While the cofounders of a unique city-building effort in Vancouver talk about its big and far-reaching possibilities, two students who took part in it have a lot to say about what it has done for them in small, deep and lingering ways. They say they walked away with a bolstered sense of confidence in themselves, in a certain set of skills and in a particular way of relating to people around them.

The level of cognitive, energetic and creative surplus that is unleashed when undergrad students are asked to help build their cities has happily astounded Duane Elverum. It’s also swelled his sense of urgency around shaping the conditions to spur this unleashing more and more.

“I feel a vibration. My heart beats faster, my hands start to sweat, when I think about how do we move faster, how do we get this going, how do we put this on the big wheel so to speak,” Duane tells Axiom News.

Seven years ago Duane launched CityStudio Vancouver with his colleague and fellow Simon Fraser University professor, Janet Moore. In very simple terms, the studio matches universities’ capacity with civic needs. Besides activating the unleashing mentioned above, the studio is shrinking the gap between higher learning and municipal government. It also represents a new way of distributing problems.

A bold match-making project in Vancouver peels away the mist on what’s possible for creating our preferred future as a society. Pairing universities’ capacities with civic needs, City Studio Vancouver unleashes cognitive and creative surplus in students that see their energies making the city better.

“In the past, the problems we have in society have typically been given to some experts or some narrow groups to solve,” says City Studio Vancouver co-founder Duane Elverum. “They really are not distributed to the demos or the democracy in very effective ways, other than voting.”

But that’s changing. A new and more effective way to distribute societal problems might soon be called a global movement.

The story of how employee ownership saved a B.C. mill company from shut down offers just one compelling glimpse of what’s possible in a business model some say is still too much of a secret.

As a child growing up in the town of Shabqadar Fort of the Pakistan province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Noreen Mahmood noticed how classmates from certain religious minorities were shunned. People from what she calls “the mainstream groups” never even liked to be touched by these girls. Though a “mainstreamer” herself, Noreen established herself very early on as a kind of quiet radical. She refused to follow the ways of her own people and deliberately intermingled with these girls.

In their ongoing quest to improve the lives of women and children in the world’s poorest countries, the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health (CanWaCH) is shaping its Annual General Meeting in a potentially powerful new way.

It can feel as if we have lost limbs and senses in today’s world of screen-based engagement and motor-based travel. To cope, we may shrink deeper and deeper inside ourselves, seeking to escape the shriek and the fumes and the emptiness around us. Others of us may do the opposite, throwing ourselves fully into an experience grated with fake lights, motor noises and the incessant cry to buy.

What is our guiding story in these times? And is it true? As an author, speaker, business consultant and community-building practitioner, Michelle Holliday invites and offers an alternative view.

No one person can ever embody a social movement. But if someone could, it might be Laury Hammel.

After a couple of decades of doing things a certain way Axiom News is taking a great big in breath and waiting to see what comes.