Participants of the inaugural Cultural Forum are seen during a collaborative 'World Cafe" session on Monday afternoon at the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre.--NEWS PHOTO BRENDAN MILLER
bmiller@medicinehatnews.com
s, organizers and community stakeholders came together to share perspectives and expand and promote cultural programs across the city.
On Monday, the city held its first Cultural Forum at the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre – six sessions focused on the city’s arts, heritage and entertainment sectors, providing attendees practical tools to use moving forward when planning events.
The all-day Cultural Forum also allowed city staff to expand on the Arts, Heritage and Entertainment Plan and its vision to expanding vibrancy throughout Medicine Hat.
The forum kicked off with a welcome and opening reflection presented by the Indigenous collective Matriarch Movement, followed by a presentation from Aaron Nelson, acting director of community development, who spoke about the City of Medicine Hat’s multiple roles.
“The city plays four different roles in arts, heritage and entertainment in our community,” explained Nelson, who listed the city as a funder of community events through several grant programs, as a regulator of rules and safety for events, as owner of several facilities like the Esplanade and as a presenter and representative of Medicine Hat.
Nelson said the goal of his presentation was to touch on outcomes the city would like to achieve and how it can be a better partner to other community organizations.
“How can organizations partner better with businesses, local governments and others to work together? And how can we ensure that the arts and culture initiative engages broad and diverse communities?”
A guided walking tour was facilitated by Tourism Medicine Hat, highlighting local cafes, murals and creative spaces, and was followed in the afternoon by a presentation from Linda Hoang, workshop and social media strategist and consultant, on marketing fundamentals for artists, cultural workers and organizations.
Participants then gathered in groups to engage in a collaborative outreach and event presentation that featured important community calendar dates, event co-ordination, communication platforms and information sharing.
The Collaborative World Cafe session was held by Safira Lachapelle, a public participation specialist, and Ashley Howes, community inclusion co-ordinator.
The goal was to create a starting point for community organizations to come together and learn how to work with the city to host more local events.
“The collaboration, and then hopefully alignment as well, so organizations could find out that they may be working towards the same sort of goals and maybe they could partner up on that,” said Nelson.
One topic of discussion included the creation of a large community calendar that would host several community activities and events to help increase community awareness.
The focus group also spoke about best uses of communication platforms for different demographics.
Nelson says the city plans to expand on the inaugural Cultural Forum and will continue to encourage collaborative opportunities moving forward.
City staff have also committed to creating an “arts and heritage report card” that will be published on an annual basis to organizations with city hosted and privately hosted events.
“We got some great information from some of these groups of what they’d like to see included in something like that, so it will be kind of an evolving document.”
