Civics Works
The CCMW’s Civics Works project took place in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto from September 2016 to March 2017. With support from Canadian Heritage’s Multiculturalism Program, Civics Works piloted programming focused on improving civic engagement skills for youth while providing mentorship to improve employability skills.
Youth of more than 13 different ethnocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, different academic training, and different political beliefs participated in workshops or “civics labs” that encouraged explorative, experimental thinking around four kinds of literacy that are important for practical civic engagement:
Political literacy (understanding tactics of activism and advocacy around social justice issues related to race, gender and class)
Media literacy (understanding of fake vs. flawed news and the relationship between democracy and a free press)
Financial literacy (understanding debt, tax, budgeting and other money matters most relevant for youth leading civic engagement work)
Technological literacy (understanding the opportunities and limitations of various digital tools commonly relied on to organize communities for civic engagement)
The labs culminated in a policy summit at the Parliament of Canada (Centre Block) in Ottawa. It was the first time these youth had an opportunity to spend multiple days working together collaboratively inside spaces where decision-making that shapes Canada takes place. Their ideas on policy solutions to address challenges related to, for example, youth employment and water justice, were reviewed and responded to by a panel of leaders including human rights lawyer and Independent Senator Marilou McPhedran, social entrepreneur and Programming Lead at Impact Hub Ottawa James Chan, CBC television and radio journalist Adrian Harewood, and the Executive Director of the CCMW Alia Hogben. After the summit, youth explored (many of them for the first time!) a modern newsroom (CBC Ottawa) guided by Adrian Harewood, who fielded questions about every aspect of how mainstream institutional media works.
