Today was the wrap-up of the conference.

I attended a workshop on exploring the role of Allies in the LGBT community. It was somewhat of a personal interest thing, and there isn't much related to TIG that I can say about it.

Outside this, we had the closing sessions at which a representative of STAND spoke about the importance of political activism amongst the youth population and another woman that talked about grassroots campaigning. Both were short, but really interesting. It was interesting in general that all the speakers were youth themselves that were doing big things within the States.

I will be compiling a more internal report shortly with further thoughts, impressions and ideas.

Cheers,
Nyla

We had one more workshop to attend on Saturday evening. At this point, all the tabling opportunities had ended so we packed up our stuff and I headed to a workshop by CIRCLE on best practices for research and evaluation 101.

It proved really really helpful to me! First of all, I got to meet Abby, and she was very excited to have TIG representation at the conference. She briefly mentioned the work she is doing with Kat and Emily as an example of a type of research she was talking about at the workshop.

I felt it was really helpful to attend seeing as a) CLC is coming to an end so there is sure to be many post-CLC type evaluation stuff, b) the Change That Clicks project that I've been helping with has a research component and I wanted to learn more about that, c) our open forums are a method of informal research and coming right up!

The things that interested me most were when we were talking about community based and youth led research- research being learning tools, and giving the power of being able to do that research into the hands of youth with our guidance. It helps involve the people affected by the policies be really involved over the whole duration of the project.

We spent about half the workshop in smaller groups, networking and discussing best practices for measuring the "impact" of something (in this case, the impact of CLC, I'm thinking). Some ideas we came up with:

a) Important to take a wholistic approach and talk to participants, administators and all other stakeholders
b) In measuring impact, qualatitive reports work a lot better than "how many" type questions
c) Questions should be phrased in terms of empowerment, not learning. Basically, if we want to know what somebody got out of a workshop, we should ask "How did it make you feel" type questions, not "Do you now understand the concept".

Using this information, I want to re-do the basic evaluation survey that we currently have. I'd also love to help out with the wrap-up of the CLC program if there is evaluation involved.

Finally, the workshop introduced me to
http://www.zoomerang.com
which is like SurveyMonkey but much better (helps you make a good question and according to a designer present, has a better interface).

This morning I attended a workshop on using Facebook for social change (though they called it for social service). It was lead by Matt Mahan of the Causes application on Facebook. Becuase a lot of the discussino was around online fundraising, there wasn't too much that I think could be applied by TIG as a Canadian non-profit under different tax rules. It was good though, the presenter was really energetic.

The conference wrapped up with the announcement that next year the conference will be in Little Rock, Arkansas and with a couple of key note speeches. I thought the most interesting one was the one from STAND (Students Taking Action Now - Darfur). Their work on the genocide in Darfur has demonstrated how important consistent pressure on domestic officials is to creating lasting change.

Late this afternoon I attended a workshop on The Millennial Generation and Redefining Citizenship. There was only four of us, so it became more of a discussion group than a workshop but it was still really neat. We talked about how out parents generation defined citizenship in a more strict and rigid way, how it dealt with duties and obligations while for our generation citizenship is more fluid, something we do. Within the group, there was a good diversity of opinion so it made for lively discussion and debate especially over issues like whether it is real or meaningful to express oneself politically online and whether our informality in the way we conduct relatiolly heated over the issue of flexible working hours and appropriate office attire. I personally really like working peculiar hours and being able to wear jeans to work, but that was not the preference of everyone in the room – some thought that the structure of 9-5 and proper suits were essentially to being able to conduct business effectively. We also had a debate over whether if you had to give up either voting or being involved in your community, which you would choose.

Another eye-opening experience was talking with Maryland school board trustees at the Conference center for a conference on bringing technology into the classroom to bridge the achievement gap before the last workshop began. In talking to them, it became really clear that though our educations systems in Ontario and Maryland are very different we are still facing many of the same challenges. These include disengagement of youth at both ends of the academic spectrum, student retention, discrepancies in school funding, policy about private donations to public schools (and how they affect the achievement gap). The more people I talk to about education in North America, the clearer it is that the way we think about education as a whole is failing students. Because there is such diversity in systems, it is too easy to blame individual schools, school boards or students, but really it is a paradigm issue.

I am really looking forward to attending the workshop on engaging people using Facebook to get a different perspective on this aspect that we include in our social networking for social change workshops.

Things really got busy on Friday afternoon as Nayla, Muneeb and myself were visited by students across the United States at the opportunities fair. I really enjoyed gettin to converse with college students from all different backgrounds and learn about what they were doing for thier communities. From talking to students here with the AmeriCorps and the Bonner Foundation the difference between Canadian and American approaches to civic involvement became clearer. The Canadian engagement model is a lot more organization driven than government driven, but the concept of a large government sponsered volunteer type program is a really interesting one. Also the growth in service-learning opportunites for students in the US is really interesting. The concept of getting class credit for helping your community is something foreign to me as a Canadian university student, yet it is so common in the States. I think by learning about different approaches to youth involvement it has really

This morning I attended a workshop on using social networking for orgnizations. I learned that in the states MySpace is still used for organizing, while in all of the workshops I have done back home no one has ever said that they use MySpace anymore so it has been cut from the SNFSC curriculum.

Following this workshop I attended a workshop on Arts and Service Learning. We had the chance to discuss issues in education, something that I am very concerned about, and it was really interestin gto hear that so many of the concerns tht I have about our education system in Ontario are also pressing concerns across the United States. Perhaps issues like increasing drop-out rates, acheivement gaps and curriculum diversity are more universal than most people would originally think. There is a lot of space for us to learn and share our ideas for improving education across borders. This conversation continued later in the afternoon when I met representitives from the Price Goerge's Country School Boards who were in the same building for a different conference, also looking at adressing these issues and the role that technology can play.

In the afternoon Naila, Muneeb and I worked the TIG table at the continuation of the opportunities fair where we got the chance to connect with orther organization and with youth that we have met at the conference in workshops and in other capacities as well. We are currently wrapimng up these conversations and getting ready for the next sets of workshops where I will be learning about millenial definitions of citizenships.