I'm going to give you an example of two specific engagements that we've had that involve many of our community partners.
In the fall of 2013, we invited many of our community partners together to come to Calgary. Actually, we invited them during the Calgary flood and we had to adjust our timing a bit. In any event, we had this gathering of community partners and academics. It included environmentalists and first nations organizations, with many of our partners brought together to focus on several areas. One was our energy future, which obviously involves environmental issues, but also aboriginal youth and building leadership capacity.
Together, what we found is that by bringing these folks together they made connections. They were able to work together with new partnerships, so we were facilitating this new network. Then we went away and worked in new groups and new networks to solve these problems together.
In 2014, we came together again and were a bit more focused, but we also invited aboriginal youth to come to express directly to us some of their concerns. One of the wonderful epiphanies that we had at that session was this wonderful young aboriginal woman who spoke to us and said, “You come to us and say, 'How can we help you?'; you should also be coming to us and saying, 'What can we do for you?'” It was about that reciprocal arrangement and how we can work together. We continue to work with the folks in those networks and it's been very powerful.