Submitted by Laur Fisher

As you walked into the Hilton Garden Inn conference room on December 8th, you could hear the energy pulsing around the room.  In fact, it was difficult to quiet it.  Here, council members, NGO and government staff, students, independent consultants, and unofficial-yet-passionate community leaders were sharing experiences from their communities.  >See pictures here.
 
The first person I met was Barb Ryan, who had flown in from Fox Creek, Alberta, her town of 2,200 a couple hours north of Edmonton.  A reporter by profession but activist by necessity, she is her community’s self-proclaimed director of sustainability.  And in this mission, she’s alone.  “People in my town just don’t get it.  They’re in denial,” she said, exasperated.  “I don’t know what to do.  I’ve hit a wall.”  This is why she is here today – “this is my challenge.”

Dayle Eshelby was invigorated.  Fourteen months ago she was appointed the Sustainability Coordinator for her island town of Lockport, Nova Scotia.  A small community of only 650, she had to start from scratch, as Lockport had no official stance on sustainability and climate change before.  “I only wish I knew about The Natural Step fourteen months ago!” she laughed, “I now have somewhere to begin.  How can I bring the four TNS principles down to a language that my community will understand?  How can I turn this into a community plan?”

This is why they, among twenty-five others, enrolled in the Community Sustainability Planning Course, a five-month online program hosted by The Natural Step.  The goal of the course is to guide community leaders through the creation and activation of their own Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP).  This was the first of two in-person workshops; the rest of the course is conducted through file sharing sessions and webinars held once a month.  So while the participants had known each other since October, this was the first time many of them were able to meet each other face-to-face.  And there was much to discuss:

How do we understand the complexity of a community’s unsustainability?  What are the traits of a successful society?  And how do we get gain town-wide consensus to move toward a collective vision?

The purpose of the workshop was to address this “sustainability gap” – the space that lies between where we are today and where we want to be in a successful, sustainable future.  Throughout the day, they dissected issues such as how to choose between engagement approaches, turn “emotional” into “creative” tension, define current sustainability challenges, and create a progressive vision for the future that everyone in the community can support.  Personally, my favorite part was a fun, though challenging, backcasting exercise which guided us through the process of closing the sustainability gap:

First, we described the community systems – what do they look like now?  And how are they failing us?  We broke into teams and scribbled our ideas on post-it notes, sticking them on the wall, discussing, debating, returning back to the four system conditions for guidance.  The more we brainstormed, the more our community’s main challenges and problem areas became obvious to us. 

Then we imagined what these systems would look like if they were flourishing, and more post-it notes went up on the wall.  Through this exercise, we were able to, even for a moment, speak as though we were living in this successful, sustainable world.  It suddenly became tangible, possible.  We then created system objectives to capture and symbolize this image.

Last, there was the step we had all been waiting for.  We knew what the challenges facing our communities were, we know the kind of world we want to create – now we could brainstorm how to get there.  This is where we let creativity loose.  A flurry of post-its celebrated the power of possibility -- all that we can do as citizens and members of our community to create this world that we have envisioned.  

It was a small group of 25 attending this workshop.  But as Margaret Mead once said, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  I saw the energy and empowerment in the room that day.  Barb and Dayle might have their work cut out for them, but they are now equipped with tools to use to move forward.  Stay tuned, because while politicians stall in Parliament and in Copenhagen, these thoughtful, committed citizens are the ones already taking action to change the world.