Archive for August, 2011

Culture Days Stories: Catherine – Kingston, ON (Part 2)

August 25th, 2011 by Culture Days

“Confessions of a First-Time Organizer” a great blog post written by Catherine (aka Kingston Through My Lens) and is the second installment in a series of posts that documents her experience and participation in Culture Days 2011.

Click here to read Catherine’s previous post.

Organizing Kingston Through My Lens has definitely been a whirlwind adventure. We’ve experienced many ups and downs, but already the results are amazing. We’ve inspired multiple other photography projects, and we’re looking forward to the start of the project. Thinking back, there are three things that I have gleaned from starting this initiative. They’re my three tips for successful community engagement practice if you will.

Be excited and spread the word

People need to know what you’re up to, and they need to see that you believe in the project. Bring other people on board who can share that excitement with you as well.

Dream big and be flexible, but never lose sight of your mission

You need to have a clear goal of what you hope to achieve from your project while being able to adapt to the circumstances. We all have the ability to be creative, so tap into that! It’s really important, though, to remember why you decided to start the project in the first place, and to make sure the end result is true to that original vision.

Use your connections and don’t be afraid to build new ones

Starting with the people you already know is a great way to go. Further to that, with technology and online media being what it is today, it’s even easier to send someone an email and let them know what you’re doing. You’ll be surprised with how willing people are to meet you and learn more about your project.

Click here to learn more about the Kingston Through My Lens project and follow Catherine’s Culture Days journey.

If you have something to say about public participation and engagement in arts and culture, post it on the Culture Days blog! Submit your vision or post from your own blog via email at stories@culturedays.ca and Culture Days will share your story with the growing network.

View Comments | Posted in Community spotlight, Culture Days stories, Ontario, community organizers, for activity organizers, opinions, ways to get involved | Tags: , , , , , ,

Manitoba Arts Mavin: Jean Giguère Gets First Time Arts Volunteer Award

August 17th, 2011 by manitoba

Article appeared in Lifestyles 55 (July, 2011)

Jean Giguère, former chair of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and well-known arts volunteer in Winnipeg, was given the very first Arts Volunteers of the Year award at the fifth annual Mayor’s Luncheon organized by the Winnipeg Arts Council June 9. The awards luncheon is held every June to recognize outstanding achievement in the arts field in Winnipeg.

Jean was the spark plug behind Culture Days, celebrated across Canada for the very first time in 2010. Because of Jean’s energy and advocacy, Winnipeg was the launching pad for Culture Days and the focal point for much of the media coverage. Culture Days is modeled on a Quebec program called Journées de la Culture, where the public is invited inside the arts community.

Jean Giguère has been a champion for Winnipeg and it cultural activities for many years. She has served on the board of the Manitoba Theatre Centre, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Writers’ Trust, the Writers Festival, the United Way and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, to mention just a few of her involvements. She has also been chair of the National Arts Summit and is on the board of Business for the Arts.

But it was Culture Days that gave Jean her biggest leadership challenge. Starting from zero, she pulled together a diverse group of people to form a steering committee and got their commitment and involvement across Manitoba, while constantly ensuring that Manitoba got the lion’s share of the credit at the national level for leading the way to a successful launch of the program.

Jean has a natural affinity for energetic people and she enlisted the support of the indefatigable Crystal Kolt, the director of the Flin Flon Community Choir and the cultural co-ordinator of the Flin Flon Arts Council, to organize Northern Manitoba, ensuring that Culture Days was not just a Winnipeg phenomenon.

It would work best, Jean felt, if the Franco-Manitoban community was involved, and she quickly brought Sylviane Lanthier from the Centre culturel franco-manitobain; Sylviane helped obtain the seed funds to get Culture Days started. Then Jean went to work on the rest of the funding, found office space and hired a staff person to manage the program. This is noted to indicate the depth of endeavour that getting Culture Days off the ground locally required.

But nobody, knowing Jean Giguère, would be at all surprised. She is a down to earth, warm hearted woman who looks life right in the eye and tackles things head on. She is an adopted Winnipegger but one of the city’s most loyal and staunch supporters. Sports may have Mark Chipman as their champion, but Winnipeg has Jean. When told how lucky Winnipeg is to now have a new NHL franchise, she responded by saying that the NHL is lucky to have Winnipeg.

It goes without saying more that Winnipeg is lucky to have Jean Giguère.


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Waabi-ma’iingan (Grey Wolf) Traditional Teaching Lodge – Thunder Bay, ON

August 12th, 2011 by Culture Days

Nazanin Shoja, the OAC Culture Days Ontario Animator/Coordinator spoke with Cynthia Coons, Assistant Coordinator of the Waabi-ma’iingan (Grey Wolf) Traditional Teaching Lodge about what they offered the residents of Thunder Bay, ON during Culture Days 2010.

Culture Days – Who are you and what do you do?

Cynthia Coons – Waabi-ma’iingan is a teaching lodge which reconnects people with their spiritual side. We have ceremonies 4 times a year, Elders and Youth Gatherings once a year and a sharing circle every two weeks. At Waabi-ma’iingan, we encourage tolerance and offer a comfortable environment where non-aboriginals can learn about Aboriginal culture as well.

CD – What made your 2010 Culture Days activity unique?

CC – We held an Elders and Youth Gathering entitled “Voices from the Past, For Tomorrow.” We had Elders come from 50 different communities, from all over Ontario. Many people were invited to come to the lodge to listen to the Elders speak.

CD – What inspired or surprised you about Culture Days?

CC – The event was very successful. People kept asking when the next one would be happening.

CD – What do you feel is the impact of culture in your community?

CC – There has been a very positive impact. On the last day of the event, the youth were invited to speak. They discussed issues such as racism and expressed their desire to learn more about their culture and reconnect with their native language and heritage. As a result of these discussions, the lodge has been going to St. Pat’s high school, where an Aboriginal counselor visits with the students and teaches them about Aboriginal culture and traditions. They are also in the process of arranging a sweat lodge for them, since they had no access to that before.

View Comments | Posted in Community spotlight, Culture Days 2010, Ontario, community organizers, opinions, seen, uncategorized | Tags: , , , ,

Culture Days Stories: Catherine – Kingston, ON

August 11th, 2011 by Culture Days

Here’s a great blog post written by Catherine (aka Kingston Through My Lens) that documents her experience as a first-time activity organizer.

If you were to look in my desk, you would find a thick brown notebook filled with many of my hopeful community initiatives. The ideas in this notebook range from book swaps to transit reform, small art projects to large institutional changes. The majority of these ideas will remain just that – ideas. However, within those ideas are scattered a few creative seeds that do manage to take root, and will one day blossom into something bigger and better.

Near the beginning of this book, dated sometime in February, you will find scribblings from the start of my current project, Kingston Through My Lens. In a nutshell, Kingston Through My Lens is a 10-day, themed photo adventure that hopes to capture life in Kingston as is. It aims to allow the people of the community to see where their life intersects with the lives of others, and to bring everyone together to affect change within the city. Every day, participants will submit one photo, which will be added to a growing collection to be exhibited both online as well as in print during Kingston Culture Days. At the print exhibit, everyone will be able to experience the photographers’ stories and pictures, and they will get a chance to add their own stories to the collection. At its core, Kingston Through My Lens is about community creation, conversation, and transformation.

Over the last few months, I have been asked on multiple occasions to encapsulate the growing process of Kingston Through My Lens. The story you are about to read is my attempt at putting those thoughts down on paper, of documenting how this idea really came to be. This is a story of what happens when you give one idea a chance – a chance to grow, to develop, and to adapt to the world that it is born into.

For the past five years, I’ve had the privilege of living and learning in Kingston, Ontario. Kingston is a mid-sized town in Eastern Ontario with a lot of history and a bright future. Its claims to fame include being Canada’s first capital city and home to Queen’s University, where I recently graduated from the Faculty of Education. Kingston is no stranger to community events, and with its friendly atmosphere, it seemed the most suitable place for me to try my hand at organizing my own community initiative.

Something you need to know about me is that I am no professional photographer. Mostly, I use my point and shoot camera to capture the world around me. Despite my limited experience, one thing I know for sure is that a picture is worth a thousand words. And with prevalence of cameras being what it is today – phones, digital cameras, SLRs – I thought that photography would be a perfect vehicle for my first community project.

The first thing I needed to do was to get some people on board with my idea. After spending hours online looking at other projects, developing my own idea, and scoping out people who could help me, I decided to go out on a limb and email some of the people I found. The emails were simple – I told them who I was, what I wanted to do, and that I would really like to meet them. Through these emails, I ended up meeting two individuals who would both play a large role in getting Kingston Through My Lens off the ground. The very first person to respond to my emails was Greg Tilson, the program coordinator at the Kingston Arts Council. He was the one who introduced me to the Culture Days movement and who encouraged me to make this project happen right away. The second person I met was Jennifer Chan, the founder of a design thinking organization called Exhibit Change. She was someone that I had stumbled upon through Twitter, and who had a ton of experience in community building initiatives. She agreed to work with me on this project and together we started to hash out our ideas. We really liked the free, participatory, arts-driven mandate of Culture Days, so we decided to register for the movement. The project found itself the name “Through My Lens” and it was decided that Jenn would head up an exhibit in Toronto called Toronto Through My Lens, while I would continue with my vision for Kingston Through My Lens.

April was the month where we really started to get moving on the project. The Kingston Culture Days planning committee held its very first get-together, and I was invited to be part of the group. There, I met Aubrey, the Culture Days Ontario Manager, as well as some movers and shakers from the City of Kingston and other prominent local groups. It was at that first meeting that I really began to build partnerships with other organizations in Kingston who would be able to help me realize this idea.

From there, it has been a whirlwind adventure. The past few months have been full of both wonderful surprises like being given the chance to be featured in a local magazine and frustrating obstacles, such as struggling with how to print all the images. I’ve had to look into countless things, from the larger vision and how to secure sponsorships to individual logistics like how to set up the space on the day of and how many volunteers I’ll need. Days have been spent in front of the computer, setting up the website, starting up social media pages, and promoting the event. Through it all, I have relied on my supports to keep me afloat, and I often need to remind myself to share the workload and to ask for help. When in doubt, I am reminded to go back to the root of the project, which is to give people a chance to see their community in a new light, to document their everyday life, and to share it with others who live around them.

In the end, I know it will all be worth it. To be able to see people in a community enjoy themselves while getting to know their surroundings in a new and creative way – that is the greatest gift.

This post is the first in a series of blog posts that will follow Catherine’s experience and participation in Culture Days 2011.

Click here to learn more about the Kingston Through My Lens project and follow Catherine’s Culture Days journey.

If you have something to say about public participation and engagement in arts and culture, post it on the Culture Days blog! Submit your vision or post from your own blog via email at stories@culturedays.ca and Culture Days will share your story with the growing network.

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Self-Promo and Marketing Info Session – Summary

August 3rd, 2011 by Culture Days

Thanks to all who participated in last week’s Info Session on Self-Promo and Marketing!

This Info Session was the first in a series dedicated to self-promotion, so if you weren’t able to join in, mark these upcoming sessions in your calendar:

- Tuesday, August 16 at 2pm ET – Self-Promo: Public Relations

- Tuesday, August 23rd at 2pm ET – Self-Promo: Marketing Tools and Social Media

Be sure to reserve your spot for these sessions here.

Last Tuesday, we reviewed some of the FREE Culture Days marketing tools now available for download off the Culture Days web site, including: logos, e-flyers, web banners, and web badges. You can maximize the use of these tools by uploading logos to your social media profile, sending e-flyers via email, or posting the web banners and badges on your website or blog; all you have to do is simply copy and paste the provided embed code!

Culture Days will continue to release free marketing tools, including customizable posters, post cards/flyers, web banners, and more! Stay tuned for the release dates of these items, along with a PR Tool Kit, which will be made available over the next couple of weeks.

Also discussed during the Info Session was how word of mouth is a powerful and effective tool, as seen in the Culture Days elevator pitch. This pitch was created as a guide to help activity organizers explain the Culture Days movement and spread the word. There has been some great feedback about the pitch and many are creating their own! Feel free to share your pitch with the growing Culture Days network in the “Comments” section, here.

Those who participated in the Info Session also posed questions about how to find a venue and how to “hub”. In both instances, the best place to start is on the Culture Days web site. Check out the “Looking for a space to share” page – this is where available venues are listed. Also, use the search functionalities on the web site to search for other activities happening near you and see if you can work with other organizers to share venue space and resources. You can also contact your regional representative – they can connect you with other organizers and also make suggestions for possible venues.

One of the key marketing tools available to you is your activity page. With an engaging title, clear description and an enticing photo, your activity page will be ready for its close up! To learn more about how to write a captivating description, check out this informative blog post. Not sure how to upload a photo? It’s quick and easy! Click here to learn more.

Did you know that your activity page has built-in social media tools? Maximize your activity’s visibility by “liking” the activity and have it automatically shared with friends on Facebook and Twitter. Social media is a great resource when wanting to share a message to many in a short period of time – you can copy the URL for your activity page (the address for your page at the top of your web browser) and send it out to your network of friends, family, colleagues, and whoever else via email, Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media platform. Don’t forget to  ”like” and “follow” Culture Days on Facebook and Twitter, as well; Culture Days encourages cross-promotion and wants your activity to become a success, so be sure to use the Culture Days social media channels made available to you!

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