Category: communities

  • The Schoolhouse in the Woods: An Earth Day Long Read

    The Schoolhouse in the Woods: An Earth Day Long Read

    Happy Earth Day! Despite my best intentions for a monthly long blog this is only my second of 2023!  This wasn’t intended as an Earth Day blog, but its seems apt to be publishing this today as a story about connection to place, love of natural landscape through art and community, and renewal. I have…

  • Good Neighbours

    Good Neighbours

    I am pleased to say I had a good few ideas for this week’s short blog (again Thursday not Wednesday, sorry), but after attending an excellent webinar from the University of Guelph’s History Roundtable yesterday, i had to get a few lines down about it. As a researcher who often looks backwards to go forwards,…

  • Grasping The Sparrow’s Tail: Thoughts on Inviting Movement Back into our Lives.

    Grasping The Sparrow’s Tail: Thoughts on Inviting Movement Back into our Lives.

    I let my intuition explore connections between shifts in seasonal farming patterns, Graber and Wengrow’s ‘The Dawn of Everything’, Tai Chi and Panarchy, and the importance of metaphors, stories and narratives in understanding and action.

  • Creating Rural ‘Complete Communities’

    Creating Rural ‘Complete Communities’

    Last Wednesday I attended a Greenbelt Foundation Workshop on Creating Complete Communities in Rural Municipalities at Gellert Community Centre in Halton Hills. As an independent researcher, I’m collaborating with Waterloo and Queens Universities, Save The Oak Ridges Moraine (STORM) Coalition and Mount Wolfe Farm in the development of the Oak Ridges Institute of Applied Sustainabiity…

  • The Ontario Rural Skills Network finds a new home at Mount Wolfe Farm: Poppa’s Workshop. Just needs a tidy.

    The Ontario Rural Skills Network finds a new home at Mount Wolfe Farm: Poppa’s Workshop. Just needs a tidy.

    A major frustration to putting on any outdoor workshops this time of year is the inclemency of the weather. The site where we held our first spoon-carving workshop in September last year  is now under a thin blanket of snow (which is thickening even as i write!) and the temperature with wind chill is  -4…