Vancouver Stimulus Paper

 Vancouver has experience as a learning city since 2006 addressing the challenge of inclusive engagement of the whole community with innovations in strategies to engage the disengaged...

Vancouver at a Glance

Located on the Canadian coast of the Pacific Ocean and bordering the Coast Mountain Range, Vancouver is renowned for its spectacular beauty and mild climate.  A popular tourist destination, Vancouver captured the world’s attention as the Host City to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. 

With a population of 578,000 (2006 census), Vancouver is part of Metro Vancouver, the third largest metropolitan area in Canada, with a population of 2.1 million. It enjoys a dynamic, highly diversified economy that includes mining, forestry, biotech, film, and software industries.  An internationally recognized Green City, Vancouver is a leader among municipalities in environmental sustainability. Its global connections have strengthened dramatically with the rise of economies in Asia Pacific.  Home to large numbers of immigrants – most notably from China, India, and the Philipines – the city is culturally diverse, multilingual, and cosmopolitan.  It celebrates a strong aboriginal heritage, including the traditional Lil’wat, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tslieil-Waututh First Nations.

Alongside the many appealing visual, cultural, economic, and environmental strengths of the city, Vancouver struggles with significant poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction.  Disparities in wealth are particularly stark in some of its neighbourhood the Downtown East Side having the highest profile.  Sadly, as with the rest of the country, approximately 40% of Vancouver’s adult population are thought to have inadequate levels of literacy for full participation in society. Moreover, as a community of learning, Vancouver falls in the middle of the pack of Canadian cities as ranked by Composite Learning Index.  As funding for social programming is increasingly restrained by the current economic climate, these vulnerabilities may well continue or worsen.

The Vancouver Learning City

The Vancouver Learning City (VLC) is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations working together to build a culture of learning throughout the City.  At the World Urban Forum in June 2006, its efforts were formalized in a Proclamation signed by the Mayor of Vancouver declaring Vancouver a learning city.

The VLC has no formal governance structure.  The Vancouver Public Library (VPL) administers a modest budget comprising its own and several college partners’ donations.  Since 2009, the VLC has contracted with an independent consultant to serve as part-time Project Director.

The mission of the VLC reflects several rounds of consultation over the years and is to build a culture of lifelong learning in Vancouver.   Specifically, it seeks to promote the richest possible array of learning opportunities throughout the city and, more particularly, to engage and animate the public around learning – in all the different forms and contexts that “learning” is relevant and compelling to them. 

Several principles may distinguish the VLC from other learning cities – and these certainly impact what it does, who it does it with, and how it does it.  First, the VLC promotes all learning regardless of its context, level, discipline, or motivation – be it for personal fulfilment, community or family engagement, or labour market success.  Second, the VLC believes learning should arise from community-based aspirations and experiences – be these neighbourhood-based, sector-based, workplace-based, or interest-based communities.  Third, the VLC positions itself as a catalyst for dialogue, opportunity, and synergy – as the collaborative “agent” or “glue” that makes it possible to achieve more with fewer resources.

Challenge: Inclusive Engagement

The crux of the challenge for the VLC is not merely the breadth and diversity of its audience but that those who it most seeks to reach are Vancouverites who may not consider “learning” as particularly relevant to their own personal, social, or economic well-being.  That is, while it very much seeks to forge closer ties among those who do provide or are already engaged in learning activity, the VLC is ultimately concerned in hooking the interest of those who are not.

In Vancouver, as elsewhere, this includes people who are traditionally difficult to engage.  Given the information age and its barrage of more and more messages about what people “should” care about or attend to in their lives, engaging these people is becoming more difficult.  Moreover, with the proliferation of new social media  – Facebook, Twitter, blogging, You-Tube -- endeavouring to do so  is becoming exceedingly complex.

Key Strategy: Curiousity + Popular Culture

Beginning in 2010, the VLC approach is this:  To work with our partners to get Vancouverites curious, engaged, and actively learning about whatever issues, skills, and topics matter most to them and about which they are already curious.

There are three reasons the VLC believes an approach that marries curiousity and learning with popular culture will draw out and engage the very groups that are most difficult to reach:  First, curiousity and learning (broadly defined) can be embedded non-intrusively and with relevance into every dimension of life in Vancouver.  Second, curiousity and learning are among very few upbeat, constructive, and versatile platforms on which Vancouverites can channel shared interests as citizens, neighbours, community members – making it strategically alluring to our partner organizations.  Third, while the VLC is committed to advancing its partners’ objectives and can draw on a very broad network of interests, it is completely independent and unfettered to conventional ways of doing things.

Case in Point: The Curious City Game Show

This willingness to try unconventional “engagement” approaches paid off in October 2010.  In partnership with Langara College and the City of Vancouver – the VLC organized 3 “live” rounds of a Curious City Game Show in which contestants competed for prizes by answering “big screen” multiple choice trivia questions about their city.  Fact-based questions were non-partisan, entertaining, and tapped into a wide array of general interest topics –  iconic Vancouver restaurateurs, household participation in environmental recycling and composting programs;  inter-ethnic marriage statistics; facts about homelessness; local First Nations artists; municipal property taxes;  library card usage; Neighbourhood Watch programs; museum and gallery exhibits;  Business Improvement Associations; the history of Stanley Park;  neighbourhood-based Farmers Markets; and many more.

The event was staged at the college in the party atmosphere of Langara College’s own 40^th birthday celebrations and was energetically facilitated by one of the co-founders of a local comedy troupe.  Around the circumference of the room were City of Vancouver displays relating to its annual budget consultation.  A videographer was on hand to capture the event in a short clip later to be posted on You-Tube.

By all accounts, the Curious City Game Show achieved its objectives. Approximately 200 enthusiastic people attended, representing a cross-section of local residents – including youth and immigrants who don’t typically turn out for citizen engagement activities. In addition to enjoying the contest, people reported learning much about their community and municipal budget issues.  Langara College appreciated their increased public profile, both with the municipality and with local community members – some of whom were exposed to it for the first time.  City of Vancouver staff said they were “thrilled” with the event and one of the elected Councillors (who served as the honorary Game Judge) congratulated the VLC as having contributed “the biggest turnout of any budget consultation session”.

The Way Ahead: Just Curious...

Under the banner of its Just Curious... brand, the VLC is further exploring innovative joint initiatives in which curiousity and learning serve as an upbeat, constructive, and relevant platform for achieving the goals of learning providers, cultural institutions, community organizations, industry, and government.  Working closely with its expanding network of partners, the VLC is  pursuing three streams of activity that link curiousity and learning to current and emerging topics, issues, and activities of “going concern” in society.  Activities are particularly (although not exclusively) directed at hard-to-reach groups like youth, immigrants, aboriginals, seniors, and those with low levels of literacy.  The use of new social media technologies and fresh unconventional methods are a priority.  The three streams of activity are:

1. Provocation: Staging unconventional, provocative, and entertaining events and campaigns that   draw diverse and hard-to-reach Vancouverites together around whatever is of “going concern” to them – giving them an opportunity to experience, share, and discover the role of curiousity and learning in their lives.  The Curious City Game Show template is endlessly adaptable for this purpose.  So also are broadly themed Just Curious... campaigns.  (The first of these centers on the broad question of “What is home?” – dovetailing in this case with the 2011 City of Vancouver’s 125^th anniversary celebrations – but spins it out into specific facets of belonging and well-being that reflect people’s interests and curiosities.)
2. Pulse-Taking: Exploring Vancouverites’ perceptions, opinions, and aspirations from the perspective of what they’re most curious about, what they most want to learn, how they most want to learn about it, and how they most want to share what they learn – using traditional survey methods and appreciative inquiry approaches as well as online polls, blogs, tweets, and other web-based tools. 
3. Profiling: Capturing and profiling what “curious Vancouverites” are actually up to – not only at school and in colleges, but in conjunction with “live” community events and programs (eg. neighbourhood houses, museum and gallery installations, local libraries, Business Improvement Associations, trade fairs, cultural exchanges, etc.) as well as with “virtual” curiousity and learning on Twitter, Facebook, You-Tube and popular blog sites.

For Discussion:

• How does the breadth of the VLC mandate – as a non-intrusive agent of change across all learning – compare to that of other learning cities?
• What are some of the ways learning cities elsewhere have developed collaborative, value-added relationships with organizations outside the education sector?
• How have other learning cities adapted new technologies and social networking as a means of generating greater interest and engagement across hard-to-reach groups?
• How have other learning cities secured funding to support social marketing activities – for which impacts and outcomes are indirect, long term, and difficult to measure?  Are there successful, revenue-generating models of social entrepreneurism in use by learning cities elsewhere?