The work of cultivating generative communities might be talked about as “changing the way we do society to be in service to life.”

A climate change town hall held in Vancouver this summer modelled a step in a new direction for the place various levels of government might hold in relation to their communities.

The July 12 event swapped the typical town-hall style of mostly lecture-like presentations for an approach centred largely on enabling meaningful conversations between citizens.

Addressing four issues on climate change, the town hall was charged and serious. Some came ready to protest.

For the longest time things have been done a certain way in Cedar Rapids-Iowa City Creative Corridor. Those ways have served the city well. Yet, a small group longed for something richer.

In the space of a few hours last month, community members of Molenbeek, Belgium connected with one another as people with more commonalities than differences. A cautious optimism glimmers that a new story for this community’s future has been seeded.

A series of theatre-inspired dialogues about Canada’s future that took place across the country last year is now bubbling into community action. “All over the country, grassroots initiatives have started as a result of these conversations,” Duncan McIntosh, project lead, tells Axiom News.

While a participatory budgeting experiment has sparked openings between the citizens and government of Peterborough, Ontario, citizenship in the city has been coming alive in exciting ways of late.

What’s it take to co-create and hold a generative space in community? What questions do we start with? What are the design constraints to generate real, felt change? How does individual agency fit in? What’s the place of analyzing and engineering versus hosting and narrating a generative space?

Hope and possibility is stirring in Calgary as a Generative Journalism co-op called NewScoop YYC draws an array of new talent sensing a life-giving space in which to step into their gifts and animate a new story for their city and society.

Bright hope for the future of reconciliation in Canada has stirred and bloomed for Wanda Brascoupé Peters, and when asked what’s next for this work, she answers with vivacity, “Blue sky.”

PETERBOROUGH - A Peterborough congregation’s shift into new ways of gathering is sparking a whole new energy and connection, members are saying. “This is just the beginning, but it is an amazing beginning. We’re in a completely different place than we were one year ago,” Jovanna Soligo, one of the members, says.