Summer update

Summer in Vancouver, and the livin' is easy – aaahhh! I don't care what all those Canadian writers and composers say about "Winters R Us" – my seasons are spring and summer, and I come into bloom with the sun and warmth.

Spring is also a time when everyone wants to get all their work done before the summer, so May and June are busy months for me. In April I connected with Keli Anderson, Executive Director of The F.O.R.C.E. Society for Kids' Mental Health – a well-named organization, because Keli is definitely a force of nature! We worked together with a group of strong and dynamic Aboriginal mothers on a session devoted to Aboriginal child and youth mental health, and then in May Keli hired me to map the FORCE's Child and Youth Mental Health Day Forum and roundtable discussion.

The April session contains private information, so I can't publish the charts here, but I'm authorized to post charts from the Forum, so here they are (remember to click on the images for a larger view):




























The last week of May found me up in the village of Teslin, Yukon, working with my old friends Bev Suderman and Mike Kelly, who were doing an Official Community Plan (OCP) review for the Village. Over 5 days, Bev and Mike convened a series of community conversations around the visioning/values clarification/objectives-setting part of the project, and my job was to map the conversations. I'm just waiting to get permission to post some of these charts. Meanwhile, here's what it looked like outside at 11pm and midnight:










I'd always wanted to see the midnight sun, and we got pretty close this time! Quite a sight, eh?

More to come...I'm on a roll!