In Flow – Building Watershed Wisdom through Civic Circles

Social ties are the building blocks for community resilience in the face of forthcoming climatic changes. Meaningful social connections help to build trust, counter feelings of isolation and can motivate shared action to take beneficial actions such as increasing urban canopy cover, developing rain gardens, applying less salt, and supporting the implementation of the watershed plans more broadly.

Concept

Through flow nibi (water) unites us all. The watershed is home. Like droplets of water pooling, watershed-based circles invite local residents, historians, artists, and water enthusiasts to explore their relationship to the waters and how ecosystems can be protected and restored. In dialogue, we will learn how watershed health relates to our own well-being.  

Background

In Flow for Etobicoke Creek was the first of a series of place-based gatherings to come to Toronto. The watershed-informed circle dialogue process serves as a social technology for civic sense-making. The simplicity and wholeness of a circle offers a metaphor and a container for a micro-agora in which local stories are entangled and integrated. 

New practices of commoning are emerging globally to guide urban design from the collective imagination of diverse members of the community, and with the In Flow series we bring back an ancient form to collect the wisdom in the watershed.

Our Future First will guide rounds of reflection of your embodied knowledge of the ecosystem.  While in circle you will become part of the system seeing itself through uncertainty into a desired future.  

Toronto has been an important site for gathering, trading and celebration for Indigenous people for thousands of years. It is the treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit and its land and waters have been stewarded by the Haudenosaunee, the Huron Wendat and the Anishinaabe. The civic circles are designed to celebrate the rich Indigenous cultures of the city and to foster strong relations between the First Nations, Inuit, Métis and diverse people from around the world who call Toronto home by celebrating watershed based identities and actions that steward the lands and waters with an emphasis on Indigenous worldviews.

Learn more about our process here: Casting Ripples: The potential for watershed based civic assemblies.

Get Involved

Interested in co-hosting a civic circle in your watershed or keeping informed of the In Flow series as it develops? Let us know below.