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Kimia's blog


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Boys and Girls National Conference
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

I just spent the morning at the Boys and Girls Club National Conference and wanted to share some highlights. Overall, it was really wonderful to meet many of the boys and girls staff from across Canada and get a better understanding of their priorities and program areas. Emily and I presented on Change That Clicks and generated a lot of interest in the program which is great! The best part of the worshop by far was the Internet Safety activity. We wanted BGCC staff to have a taste for how we are able to address some heavy topics with CTC but in a fun and dynamic manner :) The participants broke out into groups of 3 or 4 and wrote a short song about The Good and Bad one experiences in the digital world. I was super impressed with people's creativity, check it out:





There were some great ideas thrown around that could help us broaden our reach with CTC such as holding a Train The Trainer program for all interested clubs so they can lead the program singlehandedly. Our impact could be so powerful if we build the capacity of BGCC staff to provide educational programming using ICTs. Especially with the technological enhancements that will come through the CanTech Program, i feel our contribution needs to be more substantial than a one off program - we can influence the healthy institutionalization of ICTs. Beyond that, it is clear that our action-oriented approach and focus on community development are encouraged by BGCC staff who ultimately want to see their members driven to be contributors in society. I hope that we will see a greater exchange between our organizations in terms of how we enhance the leadership capacity of children and youth. I am also really interested in learning more about the training process for new BGCC staff in terms of effective ways to communication, interact and build healthy relationships with their members, how to resolve conflicts that arise and how to discipline in a non-threatening and non-oppressive manner. I have been thinking about the importance of equipping the CLC coordinators with anti-oppression and cross-cultural resolution training to build their ability to deal with difficult situations as they arise. What a perfect opportunity to exchange expertise with BGCC!

I had another inspiring experience listening to a speech by a young man who first joined the Boys and Girls Club as a member 11 years back. Currently working for the national office as the leadership program coordinator, he wanted to express his immense gratitude for the unwavering dedication of BGCC staff to raising the quality of life for the youth in their communities. His story was really touching…he felt that his life was completely turned around because of the opportunities and support of BGCC from day one. As he said, to empower youth there are two very important things: opportunity and believing. He felt that the BGCC staff always believed in him, and helped him realize his maximum potential. Today, he is coordinating a leadership program he took part in years ago and feels so honoured and privileged to shape the program that had the greatest impact on him. His speech was so genuine and it truly warmed my heart to know affecting change is as simple in believing and never losing hope in one another.

May 23, 2008 | 5:18 PM Comments  0 comments



Untitled
Related to this project: Creating Local Connections Canada/Liaisons locales Canada

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Hey team!

Just wanted to give you a brief update from Montreal. It's been a great trip so far. As soon as I arrived, I met with Yassir, Ilyes, and Sessi on the status of our Francophone engagement in Montreal. Though there has been definite progress in terms of outreach, partnerships, and online engagement, we are still facing certain barriers in reaching francophone youth as broadly as we would look. We decided that the best way for us to expand our networks in Montreal is to build strong partnerships with the more established francophone youth serving groups in the city. This might seem like common sense but the key is to identify groups that would benefit from the partnership as much as we would, groups that have shown interest in working with TIG or at least an interest in strengthening their programming in the ways that we could support. So we identified about 8 key groups we would like to develop partnerships with for Year 3 CLC. We also talked about the importance of networking at this stage as a way of increasing our visibility. We will be building a 3 month strategy together on Friday. It was so great to meet the three of them in person - we all share so much enthusiasm for our CLC work - i left feeling very inspired about what we can achieve in the coming year.

I then attended an Aboriginal Career Development dialogue on Monday and Tuesday. Various individuals and organizations were brought together to discuss the future of the Aboriginal work force and how greater cross-sectoral collaboration could help strengthen current efforts. We were such as diverse group, all adding a different piece to the puzzle. I realize that the work we do with the aboriginal program is such an important piece. It was expressed time and time again that empowering aboriginal youth to want to govern their lives should come before anything else, so the group had a lot of respect for the work we do and our efforts to cultivate a support network for aboriginal youth. Actually i was surprised to see how many people had already heard of TakingITGlobal! Many of them are members of the website and really like our newsletters, hehe. Anyway, being the only young person in attendance gave me many opportunities to offer a different perspective on things and share some of our best practices at TIG and other organizations we've partnered with. Everyone seemed really interested to learn of our approach, as a youth-led group, in terms of strategic planning, activity implementation, and focus on innovation and entrepreneurship.

One activity that resonated with all of us what a simple question that started off the day. What would a person look like if their human resource was fully developed? We ended up filling 8 pages of flip chart paper to draw a complete picture of what such a person would look like.
Off the top of my head, this list included: critical thinker, contributer to the community, compassionate, educated, inspiring, resilient, self-actualized and confident etc. During the rest of the dialogue, we kept the image of this person in mind. Even though we all have very different priorities in our work and use different approaches we all share this common vision of a person who has reached their full potential.

Anyway, this has gotten longer than i imagined. I'll stop there for now with more to come!

peace and love,
Kimia

April 24, 2008 | 6:32 PM Comments  0 comments

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Elections in Iran
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

This is getting ridiculous.. I don't know how much longer the Islamic government in Iran will get away with restricting people's freedom of choice and threatening those who voice dissent. Iranians are not just a bunch of cattle willing to be told how to act and how to think. They have the will to fight as they proved during the Iranian Revolution.

For those of you who might be interested, I read a fantastic book called We Are Iran, which is a compilation of Perisian blogs. Farsi is the fourth most frequently used language for keeping on-line journals, and Iran's political and social activists, prominent writers and journalists use online platforms to inform the Iranian public and the international community about the ill doings of the government, all in the name of Islam. It was an amazing read for me, and presented me with a whole segment of society in Iran who I wasn't familiar with since the political movement there is mostly underground.

Anyway, the latest on Iranian electio campaign below:


Iran bans make for flat election
By Jon Leyne
BBC News, Tehran

The election rally was a desultory affair. It was the last one as campaigning ended in Iran ahead of Friday's general election.

Leading conservative Mohammad Hassan Abutorabi Fard at a rally for the the United Front of Principalists
Conservatives are expected to cement control of the parliament
But barely 100 people gathered in the private car-parking space under a small block of flats.

The interior ministry would not let them hold the meeting in public.

Hardly any of the audience were women. They feel even more disconnected from politics than Iranian men.

And the party itself, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, has no candidates anyway.

They were all disqualified weeks ago, because of their alleged lack of Islamic credentials.

This is no fringe party. It had the single largest group of members in the Iranian parliament until just four years ago.

But this year the "reformists" - the more liberal-minded, pro-Western parties - have had their legs pulled from under them.

Many of their candidates have been disqualified, many more have not even bothered to put their names forward because they know there is no point.

Instead of howls of protest, the reformists seem to have lost the will to fight.

No talking to foreigners

When I approached one of the speakers at this rally, he said it was not "expedient" to speak to the BBC right now.

Hardly surprising when one reformist MP has been accused of treason, just for giving an interview to the Voice of America.

Another was criticised simply for speaking to the German ambassador.

Reformists hand out leaflets on a Tehran street
Reformists have not vanished but they appear defeated in advance

The reformists have not found a way to fight back against a system that now seems stacked against them.

Many of their supporters will simply not go out and vote in the parliamentary elections on Friday. In fact, here in the smart suburbs of north Tehran it's hard to find anyone who is going to vote.

Out in the more conservative provinces and in the villages it may be different. But even there, many of those who put their hopes in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the presidential elections nearly three years ago are disillusioned, particularly over his handling of the economy.

Mixed meassge

State television has been broadcasting stirring music and pictures of happy voters. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been telling Iranians it is their Islamic duty to vote.

Foreign governments and international media, including the BBC, have been attacked for trying to undermine this patriotic effort.

Party worker hands out election leaflets in Teheran
Some leaflets were handed out but campaigning was half-hearted

Yet the government itself is also sending mixed messages. Most election posters have been banned. The official campaign only lasted a week - including one day which was a public holiday.

The election itself is being held less than a week before the country shuts down for the Iranian new year holiday of Norouz. At the moment, most Iranians are more interested in shopping than politics.

On the streets of Tehran, there has been almost no evidence an election is about to happen.

Conservative or conservative

The suspicion is that the authorities are in two minds about what sort of turnout they want.

They need enough voters to endorse the legitimacy of what they still insist is a democratic process.

But too high a turnout might encourage those who have given up on the government to go out and register their protest, if they can find a like-minded candidate who has not been disqualified.

Some observers mischievously suggest the turnout has already been decreed as a safe 51% - the same as last time.

Maybe that is unfair. But the result certainly seems entirely predictable.

Control of parliament is almost certain to remain with the conservatives, or "principalists" as they prefer to call themselves - how can you be a conservative and a revolutionary at the same time, after all?

Precisely which of the conservatives will win is a more complicated question - fiendishly complicated in fact.

There are five main groupings or "lists" battling for seats. But many candidates have been endorsed by two or more groups.

Some candidates are even standing for apparently opposing groupings.

How voters are expected to make their choice is not clear.

But the evidence of this parliamentary election is that that choice is increasingly limited, and increasingly unimportant.