Vancouver Learning City - Response Note

While we've been around a few years, the Vancouver Learning City remains a loosely organized initiative operating with few resources.  Until we resolve the resource issue, we are resigned to proceeding on a fairly small scale.  It has been stimulating and encouraging to learn through this exchange of the successes, plans and challenges of other learning community organizations around the world.  We would be most keenly interested in continuing dialogue around the following themes: 

Animating the Public Around Learning – The primary thrust of the VLC – what we think is most likely to advance our objectives - is to reinvigorate the way people think about learning as relevant and meaningful to their own lives.  To this end, we seek to engage them in inquiry and conversations about their own “curiousity”.  We are intrigued by how the use of social networking and digital media might help, but this is a new area for us. Other community’s ideas and successes around public engagement are of great interest to us.   

Connecting Learning to Culture, Community, and Recreation – We are fortunate to have a strong network of innovative education providers in Vancouver.  One of the functions we seek to serve in the community is to convey how learning is an integral part of what happens throughout our city’s diverse cultural communities; neighbourhood networks and activities; and arts and recreation programming.  This integration is essential if learning is to be more fully embraced and appreciated by Vancouverites; at the same time, there is a balance to be struck between embedding and subordinating learning in the process.  We would be very interested to learn more about how this is being done with success elsewhere. 

Influencing Lifelong Learning Policy and Funding –  Like several of the exchange participants, the VLC is in the longer term most interested in increasing the profile and influence of lifelong learning among key decision-makers in both the public and private sectors – in a sustainable and a strategic way.  Hand in hand with animating and encouraging (vocal) public interest in learning, this is perhaps the most important work we could do, but it is also the most difficult, slow-going, and invisible work – garnering little in the way of much-needed financial support for our efforts.  We would be interested to explore whether and how we might take a more global approach to doing so.

 However it can, the VLC looks forward to contributing to these conversations in the future.