one of our volunteers, Tony, goes through of the event with us. And then he’s a long term, volunteer or the different type of activities, but he decided to form his own civic group under the University of Calgary alumni. So he actually wants to start, Chinese alumni and using and thinking about how can we use this tool kit to benefit more people. So, yeah, I think that’s all our project. And thank you so much for your patience.