WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS FOR CULTIVATING CIVIC ACTION? HOW DO WE ENCOURAGE SOLIDARITY AND HELP PEOPLE TO FIND THEIR OWN POWER TO CREATE CHANGE?
Presenter: Dr. Sylvia Gale / Executive Director, Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, University of Richmond
Date: 31.3. 13.15–14.45 (EET)
Zoom link: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/62419842588?pwd=VnVrWDdrK3YzclJXQ2VjQmFDNnBodz09
Passcode: 897336
Seminar room: Room 127, Snellmaninkatu 10
I will reflect on these questions from my perspective as an American, university-based “civic engagement professional,” who is now immersed for a semester in Helsinki with a 150-year-old social services organization, Diakonissalaitos (the Deaconess Foundation). Thanks to a grant from the Fulbright Finland Foundation, I am studying the work of the Deaconess Foundation’s civic action and community programs team and spending time at the “D-Stations” across the city, publicly described as “a community’s meeting place open to everyone.” You are invited to a discussion about the practices I’ve observed in action so far, and the ways these practices usefully and in some cases quite radically disrupt efficiency, expertise, and outcomes-based professional paradigms, in favor of practicing community, together.
Dr. Sylvia Gale is Executive Director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, and a 22-23 Fulbright Finland Mid-Career Professional Development Grantee, hosted by the Deaconess Foundation, Helsinki, and Tampere University of Applied Sciences.