Quick info:
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Applications are here!
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Alumni of a previous Toronto Jam? Apply here!
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Application deadline: Friday, March 12, 2021.
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If you need more time or other accommodations to submit an application, please let us know so we can support.
Ok, what’s a jam?
Jams are gatherings of 30 changemakers exploring connections between self-awareness, interpersonal relationships, and systemic change. We do this through facilitated dialogue, sharing circles, artistic expression, games, movement, and free time for participant-led activities and spontaneous interactions and connections. A Jam is not a conference, seminar, or meeting. It is an experiment in ‘beloved community’: a place where we can intentionally come together to practice the art of connection, collaboration, and co-liberation, in the context of a society that is constantly seeking to divide us.
How will it work online?
This year’s Toronto Jam will be virtual for the first time. It will take place between Tuesday, April 6 and Monday, April 12. We will meet for a 2-hour session from 12-2pm, with an optional hangout from 2-2:30pm, on Tuesday (April 6), Wednesday (April 7), Friday (April 9), Saturday (April 10), and Monday (April 12). Thursday and Sunday will have no pre-scheduled sessions.
Although there are only 10 hours of pre-scheduled programming over the week, we recommend making as much time as possible in your schedule outside of those hours for community interactions, participant-led workshops, rest, reflection, and integration. Many people will work full-time during the Jam and that’s fine, and in our experience, you will get the most out of the Jam if you can reduce the number of commitments you have that week and leave your schedule as open and spacious as possible to support your engagement and wellness.
Why Toronto? Why now?
The pandemic has shed light on the deep interconnectedness of so many of our systems, in both good and troubling ways. Systems of power — fueled by capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and more — hurt, kill, divide, and dehumanize us, and challenge our ability to thrive. And in spite of it all, or maybe because of it all, people are stepping up. We have seen a rise of powerful mutual aid networks and movements for racial justice that are weaving together and redistributing our collective resources to meet urgent needs in ways our traditional systems and institutions have not. We’ve seen, in the last year, intense division and separation, and also stunning coming togethers and connection fostered despite very difficult circumstances.
The Jam is an opportunity to explore this light and this darkness that surrounds us in an environment of healing, connection, and (re)humanization. It is a reminder that our interdependence is an essential part of our nature. We want to celebrate our victories, support each other through our struggles, and share what it looks like for each of us to create safe, just, and regenerative lives and communities. The Jam is an opportunity to slow down together, so we can feel our own truths and listen and learn from others.
So much of the beauty and power of Jams in years past has been the sharing of physical space together and still, we felt that given the challenges of the pandemic, meeting virtually feels like a vital and exciting opportunity to connect and collaborate together.
Why is it called a “Jam”?
In music, a jam is a creative, live gathering of musicians who together spontaneously create a new sound, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, Jams are places where people who care about the world bring together their passions, questions, and unique perspectives. We provide a structure to support the gathering, and what is formed in that space is dependent on who shows up, what they bring and what emerges in our collaborations. The Jam asks that all the players are present and ready to listen deeply to each other. What is then co-created are higher-order solutions and previously unimagined outcomes — something none of us could have done alone.
Who attends a Jam?
YOU! — organizers, artists, entrepreneurs, healers, strategists, public officials, business leaders, dreamers, thinkers, activists, builders, educators, poets, researchers, philanthropists, non-profit leaders, environmentalists, and anyone with a desire to impact social change — are invited to join us for the 6th Toronto Jam!
Jammers are people who are dedicated to creating change in our local communities; people who know the beauty, power, and wisdom of each other, our diverse cultures, and varied communities; people who see the potential of our collective liberation in this vibrant and challenging part of the world. The Jam offers an opportunity for people who use different approaches to change and who have different areas of focus to connect and build stronger networks in our city.
Given that we’re doing this year’s Jam online, we’re open to applicants from neighbouring Toronto areas, or who otherwise have or feel some kind of connection to Toronto and to this invitation for transformation work.
What questions do we explore at the Jam?
For the 2021 Toronto Jam, we anticipate exploring and deepening into these questions:
- How do I take care of myself while caring for and being taken care of by community?
- How do I find more balance across the many responsibilities in my life?
- What’s my purpose/calling and how do I live into it more?
- What tools and processes are useful to helping me pause, heal, and (re)centre myself?
- How do we find connections and common ground across our different forms of social change work?
- How can we heal wounds that have been developed and inherited across our social identities and generate friendships and webs of ongoing support?
- How can we create forms of dialogue and conversation that centre learning, love, truth, and transformation together?
- How can we build and sustain our movement infrastructure?
Yours, these, and many more questions are the basis of the Jam. And, by exploring them together through a variety of modalities — circles, small group work, movement, meditation, visioning, the arts, play, and more — we hope to build a foundation for lasting, transformative change.
Working at the intersections of the personal, interpersonal and systemic
In the Jam we will address three interconnected levels of transformation. Our aim for gathering is to:
- Rejuvenate (internal/personal) – We aspire to give ourselves space to reflect on our personal stories, learn and unlearn, take off our masks, seek our next growing edge, recharge, and renew. We want to nurture our own spiritual and emotional health in order to fire our activation and work in the world.
- Build solidarity (interpersonal) – We want to make and take time for authentic conversations to emerge, to discover common ground, and to celebrate differences. By taking an honest, loving and transformative look at our conflicts, we seek to move beyond collaboration and allyship towards deep friendships that will sustain us over the long-term.
- Foster collective liberation (systemic) – We aim to connect the dots of what we are each doing and link issues that are not commonly linked, to find new intersection points, and to gain a clearer vision of the whole.
We hope to emerge renewed: bringing back grounded passion, spiritual fortitude, new relationships, and re-imagined solutions for our home communities and projects.
Logistics
The 6th Toronto Jam will take place on Zoom. We may also use Google Sheets, Google Jamboard, WhatsApp, and other apps. Please let us know through the application form if you have any accessibility requests related to technology, or otherwise, so we can support you throughout your Jam experience.
Cost
The Jam is run by a group of organizers and facilitators who believe and are passionate about the work. We are excited that this year the Jam is online and therefore there are no fees associated with accommodations or food. The full cost of the Jam this year is $300 to support honorarium for facilitators + organizers, and given the challenges many folks have had during the pandemic, we are asking participants to pay within a sliding scale ranging from $50-$300.
We never want money to be a barrier, so we will do everything we can to make it work for you to attend. We can also create a monthly payment plan that works for you.
If you have more resources, donations above $300 are welcome and help us provide scholarships to support the broad spectrum of participation on which this event thrives.
How do I apply?
Apply here!
(Toronto Jam alumni, see below)
Application Deadline: Friday, March 12, 2021.
If you need more time or other accommodations to submit an application, please let us know so we can support.
If I’ve been to a jam, can I still apply?
Yes! If you are an alumni of a previous Toronto Jam and want to apply to come again, please do!
Use this application form instead. Same application deadline: Friday, March 12, 2021.
Please keep in mind that as much as we’d love to have everyone back, we want to make this experience available to as many interested people as possible, which may mean we are unable to accommodate some alumni.
Questions? Comments? Feelings?
We look forward to welcoming you to the Jam. If you have any questions, or want to check in at any point, please reach out to us at : yestorontojam[at]gmail.com.
Who’s behind the Toronto Jam 2021?
The Toronto Jam is organized and facilitated by a team:
Francesca Allodi-Ross
Francesca spends her weekdays providing free legal services to low-wage workers in Etobicoke and west Toronto. She loves dancing and spending time with beloved people. Other times she’s organizing for social change around income inequality and cycling. She is passionate about creating just, joyful, and effective social movements.
Berkha Gupta
Berkha is a transmasculine queer south asian that continues to spend most of their time figuring out what their role is in ‘the movement’ and their ‘communities’. They are the Executive Director of LGBT YouthLine, and have spent most of their life striving to create safer spaces for racialized queer and trans people;. In the last couple of year, Berkha’s interest has moved away from just building and organizing (i.e. doing things) to being able to focus on healing, joy, and community (i.e. being present); the Jam has been a formative space for Berkha, something they didn’t even know they were looking for and they are excited to continue to be part of the Jamily.
Kimalee Phillip
Kimalee is an experienced social justice and organizational learning consultant, facilitator, writer, educator and researcher whose work is deeply grounded in, and informed by Black queer feminist thought and practice. She finds joy in writing, music, connecting with loved ones and losing herself in the embrace of nature. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Human Rights and Law and her Master’s degree in Legal Studies which focused on field and theoretical research on the coloniality of gender and violence in Grenada. She sits on the Board of Trustees with the Groundswell Community Justice Trust Fund and organizes with the Caribbean Solidarity Network. She works as a Human Rights Representative with Canada’s largest public sector union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), and does movement-support work with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Her heart remains deeply connected to water, land and territories where she was born and raised, Grenada, while her body continues to organize and live on Turtle Island.
Jeff Carolin
Jeff is a criminal defence lawyer living in Toronto who focuses on providing top-notch legal representation to people who can’t pay out of pocket and who has a passion for restorative and transformative justice. And, when he gets the chance, he loves to sit in circles. Hence the jam. But it’s more than just the circles. For Jeff, exploring theatre of the oppressed and other participatory community organizing traditions and attending jams has been a key part of discovering how he can–in this life, with this body, and with his experiences–engage around complex issues of racism, colonialism, inequality, and other forms of systemic oppression, without this work leading to further division, burnout, and in-fighting among people who are trying to build something new together. Seeking common ground while always acknowledging the importance of difference, starting from a place of openness and caring, and tuning in to the body’s knowledge a little more and the analytical mind a little less, have all been practices that he has continued to hone through jam circles–and are practices that he tries to introduce in all facets of his life.
Rehana Tejpar
Rehana is a facilitator of systems change experiments in organizations and the building of capacity for generative dialogue across difference. At Bloom, she accompanies organizations in their evolutionary change processes towards equitable systems change, organizational health, participatory leadership and creating cultures of belonging. She is deeply serious and deeply playful at once, believing in the need for strategies that include creativity & play as ways to open up the fields of possible transformations, and reconnecting our mind, body, heart and spirit. She has a Masters in Education from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education and is a practitioner of Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter, Dialogue for Peaceful Change, Theatre of the Oppressed and InterPlay. She has worked to facilitate participatory and equity-centered change within organizations including Greenpeace Canada, Environmental Defence, KO_OP, The Catherine Donnelly Foundation, Canadian Heritage, The Canadian Evaluation Society, amongst others. She has been jamming since 2013.
Brigid Tierney
Brigid is passionate about co-creating spaces where people are able to show up, share, challenge, connect, disagree, grow, let the complex remain so, get a bit uncomfortable and feel heard. She began her facilitation journey exploring the connection to our bodies as it relates to our sexual health and care in Vancouver using theater of the oppressed. She has been developing in facilitation ever since, working to create spaces that are creative, dynamic, thriving and engaging. After completing a master in Cultural Studies, she worked full time at TIFF in this capacity. There, she ran youth engagement and community programming – building programming that supported access, inclusion and involvement for all community members both as cultural producers and within the institution. She still works in program design, strategy, organizational transformation and communications — as a consultant and facilitator — finding ways to have people connect more efficiently in their work, workplace and teams; from short meetings to long term collaborations and on. She is a queer white (irish/jewish) Montrealer but lives in Toronto. She loves what the Jam makes possible for her and all the softness, vulnerability and generosity it nurtures and invites.
Shilpa Jain
Shilpa is currently rooting herself in Oakland/Berkeley, CA, where she serves as the Executive Director of YES!. Prior to taking on this role, Shilpa spent two years as the Education and Outreach Coordinator of Other Worlds and ten years as a learning activist with Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, based in Udaipur, India, where she served as coordinator of the Swapathgami (Walkouts-Walkons) Network. All of her work seeks to uncover ways for people to free themselves from dominating, soul-crushing institutions and to live in greater alignment with their hearts and deepest values, their local communities, and with nature. Though she never lived in Toronto, she did grow up in Chicago and feels the connection to a city by the lake. Plus, she knows all about Bloor and Dufferin, so there’s that.
How did Jams start?
YES! is celebrating its 31st year of service this year. The first Jam was a World Youth Leadership Jam, co-created in 1999, bringing together 30 people from 20 countries. It came out of YES!’s work on youth leadership for nearly a decade, a growing understanding of ‘yes-and’ improv, Open Space Technology, and the power of co-learning. After several more World Youth Leadership Jams, facilitators began to organize local and regional Jams in their countries. Now teams of Jam alumni organize place-based, sector-based, and identity-based Jams all over the world. In the past four years, Jams have taken place in India, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Morocco, Nova Scotia, Toronto, New York City, California, Colorado, North Carolina, Alabama, Vermont, New Mexico, and more, on themes such as Evolving + Emerging Economies, Arts for Social Change, Healing Our Movement Ecosystem, Law and Social Change, and Education Transformation, and with specific communities like the LGBTQ*/Queer Jam, Asian American Jam, and Black Diaspora Jam.
YES! is based in California, USA, and each Jam is co-organized by a unique and diverse team of partners. The Toronto Jam grew out a short program in 2012, which then became 3-4 day Jams in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2019. This is Toronto’s sixth Jam, organized by alumni from previous Jams.
Read more about YES!’s mission, values and approach: http://www.oldsite.yesworld.org/who-we-are/values/