Buttons

At this year's inaugural Toronto Community Development Institute, some community artists with ArtsAccess set up a button-making station for Institute participants to make their own buttons. It was a wonderful activity and you can see pictures of many of the buttons made on the Collection X website. The button above is titled "Spring Into Action" by Vincenza Spiteri DeBonis and seems a fitting one to share after these past several days of cold, clammy spring. The warmth is coming. Yay!

New Ending Poverty Popular Education Curriculum

You can find this curriculum on-line and freely available on the Income Security Advocacy Centre's website. The 120-manual is available as one not-so-large PDF (980K) and as separate MSWord files. The curriculum supports a basic three-hour workshop that ISAC and Campaign 2000 are delivering across Ontario (in 7 different communities). The objective of this workshop is to involve low income people in a critical dialogue about poverty and a process to support the voices of low-income people on what will end poverty. Then curriculum contains over a dozen popular education activity descriptions as well as detailed model workshop designs for the basic three-hour version as well as one and two hour versions and one day-long version. I developed this curriculum with Dana Milne of ISAC and Jacquie Maund of Campaign 2000. If you find this curriculum useful in any way i invite you to post a comment here to let me know what you did.

Catalyst reaches its fundraising goals in record time

Well, we were both surprised and deeply moved to see how fast our friends and community responded to our appeal. We'd hoped to raise $2000 by May 6th and we had hit that target by May 1st - only two days after launching our appeal. By May 6th we had raised $3000 and as of this past week we have raised over $5000. The cheques and on-line donations continue to arrive. And we hope that we continue to raise funds for the collection. It looks like we've found a new home for the collection as well and we will be making the move the week of May 26th. You can read updates on the Catalyst Centre website. Thanks to all those who gave so generously and so quickly!