Community Foundations of Canada Conference

Event Our Communities, Our World: Community Foundations of Canada Conference
Date 7-9 November
Venue Montreal, Canada

Canada’s remarkable movement of community foundations (now numbering 165) brought the world to Montreal for a truly global gathering in November. Community Foundations of Canada’s biennial conference, ‘Our Communities, Our World’, drew more than 650 delegates, including participants from across Canada and from 29 other countries, to engage in an inspiring dialogue about the past, present and future of community philanthropy.

The conference opened with the launch of CFC’s new logo and vision document, ‘All for Community’, expressing the themes of inclusion and belonging that informed the whole proceedings. The keynote speaker, Canadian writer and philosopher John Ralston Saul, located the community foundation ethos in Canada’s deeply rooted impulses towards multiculturalism, community well-being and engaged citizenship – impulses he intriguingly traced to the values of the country’s aboriginal ‘First Nations’ peoples. As we confront the current global economic crisis, he proposed, we need to renew our sense of local belonging and global community, rejecting narrow utilitarian notions of atomized citizen-consumers.

The conference programme was as diverse as CFC’s vision of community, mixing compelling plenary speakers with rich concurrent peer learning sessions, a parallel ‘youth in philanthropy’ programme, a video series highlighting the work of CFC’s members, panel discussions and cultural performances. Delegates were fascinated by CFC’s innovative Vital Signs initiative, a growing series of annual local and national ‘check-up’ reports that let facts and citizens speak for themselves about key indicators of well-being in the community (see p8 of the December issue of Alliance). Already the Vital Signs idea has been taken up abroad with the publication this year of a similar publication by the Instituto Comunitario Grande Florianopolis (ICOM) in Brazil.

With the financial crisis looming large, there was a marked focus among delegates on ways in which community philanthropy organizations can have impact through non-grantmaking activities like Vital Signs; multi-stakeholder convening and partnerships; advocacy around tough issues like poverty, social exclusion and climate change; and building community leadership. ‘Leadership is the foundation,’ said CFC’s President, Monica Patten. Both Patten and Emmett Carson, of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in California, articulated the vision of a global movement of community foundations allied with others to provide leadership on shared social justice and sustainable development goals.

Africa took centre stage with a keynote address by Akwasi Aidoo, Executive Director of TrustAfrica, as well as the participation of a strong complement of African pioneers of community philanthropy. African colleagues highlighted the possibilities for reinventing philanthropy in Africa, marrying age-old traditions of community help with diaspora giving and organized social justice philanthropy. As a Canadian transplanted to Africa, I was struck by the resonances between the vision of ‘all for community’ and the African ethic of ubuntu – ‘a person is a person through other persons’. In Montreal, as we continued to digest the daily headlines of economic tumult, CFC exercised real ‘bridging leadership’ to connect the diverse visions of community we so urgently need to reclaim.

Barry Smith is Senior Director, Synergos Southern Africa. Email bsmith@synergos.org.za

For more information
www.cfc-fcc.ca/conference2008