Workshops

Explore more than 30 workshop sessions for engaged learning and sharing from local people about local solutions at the community level. Formats range from panel discussions, to case study presentations, interactive mapping exercises, storytelling circles, and more!

Topics + Themes

Food sovereignty, local housing, community investment, renewable energy, arts & culture, the commons/the sharing economy, Indigenous economic development, fair work, democratic ownership of the economy, progressive procurement, and more!

Check back here as we add OVER 30 workshop sessions! In the meantime check out the sessions below:

A-B-C-I (Asset-Based Community Investment)

Justin Sweeney

Justin will share how he uses a variation of the A-B-C-D (Asset-Based-Community-Development) model for identifying community investment opportunities and capital sources. He will discuss the approach using two case studies and guided discussion Justin has a decade of direct work experience in community finance and investment, which followed a decade of community development and community economic development work. This presentation will have a case study followed by guided discussion to help participants connect the example to their own experience

Thriving with Less: Degrowth and Circular Economy as Pathways to Climate Justice

Megan Devoe

Her research focuses on the perceptions and experiences of just transition policies among workers and communities in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia who depend on fossil fuel extraction for economic survival, but at a distance through patterns of long-distance commuting. Her academic research also explores just transition at different scales; from the international level all the way down to the local including movements for degrowth and local economic future imaginaries.

Vanessa Paesani

What does the social economy actually look like in our communities and how do we grow it? This session draws on the Pond-Deshpande Centre’s (PDC) state of the sector research to ground us in where things stand, then shifts into case study and hands-on exploration of how practitioners are putting that knowledge to work using PDC’s social enterprise toolkit.

Through facilitated discussion, participants will share their own experiences, connect the dots between research and real-world practice, and leave with concrete ideas and resources for strengthening the social economy in their own communities. Whether you’re new to the social economy or deep in the work, this session is for you.

Fair Work, Strong Economies; The Role of Migrant Workers in Nova Scotia

Stacey Gomez

Migrant workers are critical to local economies, contributing to sectors such as farming, seafood processing and construction. Yet, too often they face low wages, unstable employment, and unsafe conditions. This session will share findings of recent research conducted by the Centre for Migrant Worker Rights Nova Scotia on the experiences of migrant workers in the North Shore and Annapolis Valley.

This session will examine the challenges and vulnerabilities faced by migrant workers, highlight their vital contributions to local communities, and explore policies and supports that enable both workers and communities to thrive.

Building Community-Owned Food Infrastructure

Exploring the institutions, enterprises, and infrastructure needed to build resilient regional food systems. Drawing on examples from co-operatives, food hubs, community finance initiatives, local food businesses, and other community-rooted enterprises, this interactive session will examine how communities are creating the processing, aggregation, storage, distribution, procurement, and financing systems needed to strengthen local and regional food economies. Together, participants will explore what infrastructure already exists, what is missing, and where opportunities lie for greater collaboration, investment, and community ownership across Atlantic Canada.

Linda Best

Linda grew up in Somerset in the Annapolis Valley on a mixed farm – dairy, apples, field crops – helping on the farm and eating fresh local food.

With a BSC from Acadia University, Linda began a 50 year career at the QEII Health Sciences Centre as a Medical Microbiologist, Researcher, author, speaker, supervisor and a Director of Capital District Health Authority. She operated an apple orchard on the weekends and founded Frame Plus Art which grew to three locations and a production facility.
Linda came to realize that one of the most effective ways to prevent illness is to ensure that people have access to nutritious food. Aware of the decreasing production of food in Nova Scotia, she founded Friends of Agriculture in Nova Scotia (FANS) and organized the 2009 Nova Scotia Food Summit attended by over 250 people who care about people and food.

FANS planted the seeds for FarmWorks Investment Co-operative Limited, a Community Economic Development Investment Fund. Linda continues as Executive Director of a Board of 12 volunteers supporting FarmWorks’ vision of healthy farms, healthy food. To date, Nova Scotians have invested $6.5 M in FarmWorks and as of June 2026, $12.6 M has been loaned to over 170 food related businesses across Nova Scotia.

In 2019 FarmWorks Founders Linda Best and Ann Anderson received the Taste of Nova Scotia Gary Macdonald Culinary Ambassadors of The Year Award for their promotion of local farms and food. In 2020 Linda received the Order of Nova Scotia, in 2022 the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal and in 2024 the King Charle’s Coronation Medal.

Michael Jensen

Rural communities have particular needs, and new possibilities to address them are opening up with AI-assisted software development. How do small communities take advantage of them, without being taken advantage of?

Michael Jensen is building three experiments: Carpoolable.com (for province-scale travel cost sharing/carpooling), LocalLendables.com (for a community-scale “library of shared things” lending/tracking system), and CommonsCommunities.com, which has TataCommons.com as Tatamagouche’s site for a community-centered Calendar of upcoming Events, business listings, news, and other member-engagement mechanisms. He’ll talk about the sustainability models, goals, successes, and many failures, as well as leading a discussion around needs and opportunities that rural folks might address, with clever systems.

Food as Community: Building Belonging, Participation & Resilience

Exploring how food can serve as a catalyst for connection, belonging, learning, and collective action. From community food forests and gardens to neighbourhood food initiatives, participatory planning processes, and culturally-rooted growing practices, communities across Atlantic Canada are creating spaces where people come together to share knowledge, build relationships, strengthen local resilience, and shape their own food futures. This interactive session will explore how community-led food initiatives foster participation, inclusion, cultural connection, and mutual support while creating pathways for deeper civic engagement and community wellbeing. Together, participants will reflect on what helps communities thrive, where opportunities for connection exist, and how food can strengthen the social fabric needed for long-term resilience.

Jayme Melrose

Jayme is a Halifax-based community organizer, Community Food Coordinator, and cooperative governance nerd who has spent years getting her hands dirty – literally and figuratively – in local food systems. She works with the JustFOOD Halifax Network at the Ecology Action Centre, and helps steward Scotch Village Co-operative Farm, which means she spends a lot of time thinking about soil, money, and how people make decisions together (not always in that order).

Jayme has deep roots in Halifax’s food systems community, including founding and growing Common Roots Urban Farm from a seed of an idea into a place that thousands of hands have helped shape, and that’s still growing today. She serves on the board of iNova Credit Union and believes that strong local economies are built the same way good food systems are – one relationship, one act of trust, and one well-tended plot at a time.

Natural Assets, Local Prosperity, and Community Resilience: Seeing Nature as Community Infrastructure

Gillian Kerr

This workshop will introduce participants to the idea of natural assets (similar terms include ecosystem services, green infrastructure, natural capital, nature-based climate solutions) — the forests, wetlands, rivers, lakes, soils, coastlines, parks, green spaces, and working landscapes that provide essential services to communities.

Through a practical, community-focused lens, participants will consider how natural asset thinking can support local climate adaptation, community resilience, municipal planning, and more place-based forms of prosperity

Energy Democracy and Community Development

This session focuses on how communities can take back control over their energy systems to build local wealth, resilience, and fairness. Exploring the shift away from centralized, profit-driven utilities toward community-owned and governed energy models such as co-operatives, municipal utilities, and local renewable projects that keep revenues circulating locally.

Ulrich vom Hagen

Ulrich vom Hagen is the Atlantic Energy Manager at Sierra Club Canada Foundation, where he works on offshore wind, energy democracy, and the transition to a more modern and connected electricity system in Atlantic Canada.

Building the Conditions for Food System Transformation

Exploring the policies, institutions, investments, and governance structures needed to support resilient, equitable, and community-rooted food systems. Drawing on experiences from food insecurity advocacy, provincial food policy, regional collaboration initiatives, and food system planning, this interactive session will examine the conditions that help communities thrive and the barriers that continue to stand in the way. Together, participants will explore how public policy, procurement, land use planning, financing, governance, and collective action can strengthen local and regional food systems while identifying practical opportunities for collaboration and systems change across Atlantic Canada.

Sara Farias

Sara Farias (they/them) is the Advocacy Lead at Feed Nova Scotia, where they mobilize communities through education and advocacy, grounded in the belief that systemic change happens through collective community action. Originally from Brazil, they hold a degree in Social Sciences with an emphasis in Political Science and Sociology.

After moving to Halifax in late 2019, Sara continued their advocacy work in Nova Scotia. After the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, they became actively involved in the cycling community, combining their passion for active transportation with social and environmental advocacy. Their community work has focused on active transportation and food insecurity, leading initiatives such as Nova Scotia by Bike, including the educational program Cycling Experiences, and Bike Brigade HFX, a volunteer-driven project that delivers food throughout the HRM using bicycles.

Sara believes that food security is linked to decolonial climate justice and is dedicated to creating stronger, more connected, and more equitable communities.

From Local Gifts to Local Action: Building Shared Futures through Community Well-Being

Often, communities have what they need to support collective well-being, and in the face of multiple overlapping crises, the ability to identify and mobilize these strengths for change becomes increasingly important. This 90-minute workshop offers an experiential, practical introduction to do just that through asset-based community development (ABCD). Participants will uncover gifts, skills, knowledge, and connections, which are sometimes not visible, and explore how to mobilize them to cultivate resilient and thriving communities.

Marian Turniawan

Marian (she/her) is a program teaching staff member at Coady Institute, StFX University in Nalikitquniejk (Antigonish). Her work supports (re)building adaptive and resilient communities in the context of climate change, grounded in nurturing human and more-than-human relationships. She begins with an understanding that bringing together many ways of knowing and being facilitates creativity, widening the lens of possibility for cultivating a world in which all can lead dignified and meaningful lives that work in reciprocity with Mother Earth. In her work at Coady, Marian supports learning in various spaces – facilitating online and in-person courses, workshops, and knowledge building activities – with partners and community members here in Nova Scotia and globally.

Jess Popp

As a Program Teaching Staff member (Asset-Based Community-Led Development) with Coady Institute at StFX University, Jess Popp (she/her) is committed to Moses Coady’s vision of “a full and abundant life for all” and focuses on the important role that relationships, critical reflection and learning, and collective action play in creating vibrant and thriving communities. She believes that as individuals and communities, we collectively have the strengths and assets to inspire meaningful change, address local challenges, and shape a future that truly works for all. Inspired by community-driven development, Jess’s work aims to aims to connect people, develop partnerships, and foster collaborative and strengths-based approaches to better support communities.

Care for Community Caretakers: Sustaining Those Who Build The Kind Of Communities We Want To Live In!

At the heart of important community change efforts you’ll find leaders (both volunteers and staff) who lead with an unwavering commitment and vision. Existing systems, funding structures and inequitable policies draw these community caretakers toward exhaustion and burnout and in the end the whole community suffers the impact. What if we chose a different path to systems change? A path that honours the caretakers as essential infrastructure to community change, naming that these people need systems of support to protect their own health and wellbeing, too? Join us to explore stories of the transformative power of community care as essential part of systems change. Together in reflection, we will explore practical ways to support ourselves and community caretakers in pursuing changemaking work from a well resourced place of health and balance.

Jennifer Decoste

Jennifer is dedicated to work that builds strong and connected communities. She is the Founder of a non-profit network of barter-based folkschools called LifeSchoolHouse that began in Nova Scotia, Canada. This platform for grassroots skills sharing creates stronger more interconnected neighborhoods and reduces the impact of social isolation by offering nourishing spaces where neighbors can learn, connect, and thrive. This project has been scaled globally and Jennifer is the first person in Atlantic Canada to receive the prestigious Ashoka Fellowship for her work.

Jennifer and her partner are also growing a new social enterprise in Nova Scotia called FireLoch: a space in the forest for community, care, and continuous learning. As a social enterprise, FireLoch is a forested retreat space with a sustainable model to support charitable work: offering bursaries and scholarships for deep rest and care for teams from the Non-Profit and Charitable sector in Nova Scotia.

Jennifer has two children and sources great joy from introducing them to the true prosperity in Atlantic Canada: a history of cooperative action, the shared wisdom of multiple generations, and the kindness of strangers.

Reframing Climate Planning: Community-Identified Priorities as the Foundation of Resilience

In the deeply rural African Nova Scotian communities of Weymouth Falls, Southville, Danvers and Hassett; climate resilience planning is starting with community priorities rather than climate data. Through a values-based engagement process, residents identified five interconnected resilience values: food security, energy security, community spaces, emergency preparedness, and cultural preservation. These priorities reveal how resilience is tied not only to climate adaptation, but also to community ownership, local investment, and stewardship of land and community assets. This session will share emerging lessons from an ongoing project and explore how local knowledge and community-defined priorities can inform strategies that strengthen self-reliance, guide investment in community infrastructure, and support long-term prosperity alongside climate resilience.

Shekara Grant

Shekara Grant is an African Nova Scotian community leader, land steward, and emerging scholar whose work advances community ownership, land justice, and Black self-determination. Descending from the historic African Nova Scotian communities of Cherry Brook and Weymouth Falls, her leadership is grounded in enduring traditions of resilience, collective care, and resistance. She is the Founder & Executive Lead of the Weymouth Falls Community Land Trust and her work explores how community-owned assets can support thriving futures while strengthening connections to place, history, and community.

Shekara is completing a Master’s in Sociology at Dalhousie University, where her research focuses on African Nova Scotian cultural knowledge and community memory. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts and the Nova Scotian Non-Profit Housing Association, and contributes to provincial and national initiatives through the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia and University of King’s College Partnership Advisory Committee and the Advisory Council of the African Nova Scotian Road to Economic Prosperity.