Kicking Off Our 2023-2024 Catamount Fellowship Journey!

Posted October 17, 2023

 

Introducing our fifth cohort of Catamount Fellows and sharing their journey so far.

We are thrilled to welcome our fifth cohort of Catamount Fellows and share their journey with our community!

 

September was spent building a strong foundation of relationships and community starting off with a gathering in the tipi. We were joined by Elder Miiksika'am who offered a blessing as the cohort embarked on their journey together. This is a meaningful time for students as they begin building relationships. Elder Miiksika'am's storytelling approach supports the students to consider the responsibility they hold to community and to one another as a Catamount Fellow.

 

The Catamount Fellowship for Emerging Changemakers is a transformative learning journey that matches students with a community partner in Calgary and those living across Treaty 7 digging into real world challenges. At the core of the fellowship is peer-to-peer connections and building a learning environment where students feel empowered to develop their skills as changemakers. 

 

Our journey continued on September 15th with our annual Welcome Gathering, an event intended to introduce all students and program partners to systems thinking and build connections across our learning community. Through the Blind Men and the Elephant and the Babies in the River parables and a series of activities, we were able to gain a better appreciation for recognizing the need to include more perspectives in changemaking and focus on upstream solutions rather than quick band-aid fixes. 

Catamount Students meeting with their teams.

 

Whether the Fellows are exploring how might we break down racial and class barriers to support social inclusion, assessing how might we create inclusive accessibility legislation, or examining how might we explore innovative solutions in food insecurity that go beyond food provision via the charitable model, these research topics are systems-level issues that require us to collaborate with and learn from many partners.

 

Reflecting on their learning so far, Bachelor of Social Work student ilf Dharshi was reminded of the quote “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it” by Arie de Geus. “The quote to me suggests that to address challenges effectively, I and everyone in general or the collective have to adopt a fresh perspective or mindset. My experiences and my learning are encouraging me to approach problems or opportunities with a new, innovative perspective, rather than relying on old ways of thinking.” Dharshi further emphasized on the importance of connection as powerful for that evolution of what we are looking to create even if we do not see the path right away.

 

Students will spend the next few months learning about navigating problems through a systems lens and leaning into complexity. They will also have the chance to use participatory approaches for community engagement to further enhance their understanding of their research topic. From January 29th to February 4th, our Fellows will host a Community Conversation to engage with broader audiences in their research area including other scholars, students, practitioners and communities. 

 

Stay tuned to our Happenings Page for updates about the fellowship, event invites, and exploration into their research findings!

 

We express our immense gratitude to the talented students, community partners, and faculty mentors embarking on this journey:

 

 

To learn more about our 2023-2024 Catamount Fellows, visit our Meet the Fellows Page. 

 

To access blog posts about the Catamount Fellowship and our other programs and publications, visit our Happenings Page.

 

 

"Systems thinking is important for anyone looking to impact social change: understanding the broader system enables us to make more deeply informed choices and respond to root causes of problems versus reacting to symptoms"

- Student Guide to Mapping a System, Page 21