Last week — on November 3 and 4 — UBC held a Changemakers Showcase. The event aimed to give students and the UBC community an opportunity to discuss change making initiatives and ideas as well as interact with professionals whose initiatives have led to positive change.
“[The Showcase] is an event for anybody who’s interested in making a difference, big or small,” reads its website.
“The Changemaker Showcase is an event for students to come and learn more about what it means to be a Changemaker so they get to hear from local Changemakers from Vancouver, from different peers,” said one of the main event coordinators, Vince Tom. “For a large part, we just want to give students the tools and the space to try different things and that’s ideas.
During the two-day event, the showcase hosted a series of workshops designed to help students bring their change-making ideas to life. Workshops offered a diverse range of opportunities — ranging from speakers cafes “wrestling wicked problems” to “food security jam” innovation sessions — all aimed at instilling a sense of knowledge in those attending them.
“The kind of things that are going on are a collection of developing skills and then offering inspiration through some of these folks that are actually in the process of making change for societal good,” said Yusuf Alam, the associate director of the Centre for Community Engaged Learning.
The Changemaker Showcase last year was done in partnership with the Centre for Community Engaged Learning and the Ashoka foundation.
“This is our second year doing it, and so this year, we decided to do it a little bit more catered to the UBC student population and so we moved away a little bit from the Ashoka model but to make it a little more customized and personalized for the UBC student body,” said Alam.
Some students attended the events as a part of their classwork.
“I’m enrolled in SOCI 370 right now which is Social Theories which is taught by Dr. Kerry Greer who is the MC for the event so instead of class today, we came as group to this showcase,” said Hugh Knapp, a fourth-year sociology major. “A lot of this overlapped with my interests in urban sociology and how food is distributed over the city so I’m pretty pleasantly surprised that this was the conversation we had today because food access is a project I’m doing in another class too.”
A common motivation for students attending the event was the opportunity it provided to engage with initiatives run by the UBC community.
“My goal is really to see the initiatives of UBC students and faculty and staff members push through,” said Zining Wang, a fourth year economics and asian studies double major attending the event. “I also hope to gain some skills in terms of how to engage in conversations, or how to push changes, or the Human-centred design which is another really fascinating topic workshop for me.”