Calling all students with an interest in food issues!

Here is your chance to participate in the consultation process for the Toronto Food Strategy's consultation report - Food Connections: Towards a Healthy and Sustainable Food System for Toronto - (www.toronto.ca/foodconnections).
Members of Toronto Public Health's Food Strategy team will facilitate a consultation session on March 19, 2010 from 9AM-11AM. Light refreshments will be provided. Location to be confirmed (later this week).

Come prepared with your suggestions and questions regarding the strategy to be presented to Toronto City Council.

CHANGING THE WORLD BY CHANGING OUR ORGANIZATIONS

Time: Friday, March 19
3:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: Centre for Social Innovation
Alterna Savings Boardroom
Free

Presented by Organization Unbound and the Centre for Social Innovation

Many of us involved in social service and social change work have been frustrated by the incoherence that can exist between our organizations' overarching visions and their internal cultures and practices. How many community organizations have we encountered that don't feel like communities? How many advocacy groups that forget to practice the things they themselves advocate?

Our experiences and early research suggest that the distinction between serving the world and nurturing our organizations is a false one. Some of the most vibrant and socially catalytic organizations we have seen are places where there is a promising confusion about who is serving whom - schools where teachers learn and grow, food banks where staff and volunteers are nourished, hospitals where doctors are healed, social justice groups where activists are surprised to find their vision of a better world taking root in their own offices. These organizations are invoking the power of something we might call expressive change - a pattern of change rooted in who they are as much as in what they do. They ask themselves: "How can we become what we seek?"

Organization Unbound presents Changing the World by Changing Our Organizations, an exploration and dialogue into the specific practices of expressive social change. RSVP to  warren@organizationunbound.org.

About the Presenters

Warren Nilsson and Tana Paddock are co-founders of Organization Unbound. Warren is a teacher and writer with a Ph.D. in organization studies from McGill University. His work focuses on how social purpose organizations can foster deep engagement and on how such engagement might lead to broader institutional transformation. Tana has spent fourteen years working in the United States and Canada as a facilitator, organizer, and trainer on a variety of community-based projects including sustainable design, micro-enterprise development, community economic development, food security, public education, the arts, and affordable housing. Her work explores ways of creating more vibrant community organizations through reflection, dialogue, and appreciative attention.

Event description link: http://socialinnovation.ca/changing-world-changing-our-organizations

The Distinguished Critical Thinkers in World Politics Seminar Series

War on ... What? Security as Pacification

Mark Neocleous

Time: Thursday, 18 March 2010
2:30–4:30 pm
Location: Room 519, Fifth Floor
York Research Tower

Mark Neocleous brings together two concepts with very different histories. On the one hand, what is probably the major political fetish of our times: security. On the other hand, a concept about which nowadays virtually nothing is ever said: pacification. The paper will explore the ways in which these terms resonate through their early history, with the aim of unravelling the logic of pacification to contemporary security politics. In doing so, Professor Neocleous will criss-cross through the terrains of war and peace, and law and police, making links between original accumulation and the current war on 'terror'.

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy and Head of the Department of Politics and History at Brunel University, UK. His most recent book is Critique of Security (2008). His earlier books include The Monstrous and the Dead (2005); Imagining the State (2003); The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (2000); Fascism (1997); and Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power (1996). He is a member of the Editorial Collective of Radical Philosophy.

For more information please refer to the attached poster.

Research Matters: LA&PS Researchers and Knowledge Mobilization

Time: March 24, 2010
10 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Location: Harry Crowe Room, 109 AK

Speakers:
Michael Johnny, KM Unit, "Knowledge Mobilization at York University"
Nick Mulé, Social Work, "LGBT Knowledge Development through Research: Knowledge Mobilization as Strategy"

RSVP: Lorraine Myrie (lmyrie@yorku.ca or 22464)

Please see the attached poster.

Please join us at a Stakeholders Workshop for the Black Creek Pioneer
Village Stormwater Management Facility proposed for the Schmidt Dalziel
property.  This property is 16 hectares (40 acres) and is located at the
northwest quadrant of Jane Street and Steeles Avenue, forms part of the
historic Carrying Place Trail, and further is the last remaining cultural
heritage landscape in the area.

Date:                March 24, 2010
Time:               7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Location:       Black Creek Pioneer Village Visitors Centre
Victoria Room
1000 Murray Ross Parkway

RSVP:                by March 17 to Lynn Collins, The Sernas Group Inc
905.686.6402 ext 312
lcollins@sernas.com

The Study:
The City of Vaughan is undertaking a Municipal servicing Master Plan Class
Environmental Assessment (EA) Study to assess what municipal servicing
improvements and/or modifications to the stormwater, water, and wastewater
services will be required to implement the development objectives outlined
in Official Plan Amendment (OPA) 620.

Background:
Currently within the Municipal Servicing Master Plan Study a stormwater
management pond, located within Black Creek Pioneer Village is being
considered for expansion as part of the stormwater management improvements
and/or modifications.  This pond is located southwest of the Schmidt
Dalziel Barn.

Invitation:
During the initial stages of this project a number of stakeholders were
identified as having a specific interest in the BCPV site.  The study team
is seeking input and is inviting you to attend the workshop.

The Process:
A brief presentation will commence at 7:30 p.m. after which City staff,
TRCA staff and the consultant will be available to answer questions and
receive your comments.  This workshop is designed to involve stakeholders
interested in or concerned about the project.  The input received during
this workshop will be considered in the evaluation of the alternative
solution(s).  The preferred solution(s) to be presented in the Municipal
Servicing Master Plan Class Environmental Assessment Study are determined
based on engineering requirements, environmental considerations, public
input, and information gathered during the study.

For further details and contact information please refer to the attached
document.

For more details please see the attached poster.

Please find attached our Invite for Canada Blooms Guest Speak

Friday March 19th
6:00 pm-8:00

Please join us on Saturday, 11 - 3, at the Wychwood Barns for a wonderful array of food and art activities - being organized by my community arts class in collaboration with The Stop Community Food Centre and arts organizations at the Barns. See attached poster.

Art and Food Take Root at Wychwood Barns

Market to Host Artistic Interventions for Food and Social Justice

Toronto, March 2010 – On March 6, the Saturday market at Wychwood Barns will be bustling even more than usual. York University students are teaming up with local groups to host community-building, artistic activities for a neighborhood that brims with creative energy.

As part of York University’s 16th annual Eco Art and Media Festival, the planned agenda community event includes: drumming, story-telling, dance performance, music, art making, seed exchange, and recipe swaps. W and with participating groups such as the York’s Community Arts Practice program, , Eco Arts and Media Festival, The Stop Community Food Centre, Association for Native Development in Performing and Visual Arts, and the Latin American Canadian Arts Project, the event is sure to appeal to a variety of tastes and interests.

With the help of Wychwood’sThe Stop’s artist-in-residencepublic education coordinator, Ash Yoon, organizers have developed a temporary transformation ofwill transform the space to elaborate on some of the key mandates of The Stop Community Food Centre, which focus on food security and social justice. What’s more, the Aactivities are geared towards all ages in hopes of engaging a community that has a rich and culturally diverse heritage.

Drawing on the notion that food can be used The Stop Community Food Centre’s mandate to “build community and health, challenge poverty and fight hunger,” (The Stop Community Food Centre Pamphlet, date?) the activities aree truly aimed at community growth and rootedness—using food as a public good.

Although “good” food and art are often sometimes seen as economically inaccessible— not to mention environmentally unsustainable—on March 6, “Growing Art, Rooted in Communities” dares to see art and food as more than commodities. All are welcome to partake!

Please join us from 11am-3pm at 79 Wychwood Avenue (main intersection at St. Clair and Christie).

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Janna Gordam, Event coordinator, jgordan@yorku.ca 647- 835- 9330
Ash Yoon, Public Education Coordintor at The Stop Community Food Centre ash@thestop.org 416-652-7868 ext 222.

The City Institute at York University (CITY) presents:
The City Seminar

An interdisciplinary series of presentations and discussions on urban landscapes, past and present.

Alan Walks

Department of Geography, Program in Planning
University of Toronto

"From Urban Social Polarization to Civic Succession?
Gated Communities, Discourses of Privatism, and the Ascendance of Neoliberalism"

Alan Walks is associate professor of urban geography and planning at the University of Toronto. His research is primarily
concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of urban social and political polarization, and the importance of
place in the construction and reproduction of ideology and inequality. He has published research on the relationship between
urban economic restructuring and socio-spatial inequality; neighbourhood/place effects on electoral behaviour and social and
political attitudes; gentrification and social mix; and the social and political implications of the privatization of space and
gated communities. His new research projects explore the politics of automobility in Canada and the implications for citizenship, and the implications of the current recession and of government responses for growing urban socio-spatial inequality.

Friday March 5, 2010
12:30-2:00 pm
305 York Lanes

Everyone is welcome.