Collingwood Neighbourhood House – Interculturalism

Innovation and Implementation

This project was a master class in managing complexity. This was an extremely complexed topic which involved branding what interculturalism is, articulating what it means, identify how to practice interculturalism and implementing it in community, school, business organisation or government. Then put it into practice in a community, educate and make it grow to create innovative ideas.

Interculturalism means you focus on building bridges and exchanges between diverse people whether, culturally or departmentally and encourage them to bring their unique gifts and approaches to creating solutions around common interests. Interculturalism transcends traditional multiculturalism which only exists side-by-side and does not create innovation.

Using our ‘Designed Experience’ approach, we had to articulate what interculturalism is. We then took our client through a persona and journey mapping process, identifying the relationships between people and interculturalism.

This enabled us to develop a brand summary and a series of publications. We also facilitated several interactive sessions in the community involving all stakeholders, enabling us to map the capacity in the neighbourhood with residents and community partners.

We also facilitated a ‘common message’ workshop, involving community, local business and educators. It was essential that all stakeholders crafted this message when talking about interculturalism. The workshop produced the following brand message: Interculturalism is like a sports team, we need different talents on the ground to make the team strong, just as we need different people in our community. We play together and create new strategies to win as a team.

Out of this process, we developed INTERactive – Interculturalism through physical activity. Illustrated video stories have been produced, and a Knowledge Exchange developed to extend the capacity to build interculturalism in the community.

We also facilitated an Intercultural Community Development workshop and community representatives are presenting at the University of British Columbia to share their work through an intercultural lens on ACTION BC lesson plans.