Deepening Our Community Organizations
How might we learn from biological systems to harness the collective power of people by valuing and fostering grassroots, community-based practices working in systems level of change?
The Grassroots Power & Systems-Level Change trio embedded their journey in learning from the land and is working to synthesize their differential perspectives in hopes that something will emerge from it. They focused on community organizing, mutual aid, and holding space for making deep connections.
Portfolio of Learning
I am excited to see your interest in this game I developed through the Catamount Fellowship at Mount Royal University. Before we get into the ‘how to facilitate’ this game, I’d like to give a little background as to what inspired it.
I was partnered with Tyson Bankert from the Community Development and Learning Initiative, along with Dr. Robin Owen from the Biology department. From them, I was given a question to research over the winter 2026 semester. The question was “How might we learn from biological systems to harness the collective power of people by valuing and fostering grassroots, community-based practices working at the systems level of change?” In a nutshell, this question was looking at how we can learn from the land and its beings to deepen our community Relationships.
Over the semester, I looked at many topics, but one that stuck out to me was fragmentation. It’s one we feel in both our communities and can see in the land. From polarizing ideologies to climate change, fragmentation affects us and ecological species deeply. We often think of ourselves as different from each other, but we aren’t. Through this game, I wanted to highlight this topic and try to bridge that gap. The goal of this is to learn fun facts about the ecosystem and highlight our similarities to the land in a way that relates to community behaviours. The process of doing this is being in conversation with one another. Below is the template to facilitate whether you're indoors or outdoors.
CDLI’s Biomimicry in Community: Card Game [pdf]
