Breakout Sessions
Breakout sessions gave attendees the chance to interact with each other and explore some of today’s most pressing community issues and most innovative solutions. Breakout sessions included panel discussions that feature presentations on new tools, ideas and examples from leading community practitioners and experts and moderated roundtable discussions that allowed participants to dive into nuanced issues and processes and emerge with a range of perspectives.
Continuing education credit is available for select breakout sessions.
Held Wednesday-Friday, these sessions are organized into three tracks:
Be the Change
Groundbreaking initiatives, visionary leaders, community innovators, against-all-odds success stories: this track will fire you up to be the change for your community and highlight practical models for affecting change and help you engage with trailblazers who are rethinking the way communities address the most challenging issues of our time. Neighborhood health networks, creative economies, green cooperatives, youth leaders, grassroots coalitions—in this track, the sky is the limit.
Sessions:
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From Crisis to Opportunity
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In Local Economies We Trust
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Reshaping Development Patterns
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Improving Health One Community at a Time
Stock Your Toolbox
Need to expand your tool kit? This track provides a range of immediately applicable tools to engage citizens, gather feedback, measure progress, visualize growth alternatives and spread your community’s message to a broader audience. Learn how to gauge what matters most to your community. Discover how design influences awareness and find tools to improve communication and change behavior in small and large ways. From storytelling to e-Government, new media to 3-D visualization, this track will introduce new tools and sharpen the old.
Sessions:
Make It Happen
Ideas are great, but only if you make them stick. Too often, innovation gets lost in a thicket of endless meetings, policy battles, and personality clashes. Whether you want to implement a small neighborhood project or help your town build an integrated vision for the future, this track will help you upend traditional processes and end the gridlock that often prevents substantive change. Find out how to leverage informal community networks, reach new audiences and turn them into active participants, gain broad consensus around controversial issues, turn stories into action, and galvanize people to make great things happen.
