Last Tuesday’s Projecting Change Through Social Media was an incredible event. A partnership between by SMCYVR and the Projecting Change School Media team, it was held at the soon-to-be finished HiVE Vancouver.  The HiVE is a 9,000 square foot collaborative workspace for sustainability and creativity focused people located at 128 West Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver.

65_RedRoses

The evening kicked of with a welcome from Rebecca Peel, our social media director. Rebecca introduced the first plenary speakers, Nimisha Mukerji and Kat Dodds who talked about the experience with the 65_RedRoses project. Nimisha is the co-Director, of 65 Red Roses a documentary film. Kat is the founder of Hello Cool World, a communicate agency specializing grass roots campaigns for non-profits and independent films.

65_RedRoses is a documentary film on the lives of Eva Markvoort and her two online friends who all battled Cystic Fibrosis (CF). CF is a fatal genetic disease affecting the lungs and digestive system. The name “65 Roses” comes from what children with cystic fibrosis (CF) call their disease as the words are easier for them to pronounce.

Without fully realizing it, Eva Markvoort started a global campaign for organ donation by writing about her experiences with cystic fibrosis on her Live Journal site. Sadly, on March 27, 2010, while waiting for a second transplant, her breath ran out. She was 25. The documentary, website and campaign site is her legacy. 65_RedRoses aims to leave viewers with a new appreciation of life and the digital world. To keep up to date on the latest developments, search for #4Eva on Twitter.

With Glowing Hearts

Next up was Jon Ornery, the producer of With Glowing Hearts, and social media guru Kemp Edmonds, who spearheaded the social media efforts to raise funds and promote the film. With Glowing Hearts tells the story of the 2010 Winter Games’ effect on Vancouver from the perspective of people directly impacted by the Olympics: downtown eastside residents, bloggers, photographers, activists, proponents and opponents.

In order to complete the film, Jon, Kemp, and director Andrew Lavinge created the “Tweet and Toonie Torch Relay.” This is a crowd-sourced social media campaign to promote the film’s message and help raise the $10,000 needed to complete the film, $2 at a time. Special props were given to east-side resident and citizen journalist, April Smith.  April is still drawing attention to the film through her social media activism in the DTES.

HiVE Vancouver

The last plenary speaker was Jeremy Murphy, the man behind HiVE Vancouver, our hosts for the night. The HiVE is an up and coming sustainability and creativity co-working space in downtown Vancouver. It will be home to non-profit organizations, small businesses, social entrepreneurs and independent contractors all working in creative and sustainable industries.

The HiVE will provide co-workers with a great work space, awesome networking opportunities, and access to the knowledge, capital and resources that will help them project change. Check out Rebecca’s interview with Jeremy for more information on him and HiVE Vancouver.

You can’t project change without the right tools!

The second half of the evening was dedicated to workshops. There were two sessions of there concurrent workshops. Since I wasn’t alble to be three places at once. I’ll rely on some notes from my friend, Tracy Bains and the twitosphere. Here are some key takeaways from each workshop:

Being Strategic Using Twitter

Stephanie Michelle Scott of Wildfire Effect and Monica Hamburg led back to back workshops on Twitter basiscs. Their discussion was truly old school as Stephanie and Monica illustrated their points with stand up board twitter signs! Through their workshops, Stephanie and Monica created a few new social media converts, who will now go out and project their own change through social media!

Photograph by @masalapuri on TwicPic

Inside HootSuite

Kemp Edmonds led another set of back to back sessions on how to maximize what Hootsuite, a Twitter dashboard has to offer. Kemp offered his insider expertise on how to use Hootsuite to help even most the most advanced twitter user improve theri ability to project change Some of his most useful tips included how to use Hootsuite analytics tools, the geo-location search function and how to mass schedule tweets. You can find out more about these subjects and more at http://learn.hootsuite.com.

Transforming the dialogue: How questions & media can create change

Camille Jensen from Axiom News led this workshop. Axiom News is and organization “committed to sharing stories about movements making a difference.” Camille illustrated how the questions we ask will create thr stories we tel. She refered to Peter Block, a writer and consultant, who noted that: “If you want to change the world – or the culture – all you have to do is change the conversation.”

Camille also talked about generative journalism: telling positive stories to support positive change.

Photograph from @check_your_head on TwicPic

Taking offline community organizing online

Ajay Masala Puri led this session that was based on the question: What is the purpose of engaging on social media unless you can make a difference? His main take aways were to avoid the temptation of “over-institutionalising” your message and instead take complex issues and make them simple for your friends and followers to digest. Doing so will allow many more friend and followers to connect with your message.

Ajay suggests creating your ideas offline, take them online to gain momentum, then back offline for execution. He talked about how, by following thrice strategy he was able to leverage just 15 of his Facebook friends to attract thousands of people to an event.

Final Reflections

All in all this was an incredible event that taught something to everyone who attened, regardless of their level of social media knowledge. It was great to see people completely unfamiliar with social media, not only being invited to attend an event, but being welcomed and guided. It is always cool to see somebody learn what a # is for the first time.

Photograph from @smcyvr on YFrog

—Yuri @yuriartibise

Jeremy is projecting change all over the place. In addition to co-founding a work space for local change-makers to collaborate (Hive), he is a Director with Sustainability Solutions Group. Jeremy uses his skill sets as an urban planner, public facilitator and green building expert to create innovative sustainable solutions to climate change which are employed across Canada and internationally. Sitting down to play Q&A (question and answer) with Jeremy was a blast–check out the video & highlights below!

Q: Tell me about your work with Sustainability Solutions Group?

Sustainability Solutions Group is a workers’ cooperative. It’s different from the typical business model in that it is a flat job complex. We have 6 directors working across Canada and 25 associate members who we draw on for specific projects. They don’t work with us full-time but, when we need an economist we have an economist, when we need an engineer we have an engineer – it’s great to be able to draw on these resources for specific projects.

Q: Tell us about some of Sustainability Solutions Group’s more recent projects… I hear you guys are winning some awards?

Sustainability Solutions Group works on a variety of different sustainability projects across Canada, some of the things we are most proud of are our green building work, our work with university campuses and our work with local governments. One of our recent green building projects, the new Vancouver Convention Centre, was a $1 billion+ project and is winning architectural awards around the world. We are also doing green building projects for BC housing, which are socially assisted projects, which we hope will have an impact on poverty levels in Vancouver’s downtown east side.

Our campus work has mostly been out East in Ontario and Quebec. It has transformed the way university campuses think about sustainability in their curriculum their operations and their buildings, multiple campuses and everything they do, that is really inspiring to us and to the students and the faculty who work there.

For local communities we do a lot of green house gas emissions land use planning with them trying to meet their commitments for the provincial legislation on green house gas emissions and climate change targets. Working with local communities is really rewarding because we can see how our work really impacts their land use plans and how they are going to plan for the future and meet and tackle climate change problems.

Q: How does the power of film effect social change?

Video is the mainstay of modern communications, it really inspires you and makes information stick with you. Film is a very powerful median for portraying any sort of message. Nothing captures inspiration and emotion and messages the way video does. Projecting Change Film Festival really captures that in a fantastic way with its documentary style and appeal to a broad audience.

Q: Tell us about the Hive Vancouver? (I really want to work there).

The Hive is Vancouver’s up and coming sustainability and creativity co-working space. It will be home to non-profit organizations, small businesses, social entrepreneurs and independent contractors all working in creative and sustainable industries. The Hive will provide individuals with the capacity to have a fantastic working space, networking opportunities, and access to knowledge, capital and resources that will help make their world changing ideas into realities.

Interested in checking out the Hive for yourself? We’re hosting Projecting Change Through Social Media at The Hive on May 17. Limited tickets so get them early! TICKETS

- Rebecca @rebeccaapeel