ICA’s Toolkit Session with Youth
“Chi-Miigwech for hosting this session! I work in the non-Indigenous side of climate action right now and always want to engage with my own people, but find it difficult due to my tendency to want to be inclusive to all. I never felt pressured to speak and in fact only did so when others mentioned they didn't know if anyone felt the same way (lack of context in second activity and two-eyed seeing importance in last activity). I also host and attend a lot of engagement sessions online and this was by-far my favourite I've participated in.”
- youth participant
Despite the challenges of the global pandemic, the ICA team is pleased to announce that the ICA Toolkit and Program are going to be ready for release in 2021! It has been no small task to pivot our strategies that have been centered in land-based, face-to-face community engagement to one that is primarily online and capable to support distance-learning, however our toolkit team has been successful in curating the Indigenous Climate Action Toolkit! We have long been anticipating the Toolkit curriculum to serve as a foundation for future community engagement to nurture new and existing relationships, build grassroots capacity, and skill-up future Indigenous climate champions.
With the curriculum development complete, the toolkit team felt it would be a good idea to have our Community Engagement Lead, Jayce Chiblow, practise some of the exercises that were tougher to adapt to an online/distance environment. Our goal was to test functionality and to find ways to improve these online modifications. Keeping in mind the results of our Youth Needs Assessment, ICA felt the best way to do this was to invite 10 youth from our network to join the session to offer input and feedback into these exercises while also gauging interest in the program. Each youth that participated was offered an honorarium as our way of honoring their participation, time, knowledge and feedback.
The feedback process took a two-pronged approach to ensure the best feedback we could get. The first component of the feedback involved group discussion in the session itself, while the second component took the form of an anonymous online survey to ensure the youth offering feedback felt safe and comfortable being as honest as they’d like.
Overall, participants enjoyed the exercises from the workshop. There was a lot of interest in the toolkit program, but not a whole lot of excitement for a youth-specific cohort. Participants identified that they would definitely recommend this workshop to others. Those that filled out the online form felt as though the workshop covered useful material, that the workshop was practical for their needs and interests and that the workshop was easy to understand. There were some requests for clarification on certain exercises and more visual aids.
“The first and last activities, where we were given a chance to provide our own thoughts/ideas on what caused climate change/crisis and how that interconnects with the second part of our resilience/wellness. It was refreshing to think of the why we're here versus why we shouldn't be.”
- youth participant, on their favourite activity
Overall, participants felt the facilitation was done well. Specifically, the facilitators have a good level of knowledge on the discussed topics and felt the presentation style was effective. Facilitators were rated as excellent for responding to questions and comments. Most importantly, participants rated 4-5 (out of 5) for facilitators creating a safe, inclusive and respectful environment for the workshop. General comments and feedback from participants included gratefulness for starting the session with a check-in question focused on our expectations for a safe space.
We are so grateful to these youth for their time, knowledge and wonderful feedback! Our team has begun working the more detailed feedback into our Curriculum Guide and additional resources for facilitators. This session was a great opportunity for ICA to, of course receive feedback on exercises, but to also continue to engage the youth in our network. We are always exploring ways to continue building relationships and capacity with Indigenous youth!
Image Description: Resilience & Wellness Tree created by the youth participants. Orange stickies act as the roots of the tree, which represents the fundamental things that make us strong as Indigenous peoples. The orange text acts as the trunk of the tree, which represents things or systems Indigenous Peoples have created or used over time to keep us strong. The green stickies act as leaves of the tree, representing solutions work we as Indigenous Peoples are engaging in now.