What a Trip! Engage Nova Scotia’s Winter Road Trip about the Sustainable Development Goals and quality of life for all (Part 1)

Mapping it Out: Our approach to the Winter Road Trip and its design

Engage Nova Scotia team members, Blair (left) and Erika (right) in our office holding Winter Road Trip wayfinding signs.

Over five weeks this winter, Engage Nova Scotia went on a 10-stop road trip in partnership with Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC).

We co-hosted conversation panels about quality of life, wellbeing, change-making, belonging, and connection with community members who had been nominated locally. 

The event was part of our Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) program. If you’re new to the SDGs, they’re 17 global goalposts and calls to action set out by the United Nations that strive for a more inclusive, sustainable, and just future for all.

At their core, the SDGs show us how interconnected the world’s pressing challenges are. They emphasize the importance of leaving fewer people behind as we work towards our collective futures. 

When planning the Winter Road Trip, we asked ourselves:

• What if we created a container for conversations with community members, in every corner of the province?

• What if we guided that conversation with open-ended questions that speakers could take in different directions?

• What if we assumed the SDGs can best be achieved when they’re localized?

Here’s what those guiding questions led to:

• We asked the public to nominate community members to be speakers. This was part of an effort to co-create the event and amplify people new to us (and to others).

• This led to dynamic, diverse, and representative panels with speakers who were sometimes surprised and humbled at being asked.

• We didn’t focus on single SDGs in the conversations. 

  • This led to demonstrating that the SDGs are interconnected. It showed how speakers’ efforts to improve quality of life for themselves and their communities are advancing the SDGs, whether or not we’re using SDG language to describe it.

Blair speaking at a podium to a crowd in a small auditorium during the Winter Road Trip event at NSCC Strait Area Campus.

• We designed the two-hour event in a way that centred the stories of others instead of ourselves as the ‘host organization.’

• The focus of the event’s offering was the speakers. We closed with who Engage is and what we do instead of opening with it and bookmarked the panel with time for everyone there to mingle and snack.

• We asked speakers to bring their whole selves to the conversation. In other words, we challenged the notion of the work ‘hat,’ and we asked broad questions that didn’t put speakers in any one lane.

• This led speakers to talk about their community, personal, and professional roles and to vulnerable conversations that had laughter and lightheartedness. Audience members used words like ‘raw,’ ‘candid,’ ‘honest,’ ‘sincere,’ and ‘authentic’ to describe conversations.

Blair in conversation with Kailea Pedley, Rosie Sylliboy, and Jody Nelson.

• The tone of events and conversations was welcoming and warm, like ones you’d have in your home amongst family, friends, or neighbours.

  • Audience members said they felt part of the conversation even though they weren’t speaking, and it was hard in most places to wrap up ‘on time’ because the post-panel mingling and connecting was so energetic.

• We partnered with NSCC to host the events at campuses provincewide.

• Our partnership allowed NSCC to prototype this approach that involved all campuses and create a roadmap for how to do it again.

Like where we’re headed so far? Read Part 2 of this blog post here.