Notes from an Exploratory Gathering | Toronto Metropolitan University | May 14, 2025
On a spring afternoon at Toronto Metropolitan University, a small but purposeful group gathered at the invitation of the Coalition of Manitoba Cultural Communities for Families (CMCCF). Martin Itzkow, CEO joined this meeting in person. The occasion was exploratory in spirit but ambitious in scope: a conversation among Toronto-based allies about what it might look like to weave the city’s rich tapestry of cultural communities into a national movement for peace.
The meeting was convened around CollaborationNet, CMCCF’s emerging vision for a pan-Canadian network designed to cultivate positive peacebuilding capacities in and with cultural communities from coast to coast. The Toronto gathering was an early and intentional step: before any national architecture could take shape, the work of understanding and connecting locally had to begin. The room held that tension well — the pull of a large national aspiration grounded by a clear-eyed commitment to starting where people actually are.
What animated the discussion most was the question of trust. Participants were frank about the fact that cultural communities, particularly in a city as layered and dynamic as Toronto, are not waiting to be discovered. They are already organized. They already have leadership, agendas, and histories of engagement. Any meaningful peacebuilding effort would need to enter that landscape with humility, meeting existing structures rather than supplanting them. The group was clear: authentic relationship-building is not a precondition to the work — it is the work.
This emphasis on deep, meaningful engagement rather than transactional partnership gave the conversation a particular texture. Collective impact, the kind that emerges when communities are genuine co-authors of a shared vision rather than recipients of a program, was held up as both the goal and the method. Trust, the group agreed, is built slowly and through presence, and any credible peacebuilding initiative in Toronto would need to invest in that process before anything else.
At the same time, there was real energy around what CMCCF’s cross-regional framework might uniquely offer. Toronto’s cultural communities are connected globally and yet can remain siloed locally. The idea that a national peacebuilding network — one that uses technology to bridge geographic distance and foster solidarity across regions — might provide a new reason to connect across communities felt genuinely resonant. The peacebuilding lens, participants observed, could serve as a strategic inflection point: a frame capable of bringing together communities that share deep values but have had few common platforms for engagement.
CMCCF’s envisioned role in this work, as organizer, facilitator, and holder of the broader vision, was received as a credible and generative one. The structure and process they have developed was seen not as an imposition but as an invitation: a framework strong enough to provide coherence without foreclosing the local creativity and leadership that would make the work meaningful. Importantly, the group also recognized that this network could open new pathways for cultural communities to participate in policy change processes, moving peacebuilding from the relational into the systemic.
The meeting closed without a blueprint, but with something perhaps more valuable: a shared commitment to continue. There was collective agreement that the conversation had surfaced the right questions, affirmed the right values, and identified enough common ground to take a meaningful next step together. The process CMCCF has begun is one that honours both the complexity of the communities it seeks to serve and the patience that genuine solidarity requires.
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