We would like to invite you to our upcoming Community Consultation on the Green Change Agents Program to share our new vision for the program and engage in a discussion about how it could better serve our community partners and residents. We are very excited about the potential outcomes of this session and would like to share this invitation widely. If you are unable to make it, please encourage another representative from your organization to attend in your place!

Green Change Agents Program
Community Consultation

WHEN: Friday, November 30, 2012 from 12:30 pm to 4:00 pm
WHERE: Driftwood Community Centre, 4401 Jane Street (southeast corner of Jane St/Driftwood Ave)
WHO: Individuals and community partners working on, or interested in, local environmental action, community engagement/education, and social justice, as well as past participants of the Green Change Agents Training Program
OVERVIEW: Green Change presents an immersive, interactive session to (re)engage community partners and residents around the next iteration of the Green Change Agents Program and develop strong partnerships that will influence its new structure and content

HOSTS:
Clara Stewart-Robertson, Project Coordinator for Green Change
and Jennifer Chan, Education Innovation Consultant

We have included some important background information below on the Green Change Project and Green Change Agents Program to help bring everyone up to speed. We promise that it is worth the long read!

What have we been up to lately?
Since the last round of agent training in early 2011, the Green Change Project has experienced numerous challenges, including a complete staff turnover and the loss of organizational memory, partnerships, and participants. While the resulting transition proved difficult at times for our new staff and caused some delays in our programming – as well as the construction of our new Centre for Green Change, – it also presented an incredible opportunity to pause, breathe, and reflect upon the project at a critical stage in its development. Moreover, that very “break” gave us the space to experiment with new creative processes and activities, seek new relationships with other innovators across the city, and stretch our capacity to lead change. Many of you played a part in this exploration and we are so grateful to you for your dedication and your inspiration over the last year!

So, long story short, once we had distilled all the lessons learned as well as our emerging ambitions for the project, we recognized that we needed to:

Develop better organizational clarity and communication
Develop more systematic and systemic community outreach
Scale up inclusion and diversity in our operations and programs
Formalize our commitment to community design, environmental health, and just sustainabilities.

What better place to start this transformation, we thought, than with the redesign of our cornerstone Green Change Agents Program?

The purpose of the Green Change Agents Program was, and continues to be, to uncover and grow the capabilities and potential in all Jane-Finch residents to transform the way we treat each other and the planet. Through the program, participants are offered opportunities to build their environmental knowledge, take leadership on community projects, connect with a network of local mentors, and create pathways to employment.

Can we co-produce a more effective and sustainable program?
Over the last year or so, we have been working with graduate students from York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies to unpack what happened during those previous agent programs, interview past participants and facilitators, and discover emerging trends in the “green economy” and “green jobs.” More recently, we have begun to evaluate similar environmental education and community leadership programs operating throughout the Toronto region, Canada, the United States, and Europe to help us think about how we could do our work differently.

We will be posting more direct outputs from our research online in the coming months, but for now, please get in touch with us for more information!

How can YOU contribute to this process?
As we begin to translate this research into more concrete ideas and practices for a revised agent program, it is important that we hear from as many different people as possible by hosting meaningful public conversations with our partners and residents. We want to ensure that we provide a fertile ground where we can all work collaboratively, creatively, and strategically toward the program’s growth and development. All of you have so many wonderful ideas, projects, and job/entrepreneurship opportunities to share with the Jane-Finch neighbourhood, and we want to find the best ways to move them forward.

Unfortunately, our time-frame for delivering a redesigned Green Change Agents Program is extremely short due the conditions of our funding. Our goal is to test run the new program this February during the “12 Days of Green Change,” and then deliver two consecutive rounds in March and June 2013. That said, we are strongly committed to ongoing dialogue and community engagement, starting with the community consultation on November 30th.

The purpose of this community consultation session will be to:

Share the draft vision and principles for a redesigned Green Change Agents Program
Engage with community partners and residents to amplify/coordinate emerging partnerships and learning opportunities
Collaborate on the challenges currently facing the Green Change Project

If you know other community members or organizations who might be interested in contributing to the Green Change Agents Program, please share this invitation with them or contact us directly. We will do our best to accommodate everyone at the session, however, space is limited at the Driftwood Community Centre.

Additional details: Lunch and refreshments will be served. Please let us know if you have any specific food allergies or needs. Childcare can be provided upon request.

RSVP to the Green Change team by email at cstewartrobertson@gmail.com, or call 416-663-2733, ext. 235.

Friday, November 30th @ 7pm
Ryerson University
Ted Rogers School of Management, 55 Dundas St W., 7th floor

Please join us for an exciting public panel that explores the international and Canadian trends in “human trafficking.”

The panellists ask: Why has human trafficking become a legal and policy priority in Canada, and with what effects? How have international dialogues shaped Canadian public policy? Why does migration for the purposes of engaging in sexual labour capture the public imagination, while other forms of labour-related migration disappear from discussions of criminal exploitation?

Melissa Ditmore (Sex Workers Project - New York City)
Annalee Lepp (Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women and the University of Victoria)
Nandita Sharma (University of Hawai’i - Manoa)
Harsha Walia (Anticolonial migrant justice activist and author – Vancouver)

This is a FREE event, held in a wheelchair accessible space.

Co-sponsored by:
Law Research Centre (Ryerson University)
Centre for Feminist Research (York University)

Generously supported by:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Ryerson University
Office of the Dean of Arts, Ryerson University
Office of the Vice President, Research and Innovation, Ryerson University
Ryerson Student Union
Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies, York University
Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies, York University
Department of Social Science, York University

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/297512677020410/
Media Requests: HT.workshop@ryerson.ca

A growing volume of business regulation, from accounting standards to sustainable fisheries certification, emanates from a heterogeneous array of non-state and hybrid public-private actors and institutions operating in a dynamic, transnational regulatory space. As these initiatives proliferate, they increasingly interact with one another and with state-based regimes, generating complex governance ensembles. Heterogeneous actors and institutions interact at multiple levels in various ways, from mimicry and cooperation to competition and conflict. This phenomenon of transnational business governance interactions (TBGI) is ripe for systematic study. What are the forms and drivers of TBGI? What are its implications for regulatory capacity, regulatory performance and the impacts of regulation on social and environmental problems? To gain purchase on these complex issues, Professor Black will offer an original analytical framework that disaggregates the regulatory process, focusing on the points at which interactions may occur and suggesting, for each point, a series of analytical questions that probe the key features of TBGI. The paper on which the talk is based is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2152720. Professor Black will be accompanied by three of her co-authors, who will provide brief commentary. The paper is part of the interdisciplinary TBGI Project, co-led by Stepan Wood (Osgoode), Kenneth Abbott (Arizona State), Julia Black, Burkard Eberlein (Schulich) and Errol Meidinger (U. Buffalo). The TBGI project is housed by IRIS.

Julia Black is a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Director of the Department’s Law and Financial Market Project and  a research associate of the LSE’s Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation.  She joined the Law Department in 1994 having completed her first degree in Jurisprudence and her DPhil at Oxford University. Her primary research interest is to explore the nature, dynamics and legitimacy of regulatory regimes, both state and non-state. She also specialises in financial services regulation, and in the regulation of risk.  She has written extensively on regulatory issues in a number of areas, and has advised policy makers, consumer bodies and regulators on issues of institutional design and regulatory policy in the UK and overseas, including the OECD, the UK National Audit Office, the environment agencies of the UK and Ireland, the Legal Services Board, the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, the Financial Services Authority, the Department for Constitutional Affairs, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the Law Commission of England and Wales, the Taskforce to Reform Securities Regulation in Canada and the Australian Law Reform Commission.  She also runs executive training courses in regulation and in financial services and markets regulation. Julia was a member the Steering Group for the Better Regulation Executive's Penalties Review and of the Department of Health Working Party developing a Common Framework of Principles for the direct sale to consumers of genetic tests.  She was recently appointed to the board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, to commence in January 2014.

All are invited to attend.

Refreshments will be served.

Please RSVP:
adrgs@osgoode.yorku.ca