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Youth Day with Siila Watt-Cloutier
On Monday, February 24, 2020, the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue hosted the Blaney Youth Day Workshop with Siila Watt-Cloutier. This event brought together young climate leaders across Vancouver for dialogue on climate justice as part of the Centre's programming for the 2019/2020 Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue.
The Blaney Youth Day Workshop was organized as part of Siila Watt-Cloutier’s vision to connect with youth, and with the goal of creating a safer and brave space for intergenerational and peer-based dialogue on intersectional climate justice. Nearly 40 young Indigenous and non-Indigenous climate leaders across Metro Vancouver gathered at this event.
DIALOGUE WITH MENTORS
The morning of the event created space for intergenerational knowledge sharing, and consisted of short presentations by mentors followed by circle dialogues between the youth and mentors. Our panel of mentors included: Siila Watt-Cloutier, Ginger GosnellMyers, and Kris Archie, who each brought their wisdom and perspectives in this work as Indigenous women. They each spoke to different themes, including effective organizing, finding our personal power, and maintaining our resilience while doing climate justice work. After their presentations, the youth participants had an opportunity to go into a deeper conversation with the mentors in small circle dialogues.
YOUTH-LED DIALOGUE
Over lunch, the youth participants were asked to share on sticky notes the questions and topics they wished to explore with the group. 6 major themes emerged from the stickies, which formed our dialogue topics for the afternoon dialogue sessions.
Each youth had the opportunity to take part in two of the six possible breakout discussion topics. The youth identified key points within each of the 6 session themes, summarized below:
Climate anxiety and self-care
- Heal personal traumas in order to stay resilient in the movement
- Acknowledge burnout and step back to make space for healing
- At times, the best self-care can be community care - giving back to those you care about
Solidarity across struggles and people
- Ensure that youth movements feel welcoming to other generations
- Ensure the climate justice movement resonates with diverse communities
- Amplify diverse narratives to challenge the predominant white narrative of climate justice
Building a united vision for the future
- Embolden our imagination and creativity
- Rethink of our future as colourful, diverse, just, and sustainable
- Leverage shared identity as youth
- Shared visions are built through connections and relationships
Change within capitalism
- It’s challenging to achieve climate justice within a current system of corporate greed and capitalism
- Climate change is a byproduct of capitalism
- Must reduce consumption of unnecessary and wasteful goods
Positionality within change making
- Know where your strengths and passions lie in order to sustain resilience and energy in changemaking
- Recognize own privileges in the movement, and make space for others
- Build intentional relationships and solidarity
Decolonizing Environmentalism
- Reflect on how to be an effective ally
- Uphold Indigeneity and traditional ecological knowledge
- Actively acknowledge work to decolonize perspectives
CLOSING REFLECTIONS
To close the event, Siila offered her reflections about the day. She reminded us that this work can be complex and isolating, and in these moments, it’s important to know yourself and stand strong in who you are. Siila provided a grounding affirmation to all the youth in the room that she feels that they are ready for the change they want to create, and assured everyone to trust their inner voice in their own changemaking journey.
All the youth participants also engaged in a closing exercise called “Head, Heart, Hands” - a reflection tool to encourage participants to share a thought, a feeling, and a call-to-action they had at the end of the event. Youth shared that they were reflecting on creating space for others in the climate movement, better understanding their intersecting identities within climate justice, and respecting systems of the past, present, and future. A majority of youth shared feelings of empowerment, gratitude, connectedness, and inspiration from the event. Finally, key call-to-actions that emerged included expanding one’s own knowledge about climate justice, recognizing one’s own positionality in changemaking work, and prioritizing self-care in the climate justice movement to maintain personal resilience.