Workshops 2026
Concurrent workshops will be running in the morning and in the afternoon. Participants will have the opportunity to attend one workshop in each block.
No need to sign up! Workshops are first come, first served.
Volunteers will help you find the workshop locations at St. John’s High School.
FIRST SESSION
10:45 am – 12:00 pm
What makes a community safe? Is it the absence of harm, or the presence of relationships, resources, and collective care that help us navigate uncertainty together?
Drawing on stories from Kalila and Dimna, Amna Burki of StoriesMatter invites participants to explore trust, interdependence, solidarity, and the different strengths communities can draw upon in times of adversity.
Through storytelling, reflection, and dialogue, participants will consider how Community Economic Development can build on community strengths, strengthen local connections, and create shared solutions.
Together, we will explore how collective action can foster belonging, shift power, and contribute to safer, more resilient communities.
Speaker: Amna Burki
Organization: StoriesMatter
Level: All Levels
This presentation explores the collaborative efforts of our respective organizations—a prison law clinic and an urban Section 84 release site, to advocate for individuals serving federal sentences as they transition into the community. We will examine how conditional release conditions shape reintegration, and discuss the responsibilities of both individuals and communities in creating meaningful opportunities for participation, inclusion, and belonging.
Drawing on legal advocacy and community-based practice, we will highlight approaches that support successful reintegration while ensuring release conditions are applied in ways that promote, rather than hinder, connection and community engagement.
Speakers: Jenelle Smith and Ryan Wengelinkski (Manitou House) and Chanelle Lajoie (University of Manitoba)
Organizations: Manitou House (Native Clan Organization) and the University of Manitoba’s Community Law Centre
Half of all Canadians will be a Caregiver in their lifetime! Yet, many provide care without ever calling themselves one; they simply see themselves as siblings, parents, children, neighbours, friends, or community members. We coordinate appointments, offer emotional support, advocate, provide transportation, manage crises, and help others navigate daily life. This (often invisible) work is essential to community well-being, yet many caregivers do not recognize their role and therefore never think to seek support.
This interactive workshop helps current and future caregivers and their support system. Through facilitated discussion, participants will explore shared experiences, identify challenges and strengths, exchange practical wisdom, and learn about resources and community supports. Together, we will consider how stronger caregiver networks help create healthier, more connected communities.
Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of caregiving, greater awareness of peer and community supports, and new connections that can reduce isolation, build resilience, and strengthen collective well-being.
Speakers: Michael Coutts and Audra Latschislaw
Organizations: Manitoba Possible and Community Living Manitoba
Level: All levels
In this session, Marianne brings a trauma informed lens to power and politics, applying what we know about conflict resolution for the Politics of Unity and collaboration for healthy organizations, movement building, and even moving electoral politics away from hyper-partisanship and polarization.
Participants will explore a conflict resolution model that Marianne has been expanding to better understand and address growing authoritarianism, polarization, hyper partisanship, cancel culture and other forms of exclusion. The session will also examine how to move from competition to collaboration and from use of force to something safer and more powerful.
She will also offer an update on the Healthy Democracy Initiative of the AFMMLA
Speaker: Marianne Cerilli
Ahead of the 2027 provincial election, this session takes stock of Manitoba’s action (and inaction) on climate change, and invites participants to work together to advocate for the solutions we need. Canadian climate politics has shifted sharply over the last year, with Prime Minister Mark Carney cancelling key policies (like the consumer carbon price and electric vehicle sales mandate) and pushing for increased fossil fuel production and consumption (such as new oil pipelines and fossil gas electricity generation).
There have also been several climate plans and announcements released by the Manitoba government, including the Path to Net Zero (Oct. 2025) and Net Zero Action Plan (Sept. 2026), alongside continued advocacy for liquefied natural gas exports through Churchill and a new fossil gas-fired power plant in Brandon. Throughout this period, massive wildfires, flooding, and storms have continued to devastate much of Canada, serving as a stark reminder of the issue’s urgency and its relevance to community safety and well-being. Given the sheer volume of changes, it can be difficult to make sense of where things stand.
This session will improve understanding of this important issue by providing an overview of current climate policy in Manitoba and explaining opportunities for attendees to advocate for policy improvements in their own workplaces and community organizations. CAT’s policy manager, James Wilt, will start the session by breaking down Manitoba’s major emissions sources, recent government commitments, and opportunities to accelerate emissions reductions in the province.
Afterward, CAT’s Program Operations Coordinator, Bobbie Mang’eli, will lead a discussion on how climate change intersects with community economic development, then lead a collective advocacy action. There will also be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion.
Speakers: James Wilt; Bobbie Mang’eli
Organization: Climate Action Team Manitoba
This workshop focuses on two tools – one economic and one political – for strengthening Canada’s caring economy (including our care for the earth).
We invite participants to reflect on how a return to full employment as a core policy at all levels of government might affect their own work; we present the work of Food Matters Manitoba, an Indigenous-led non-profit organization the supports food security and food sovereignty in northern Manitoba First Nations; and we provide an overview of Modern Monetary Theory which provides countries that issue their own currency (like Canada) with the ability to fund community-led Guaranteed Jobs programs without raising taxes, borrowing or cutting other programs.
Finally we look at examples where governments have used Citizen Assemblies to strengthen participatory democracy and shape policies for addressing seemingly intractable societal challenges such as poverty, unemployment and climate collapse.
Speakers: Rob Miller and Kyle Mason
Level: All levels
Nonprofits play a vital role in understanding and responding to complex community needs, including housing instability, food insecurity, inequality, and access to essential services. Yet many organizations are navigating growing data needs with limited time, resources, and clarity about where to begin. This session will introduce the Nonprofit Data Capacity Navigator, a free, bilingual service that connects Canadian nonprofits with assessments, resources, and practical advice tailored to their organizational context.
Participants will explore how stronger data capacity can help organizations not only improve their own services and communicate their impact, but also better understand emerging community needs, identify inequities, and contribute to coordinated responses that advance community safety and well-being. The session will encourage participants to reflect on their current data challenges and consider how the Navigator and stronger sector-wide data practices could support safer, healthier, and more equitable communities.
Speakers: Wilfreda Edward, Daniel Simeone, and Neemarie Alam
Organization: Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience and Blueprint
We will have a team of 2-3 MLPD folks, each sharing examples from their lives where safety and accessibility intersect. Then workshop participants in small groups would have the opportunity to reflect on their own lives and identify and share in their small group where safety and accessibility intersect.
Speaker: Sue Hemphill
What can a city budget teach us about history, power, inequality and democracy? This session uses Weaving a Better Winnipeg: 2026 Alternative Municipal Budget as a local, contemporary case study of how local experts can propose tangible policy changes to advance truth, reconciliation, equity, and sustainability.
The workshop will explore: Who makes decisions about our communities? How have historical choices shaped Winnipeg? Who benefits from public spending—and who does not? What would a more just and sustainable city look like? How have ideas about housing, transportation, taxation, Indigenous rights, living wages, neighbourhoods and public services changed over time? What choices being made today will shape Winnipeg’s future?
With the municipal election on Oct 28th, this workshop will equip participants with tangible ideas for advancing progressive ideas with municipal governments.
Speakers: Molly McCracken
Organization: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – Manitoba
The way that we work with each other in organizations and community groups is a major contributor to feelings of safety and belonging. However, we don’t always know what everyone needs to feel safe, and what safety means to different people. This session will explore what safety means, referring to literature around safe, brave, and accountable spaces; and investigate strategies for creating the spaces we want. We’ll do this by trying out techniques and strategies in real time together, exploring and building our own safe space as we share ideas with each other.
Be ready to engage – this session will include a lot of peer-to-peer dialogue and mutual learning, rather than presentations or information from a facilitator. Through discussion, dialogue, and sharing, participants will leave with new ideas and strategies for building the spaces that the people in their organizations and groups need to flourish.
Speaker: Robin Attas
Organization: Division of Extended Education, University of Manitoba
Level: All levels
This session looks at how communities can define and measure safety and well-being tailored across different contexts and initiatives. We’ll start with lessons from our CSWB work in Manitoba so far, and how it connects to shared goals with CED. Next, we’ll introduce the Community & Urban Safety Monitor (CUSM) Toolkit, which adapts a United Nations framework to Canadian and Indigenous contexts, and is grounded in a theory of change for why safety matters. A live demo will cover the Indicator Explorer and Customizer, along with guidance on accessing templates like data development plans and data sharing agreements. We’ll then share broader lessons from evaluation projects across Canada, which will feed into a discussion on how CED themes can be built more fully into CSWB planning and measurement.
We will close by sharing how to connect or further engage with CCFSC for safety-related projects, knowledge exchange, training, or practical resources through our national membership. CCFSC is always looking for new partners to support our work in fostering community engagement and local multisector strategies that address root causes to improve well-being.
Speakers: Jess McKeown and Cassandra Doken
Organization: Canadian Centre for Safer Communities (CCFSC) and Manitoba Justice
This workshop will look at how art (both individual and collective) can be used to foster safe and equitable communities during particularly difficult times.
Speakers: Uyen Pham and L(ani) Zastre
Level: Intermediate
Community safety and crime prevention are pressing issues for many Manitobans. At the same time, jails in Manitoba are “bursting at the seams,” a situation that is likely to only get worse without meaningful intervention. The majority of people who end up incarcerated in Manitoba’s correctional facilities do not have their high school diploma, and the majority of people entering prisons have less than Grade 8 education.
Involvement in education has been proven to decrease recidivism by 20 to 30 percent. Education—not incarceration—is the way forward in promoting community safety and crime prevention. We know that an effective adult basic education system operates in Manitoba. We also know that the demand for educational upgrading on the part of people in custody is strong. Connecting those individuals on their release to the educational opportunities in the community—adult learning centres and adult learning programs—would go a long way toward enabling them, and their families, to realize a good life. In this way, communities are made stronger and community safety is improved.
Speakers: Jim Silver, Elizabeth Comack, Fran Taylor, and Anna Sigrithur
Lunch + Self Care Session and Networking Opportunities
12:00 – 1:15 pm
Caring and supporting others sometimes means we forget to care for ourselves. Fortunately, self care doesn’t need to be long and complicated! This one-hour workshop introduces breathwork as a practical tool for self-care to reduce anxiety, respond to emotions, and improve communication in high-stakes moments.
Grab your lunch and join Peter as he guides us through this session – how and why the nervous system drives automatic stress responses; methods to use the breath to recognize different states in the body and mind, and simple breathwork techniques to use:
- To recover quickly after stressful events
- Before tough conversations or meetings
- To stay present during interpersonal challenge
This session will help you strengthen your self-awareness, develop your ability to stay focused under pressure, and gain practical tools that are easy to learn and apply immediately
This is a unique session that CCEDNet is offering this year. If you want to take part, be sure to grab your lunch quickly! Participation is limited, and spots will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Facilitator: Peter Dueck
Connect with him at pdbreathwork.ca or on IG: @pete_maws
Location: Rm. 337- the Theatre starting at 12:30 – 1:15pm
Join us for a 20 minute stroll around the neighbourhood and meet other participants!
We will meet at the main entrance and stay on the sidewalks for a walk-a-mile style of networking.
Dress for the weather!
Organization: Canadian CED Network
Location: Meet at the main entrance (401 Church Ave.) at 12:30 pm
SECOND SESSION
1:15 – 2:30 pm
Communities and societies in the pursuit of development and collective well-being face many crossroads that demand decisions about where to go and how to continue the journey. Measurement, by informing policymaking, allowing policy evaluation, and supporting accountability, helps make the economic development journey safer. Join Dr. Ernesto in this session to explore the following:
- Measurement and development: insights from economics to collective well-being/community economic development
- Leadership, measurement and the power to change: the case of First Nations healthcare transformation
- Collective well-being: measurement in the case of early childhood education
- The data detective: systematic data collection and analysis
Speaker: Dr. Ernesto Cardenas
Organization: Waapihk Research
This workshop is guided by the words of the late Richard Wagamese, Ojibway writer: “We Change the World One Story at a Time”.
‘When I read these words a small voice in my head says ‘Change the world? Come on!’ But Wagamese got it right. The stories we tell, for better or worse, shape our material world. They reflect/reinforce dominant cultural narratives of war as heroic; the ‘other’ as unworthy, economic growth as the hallmark of well-being….
Or they can reflect/reinforce narratives of the world we crave; that already exists in places where we feel we belong and have something to contribute. These counterstories need to be told again and again.
In this workshop participants will examine the ‘better and worse’ stories told through art (images, songs, videos) and will have the opportunity to contribute to the repository of counterstories by sharing stories from their own lives.
Speaker: Frances Ravinsky
Organization: Community Works Manitoba
Level: All levels
Community economic development starts with bringing capacity building home. The York Factory First Nation (YFFN) had major community development result from project-based education, in which Wikiwin students built houses and renovated restaurants and contributed to the Wikiwin Polytechnic Institute, a dormitory and instructors; homes. As well as many community outcomes, these students improved their sustainable livelihoods and passed university courses, while interning as carpenters and other trades.
The YFFN Chief and Council (2025) shared how Wikiwin was bringing self-determination: “The establishment of the Wikiwin Polytechnic Institute is a bold step in that direction, creating opportunities for lifelong learning, self-determination and mino pimatisiwin right here on our land.” Mino pimatisiwin means the practice of a good life. Applied projects-based adult post-secondary education can build the necessary infrastructure and culturally-appropriate programming to address the root causes of poverty, low education, food scarcity, overcrowding and inhabitable living conditions in First Nations.
Speakers: Shirley Thompson and Darryl Wastesicoot
Organization: University of Manitoba and Kawéchiwasik Development Corporation
Entrepreneurship can offer flexibility, independence, purpose, and opportunities to build a meaningful livelihood.
At the same time, it can bring significant pressures, including financial uncertainty, isolation, decision fatigue, blurred work-life boundaries, and burnout. For people who turn to self-employment because traditional employment has not been accessible or sustainable, these pressures can be especially complex.
This session explores the relationship between mental health, entrepreneurship, economic safety, and collective well-being.
Using a Community Economic Development lens, participants will consider what makes entrepreneurship sustainable not only for the business, but also for the person behind it and the community surrounding them.
The conversation will examine practical approaches to supporting well-being while also considering the role of community, connection, support systems, and broader economic conditions. Participants will be encouraged to think beyond individual resilience and consider how CED organizations, communities, and systems can help reduce barriers, strengthen economic security, and create more supportive conditions for sustainable livelihoods. Ultimately, the session asks us to consider what responsibility belongs to the individual — and what might be better carried collectively
Speaker: Jill Zdunich
Organization: SEED Winnipeg
What if the question isn’t how we can divert a few crisis calls away from police, but what response is actually most appropriate for a person experiencing a crisis? This session will explore the Police Accountability Coalition’s response to Winnipeg’s proposed Community Crisis Response model and invite participants to imagine what a truly community-led, consent-based, and non-criminalizing approach to crisis could look like.
Drawing on PAC’s Position Paper on the proposed Winnipeg Community Crisis Response Model, presenters will examine the tensions between the City’s vision for community crisis response and the structures that continue to centre police, emergency services, coercive intervention, and criminalization. We will explore what it would mean to shift from a diversion model, where community responders are brought in for situations deemed appropriate, toward a community-first model, where community response is the starting point and police or emergency services are engaged only when their specific authority or expertise is genuinely required.
The session will consider practical questions around consent, harm reduction, substance use, mental health crises, wellness checks, Indigenous leadership, lived experience, triage, governance, funding, and accountability. Participants will also be invited to think beyond crisis response itself: What social conditions create crises, and what investments in housing, health, connection, poverty reduction, and community infrastructure could prevent them?
Rather than presenting a single solution, this session will create space for participants to critically examine Winnipeg’s current approach and contribute to a shared vision of what a safer, more just, and more community-centred crisis-response system could become.
Speakers: Kate Kehler, Lisa Forbes and Teruni Walaliaddi
Organization: Police Accountability Coalition (PAC)
Level: All levels
This interactive presentation will explore lessons learned from Eviance’s “Canadian Disability and Climate Change Network and Strategy Project” which focuses on the impacts of climate change on people with disabilities (PWD). Drawing on disability and climate justice, this project aims to uncover what these movements can learn from each other in order to work towards shared goals. Eviance is a community-based organization of persons with disabilities (OPD) and is working closely with climate justice experts and organizations. This project is led by PWD and consults directly with disabled communities to better understand the incredibly varied lived experiences of disability and climate change.
In this presentation, we will talk about the importance of considering ourselves as a part of nature and the commonalities between human and environmental vulnerability. We will also discuss how to create networks of care and how to better care for our communities in climate crises and emergencies.
Speaker: Olivia Boonstra
Organization: Eviance
Level: Introductory
Community Safety Hosts (CSHs) are an Indigenous-led, people-centred alternative to security guards that address the need for access while providing meaningful employment for young people aging out of care and/or lived experience with poverty, incarceration, homelessness, and other forms of exclusion. CSHs work in inner city Winnipeg to provide care, safety, and well-being for vulnerable people accessing essential services through the worldview of wâhkôhtowin.
In this storytelling circle format, presenters will share the creation stories of the Community Safety Host Initiative, which includes the role of The Gathering in bringing Zoongizi Ode (formerly Fearless R2W) and Persons Community Solutions (PCS) together to create this social enterprise focused on community safety. Stories will be shared about the vision of CSHs, the impact of the work, results of community-based research, and current challenges. The workshop will end with stories still unfolding, leaving room for participants to imagine future stories of community safety together.
Speakers: Christine Mayor, Mary Burton, Michael Redhead Champagne, and Dan Waycik
Organization: University of Manitoba and Zoongizi Ode
Level: All levels
When we think about community safety, we often think about emergency response: police, fire services, paramedics, hospitals, and crisis intervention. But what if true community safety begins long before a crisis occurs?
Across Manitoba, older adults are experiencing increasing challenges related to housing affordability, food insecurity, transportation barriers, social isolation, caregiver burnout, ageism, and limited access to health and social services. Too often, systems respond only after a crisis has occurred—when an older adult presents to an emergency department, experiences homelessness, becomes a victim of abuse, or can no longer safely remain in their community.
This session explores how proactive, community-based supports can prevent crises before they happen, improving quality of life while reducing the need for costly emergency and institutional interventions. Drawing on examples from community facilitation, home care, elder abuse prevention, housing advocacy, and interdisciplinary partnerships, participants will examine how relatively small investments in prevention can have significant impacts on individual well-being and community resilience.
Participants will be invited to challenge traditional understandings of community safety and consider what it would mean to design systems that prioritize prevention, dignity, belonging, and collective care.
Speaker: Kathy Majowski
Organizations: HART Program, Winnipeg Regional Health Authority
Level: Introductory
Community organizations tell stories every day through interviews, fundraising campaigns, participant profiles, advocacy, social media, grant reporting and conversations with the public. Those stories can strengthen dignity, agency, trust and belonging. They can also unintentionally reinforce assumptions, stereotypes and existing power imbalances. In this interactive 60-minute session, participants will explore how the choices we make when telling stories about real people and communities affect not only how those people are represented, but how they are understood and treated. The session will connect ethical storytelling to community safety and collective well-being by examining how trust, belonging and perceptions of people and communities are shaped through the stories organizations choose to tell.
Through facilitated discussion and a practical framing exercise, participants will examine how similar facts can produce very different narratives depending on who is given agency, whose perspective is centred, what context is included and what assumptions are left for an audience to make. Participants will then apply those questions to storytelling within their own organizations and leave with practical tools they can use in interviews, communications, advocacy and impact storytelling
Speaker: Joanne Roberts
Community safety is a growing concern, while rising costs, housing insecurity, strained services, discrimination and political polarization are straining trust and sense of belonging. What frameworks or first principles can we fall back on to respond collectively to strengthen community well-being? This participatory workshop starts from Community Development as a practical response. Community-led development puts residents’ knowledge, relationships, assets and decision-making power at the centre of identifying priorities and taking collective action. Community Economic Development extends this approach into the economy by mobilizing local resources, ownership and enterprise to meet social, economic and environmental needs in inclusive and sustainable ways.
After a short framing, participants will explore how exclusion and insecurity can become division, then use Community Development and CED principles to design responses that build relationships, community capacity, material security and shared power. The goal is not to eliminate disagreement, but to strengthen the community infrastructure that allows people to navigate differences, solve problems together and maintain a meaningful sense of belonging.
Speaker: Jesse Hajer
Organization: University of Manitoba
Level: All levels
A safe community isn’t simply one where nothing bad happens. It is one where people have the resources, relationships, economic opportunities, dignity, and collective power they need to thrive. The Village Co-operative offers a community-led example of how safety can be built through the social and economic conditions that enable people and communities to thrive. Recognizing that true safety extends beyond the absence of harm, the project responds to root causes of insecurity by creating access to essential services, affordable housing, meaningful employment and training, social connection, mutual aid, and opportunities for community ownership and decision-making.
The Village Co-operative is a community-driven project of Woman Healing for Change. Our plan is to provide key services and community-based support to North End families. The co-operative model, emphasizes collaboration and community ownership. Our co-op structure will ensures that decision-making is participatory and inclusive, with an additional focus on fostering mutual aid networking. The co-operative is structured to prioritize the needs and strengths of the neighbourhood, providing the opportunity for residents to reclaim control over essential services. The laundry facility provides a small base-line income, employment and youth internship opportunities and community access to the dignity of clean clothes. Led by a diverse group of individuals with extensive experience in community development, social services and Indigenous advocacy, the co-operative seeks to fill a critical gap while promoting economic resilience. Our plan is to provide a safe place to do your laundry but it’s more than that. We will offer: training in co-op development; a cafe and cosy children’s area; a mutual aid trading space; sewing stations for repairing or upscaling clothes; and affordable rental housing. In this session we present the social and environmental return on investment that will flow from this project.
By bringing these elements together in one accessible, community-driven space, the Village Co-operative invites us to consider what it means to build safety proactively—and what becomes possible when communities have the power and resources to define and create the conditions for their own well-being.
Speakers: Judith Harris, Gerry Prymak, and Virginia Hunter
The Black Canadian Experience Centre (BCEC) proposes a reflective and participatory session for The Gathering 2026 that explores community safety as something deeper than the absence of harm. For Black communities in Manitoba, safety is also about visibility, memory, belonging, cultural affirmation, truthful public education, and the power to shape the systems that affect our lives. The BCEC exists because Manitoba has lacked a dedicated space that centres Black histories, stories, and futures. That absence contributes to erasure, weakens belonging, and limits the province’s capacity to understand how anti-Black racism, colonial narratives, and historical exclusion continue to shape present-day experiences of safety and well-being.
This session will position the BCEC as a community-led infrastructure for prevention, healing, education, and systems transformation. Through storytelling, facilitated dialogue, and shared learning, participants will examine how a Black-led cultural, archival, and community space can strengthen collective well-being by honouring the past, celebrating the present, and building a future where Black Manitobans are seen, heard, protected, and able to thrive
Speakers: Maggie Yeboah, Ralph Bryant, and Phylis Reid-Jarvis
Workshop THREE
2:40 – 3:50 pm
True community safety cannot be achieved through criminalization, surveillance, or exclusion; it is built through radical care, social inclusion, housing security, and peer-led health and cultural initiatives. This interactive session hosted by Sunshine House Winnipeg, explores how community economic development (CED) and grassroots frontline services intersect to address the root causes of socio-economic vulnerability.
Drawing directly from our multi-layered continuum of care, including our drop-in centre, dedicated Cultural Initiatives, Gizhiwenimin health and wellness initiatives, the Mobile Overdose Prevention Site (MOPS), and Kelly’s Corner (transitional housing for 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals exiting encampments), we will examine what makes individuals and communities truly safe. Participants will engage in dialogue and practical exercises exploring how to shift from systemic punishment to collective, community-led well-being.
Speakers: Muyi Eboigbe, Nate Davar, Caleb Clay, Chelsea Bannatyne, and Winnie Amo-Mensah
Organization: Sunshine House
This session will provide a live demo of the City of Winnipeg’s Open Data Portal. If you have never looked at the Open Data Portal, don’t worry, Jen will start at the beginning. Some datasets will be showcased as examples. Jen will show how to use the portal: how to search for datasets, how to make charts and maps, how to filter large datasets, and how to learn more after the session. Please bring your questions and curiosity.
Speaker: Jennifer Bodnarchuk
Organization: City of Winnipeg
Power of Stories is an interactive storytelling and writing workshop that explores how sharing and listening to lived experiences can contribute to community safety, belonging, and collective well-being. Through guided writing, storytelling, and dialogue, participants will create space for diverse voices and perspectives, build empathy and understanding across differences, and strengthen the relationships and connections that help communities thrive. By recognizing the experiences, strengths, and knowledge within our communities, the workshop invites participants to reflect on how storytelling can challenge isolation and division, amplify voices that are often unheard, and contribute to more inclusive, connected, and caring communities.
Speaker: Izzeddin Hawamda
The toolkit was developed in response to the wide range of safety concerns non-profit housing providers encounter in their day-to-day work. Throughout its development, input from housing providers, frontline staff, and community partners helped shape both the content and the way this resource was designed. That process reinforced that safety is not only about responding to incidents. It is also about prevention, early intervention, communication, collaboration, staff and tenant well-being, and finding ways to support safety without losing sight of dignity and housing stability.
I would also introduce participants to the toolkit itself and how it can be used in practice. It was designed as a flexible reference that organizations can turn to based on the issues they are facing, with practical guidance, case studies, checklists, templates, and Manitoba-specific resources throughout. Rather than focusing only on the finished toolkit, I would use the presentation to share some of the broader lessons that emerged while developing it and how those lessons connect to the question at the centre of this year’s gathering: what actually helps people feel and remain safe in their communities.
Speaker: Judith Hertel
What if some of the things we do to create safety are actually responses to fear, rather than investments in the conditions that make communities safer?
In this interactive session from Nahuen Consultation, lead speaker Victor Mondaca will draw from lived experience and years of work across security, homelessness, harm reduction, frontline leadership and community safety. His own understanding of safety has evolved from one centred largely on control, enforcement and responding to immediate threats toward one that also recognizes connection, belonging, dignity and prevention as essential parts of safer communities.
That shift has informed his work developing alternative approaches to community safety, working alongside community-based safety and care teams, and training community patrol teams. Through stories from this work, Victor will invite participants to consider the difference between managing an immediate situation and creating the conditions that can prevent harm in the first place.
Through storytelling, reflection and facilitated conversation, participants will examine how fear and assumptions can shape our responses to visible distress, and explore what becomes possible when we ask not only, “How do we respond when something happens?” but also, “What would have needed to exist before this happened?”
Rather than offering one answer to “What makes us safe?”, the session invites participants to consider how relationships, belonging, community infrastructure, cultural connection and access to support can become part of how we understand and build safety
Speakers: Victor Mondaca & Mandy Mondaca
Organization: Nahuen Consultation
What does it take to build a safe and healthy community when people are navigating rising costs, housing pressures, employment uncertainty, systemic barriers, and limited access to legal, social, and economic resources?
From an Access to Justice perspective, this session will use storytelling to explore what we have learned from working alongside newcomers, immigrants, refugees, and other community members who face barriers in accessing legal information and services, employment opportunities, and essential resources.
Through stories from our community-based work, we will explore how legal support, employment services, skills development, and community-based programming intersect in people’s lives. For many community members, access to justice is not limited to understanding their legal rights. It is also connected to their ability to secure meaningful employment, access stable housing, understand available services, navigate systems, and build financial and social stability.
Rather than presenting a traditional workshop, we will share real community experiences. What happened, how individuals and HMF responded, what worked, what did not, and what these experiences can teach us about creating safer, healthier, and more resilient communities.
The session will connect individual experiences to broader systems and explore how access to justice, community economic development, employment, and collective care can contribute to safety, dignity, belonging, and resilience.
Speaker: Amna Iqbal, Khalid Jaleel, and Zuher Almusre
Organization: Healthy Muslim Family
What if safety is shaped not only by physical environments, but also by relationships, belonging, opportunity, dignity, and meaningful support?
Walls to Bridges offers a powerful example by bringing incarcerated and university students together as peers in for-credit courses focused on dialogue, collaboration, and problem-solving. Through education and relationship-building, the program challenges social divisions and assumptions that can perpetuate exclusion and inequity, while creating opportunities to build trust, foster belonging, and imagine pathways toward justice, reconciliation, and systems change.
Drawing on more than a decade of teaching at Stony Mountain Institution and the Women’s Correctional Centre, instructors will share what they have learned from creating and teaching within a circle of trust.
Speaker: Dr. Judith Harris, Tam Le, Marty Donkervoort, and Chanelle Lajoie
What does Manitoba’s social enterprise ecosystem need to help social enterprises sustain, scale, and grow? This interactive session will explore key findings from research and the levers needed to build a stronger enabling environment for social enterprise.
Participants will work through a rural business acquisition scenario, identifying and sequencing the most important “year one unlocks” across finance, markets, and capacity. Together, we’ll explore how these pieces are interconnected and what an efficient support system requires.
The session will then turn to Manitoba: What is needed most right now—more capital, more customers and contracts, more capacity support, or more enabling infrastructure? Through discussion and action-oriented reflection, participants will identify priorities, opportunities, and next steps for strengthening Manitoba’s social enterprise ecosystem.
Speakers: Sarah Leeson-Klym
In this workshop, participants will be introduced to areas of knowledge required to foster inclusion of Two Spirit, Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Diverse folks in professional and community spaces. Based on the lived experience of gender diverse Manitobans from all walks of life, and delivered by a subject matter expert, this workshop answers questions and provides tools that help individuals and organizations move from allyship to action by answering the question, “How can I create belonging in the spaces in which I hold influence?”
Participants will leave with new ideas on how to be inclusive, and with knowledge on local resources to help develop their knowledge further. All are welcome in this workshop!
Speakers: James Webster
Organizations: Trans Manitoba
Level: Intermediate
Step into the roles of developers, lenders, employers, and residents to experience firsthand why underinvested neighbourhoods stay stuck. A guided debrief follows, tracing the hidden links between employment, housing stability, family wellbeing, and community safety, and reframing investment not by what it costs, but by what it creates.
Explore how equitable investment in housing, employment, and community assets can strengthen the conditions that make communities safer, healthier, and more resilient.
Participants will:
- Recognize the connections between economic opportunity, housing stability, family well-being, and community safety.
- This session will explore how community-centred investment can address root causes of inequity and strengthen collective well-being.
Speaker: Sheri Bailey
Organization: Purpose Construction