50 community members, including 14 featured speakers, gathered from across Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and San Francisco to share their expertise and surface community priorities. The forum marks the CLT’s transition from eight years of internal research to welcoming the involvement and knowledge mobilization of the wider arts community in its development.
It also marks the next phase of governance planning. Community-led governance and involvement are all the more important amid the CLT’s growing momentum in recent months: the donation of a house, the passing of a pivotal motion by City Council in July, and growing relationships and negotiations with potential development partners.
With goals to assemble a task force and launch CLT membership by early next year, the forum was an opportunity to get to know the arts communities we seek to serve, invite folks into the fold of this work, and to ground the next steps of our work in accountability to community members and interests.
The forum also launched five resource booklets, now available on the CLT’s new website. The booklets serve as contextual background and offer typologies for diverse, practical applications of the CLT model that we have explored over the years; models include a community co-development model, decolonial cultural space use at a large government-owned site, and a municipal lease-transfer model.
Read 221A Cultural Space Planner Miriam Berndt’s reflections on the significance of this forum and the development of the CLT here.
Cover photo by Kayla Isomura.
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