In 2021, Banff Canmore Community Foundation, Town of Banff and Town of Canmore assumed the guiding role for the implementation of the Moving Mountains Initiative. The goals were to enable Bow Valley civil society to build capacity, collaboratively achieve greater impact and transform the flow of resources. The trifecta of partners seeded the Moving Mountains Initiative, securing funding from the Province of Alberta’s Civil Society Fund.
The work of the Moving Mountains Initiative may look complex and sometimes it is, and it has been our job to help untangle the complexity and work with others towards clarity. The learnings generated over the course of this initiative reflect those of Bow Valley civil society and the project team as a collaborative. Like many collaborations, the journey was not a straight line, it ebbed and flowed, and the initiative team embraced emergence.
These learnings are presented in the pages of this website, as an online report of the work. Our intention is to spark curiosity, share the Moving Mountains process with other communities embarking on similar work, and create a space of common ownership.
Collaboration
Learn about the experiences of collaboration in each community in our, Learn and Try Group Profiles understand more about Bow Valley collaborations, and check out the Case Stories to explore the barriers to collaboration and how we can come together to make changes that matter.
Mînî hrpa - Indigenous-led Collaboration
Mînî hrpa is an Indigenous-led collaborative project that emerged from the Moving Mountains Initiative. Read about Mînî hrpa and other collaborative initiatives in the news, and watch the video of the soft launch of Mînî hrpa in Banff, AB.
Learn and Try
To achieve its collaborative goals, Moving Mountains empowered and activated 5 Learn and Try Groups. The groups were convened in alignment with the thematic ‘opportunity spaces’ civil society had collectively named in earlier phases of the Initiative. These included:
Mental Health and Wellness | Housing, Affordability and Livability | Indigenous and Local Economy | Cultural and Environmental Learning | Reconcili-ACTION
The groups accepted the creative, collaborative challenge to “Learn and Try’ together – that is, to ‘learn’ together about the challenge and opportunity spaces as revealed earlier in the initiative; to ‘learn’ together about possible shared goals and projects that might address community challenges, and to ‘try’ working across civil society organizations and groups to prototype and activate a collaborative initiative, project, program, service or enterprise, and to ‘try’ accessing shared supports through methods such as collaborative grant applications and social enterprise efforts.
Shared Learnings
Moving Mountains Initiative worked with partners, evaluators and civil society researchers in the Bow Valley and beyond to develop a series of case studies, stories and videos. Read about our findings and case stories here.
