HOME
Community Works Manitoba Inc. is a not-for-profit community development and training organization based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Over the past 30 years we have worked with program administrators, front line staff and community volunteers in First Nation communities and urban social service agencies to develop and deliver a wide range of economic and healing and wellness initiatives.
Whether the focus is on economic or social challenges, we always begin by inviting participants to share stories from their own lives and from the lives of their ancestors. We believe that it is our own stories that hold the wisdom we need to create safer, more just, and healthier futures.
VISION
Community Works envisions a society in which individuals, families, and communities apply their stories, wisdom, and strengths to address critical challenges and to help build safer, more just, and healthier futures.
MISSION
We create spaces for addressing challenges and celebrating accomplishments through sharing stories and diverse perspectives. Our workshops provide individuals and groups with tools to imagine new possibilities and engage in individual and collective change.
CALL FOR PARTNERS
Lifting our Voices: Stories from our Lives
We would love to partner with you on a multi-media storytelling project
Community Works is seeking host organizations to partner with us on projects that use storytelling and the arts as a path to personal and social change. Three funding opportunities are coming up in the next few months.
The Canadian Women’s Foundation is inviting applications for projects that address gender-based violence and that provide safe and empowering spaces for women, two-spirit, trans, and non-binary people; and for projects that focus specifically on girls’ empowerment. The application deadline is January 26, 2023.
The Catherine Connelly Foundation funds adult education initiatives that address social, environmental, cultural and community development concerns; and that support personal and collective change. Application deadline for the first part of a 2-part process is February 1, 2023.
For Winnipeg organizations, the Winnipeg Foundation supports a wide range of community-based initiatives including those that use the arts for individual and social change. Applications are due March 1, 2023.
We prepare proposals in consultation with host organizations. Please contact us as soon as possible if your organization is interested in hosting a project.
UPCOMING EVENTS
IN OUR OWN VOICE:
Honouring our Healing Journey
The project will provide participants with histories of loss and trauma the opportunity to listen deeply to themselves and to each other as they explore personal stories through words, images and sounds. Participants will also learn how to use digital editing software to integrate these story elements into short video stories.
The project will be funded through a grant from the Winnipeg Suicide Prevention Network.
If you would like your organization to host a similar project, just get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
And we’d be pleased to deliver a presentation on the use of multi-media storytelling as a transformative resource for healing and wellness, education, and social change.
Community Works is pleased to announce our return to Thrive Community Support Circle. The agency will partner with us to deliver its second digital storytelling project.
Thanks to Rhonda Elias-Penner, Thrive’s Executive Director, for inviting us back!
RECENT EVENTS
CELEBRATING TREATIES WITH PUPPETS
The annual We Are All Treaty People Celebration returned to The Forks on September 18th for an in-person gathering for ceremonies, speakers, music, traditional crafts sale and stations for do-it-yourself crafts activities. Community Works taught puppet-making. About 40 puppets were brought into the world by people of all ages and many backgrounds.
CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF CCED-Net GATHERINGS
Community Works facilitated a workshop called At the Heart of the Matter: Digital storytelling as a resource for building safer, more just, and healthier futures. Frances Ravinsky was joined by storytellers Carolina Meneses, Dakota Nadeau and Nyamet Obeing. The 2022 Gathering took place at St. John's High School on October 21st, and focused on how to use the power of joy to connect to each other and strengthen our organizations and movements.
COMMUNITY WORKS REPORT FOR 2020-2021
Like most social service organizations, these pandemic times have been challenging for us. For 30 years, the effectiveness of our community development practice has depended on our capacity to create safe, inclusive, and intimate spaces in which accomplishments can be celebrated and in which participants can give voice to critical concerns that often have been silenced. How do you create authentic relational gathering places online in two dimensional rectangles?
That was our question and our challenge. It took us about a year into the pandemic to bite the bullet and move online for workshop and project delivery. Did it work? Yes, the feedback we got from participants and partnering organizations has been unequivocal.
Is it the same? No. Yet we discovered that it can be done. And we are grateful for everyone who has joined us for our online workshops and for the organizations that have partnered with us on multi-media story projects. And we so look forward to meeting with folks face to face.
WHAT WE'VE ACCOMPLISHED THIS YEAR
We have introduced 4 new workshops:
That Reminds me of a Story 1
Exploring Stories Through Treasured Objects
In this workshop participants will explore in the story circle a rich trove of memories associated with a treasured object, and then craft a short written story that emerges from that exploration.
Make Your Own Videos
An Online WeVideo Training Course
WeVideo is a powerful, easy-to-use cloud-based program for creating and editing videos. In this hands-on course participants will learn video editing tools and creative techniques needed to create their own videos.
That Reminds me of a Story 2
Exploring Stories Through Images
In this workshop participants will learn how to compose a compelling video image track that supports and enhances a voiced story.
Tree of Life
Connecting to Past, Present & Future
S.B. Miller
In this workshop participants explore their relationship to their life experiences, culture, and history through the metaphors of tree and forest. Through art-based activities, participants craft and tell their first person stories as well as the stories of their ancestors and, in so doing, connect to what sustains them on their life journey.
We have completed 3 multi-media story projects hosted by 4 Winnipeg organizations:
Spence Neighbourhood Association, Indigenous Family Centre, North End Women’s Centre and Thrive Community Support Circle:
Stories of Home and Community
A Multi-Media Project Hosted By Indigenous Family Centre and Spence Neighbourhood Association
Women's Stories: A Cultural Exchange
A Multi-Media Project Hosted By
Thrive Community Support Circle
"We are story. All of us. What comes to matter then is the creation of the best possible story we can while we’re here; you, me, us, together. When we can do that and we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, one story at a time…”
- Richard Wagamese
Featured Digital Story
A woman's story of loss during Covid times and of discovering her altered self.