Sessions
Guide to Sessions
Each session and play station will feature skills related to each area of the Community Learning Model and will feature a variety of learning styles. Use the following guides to help you navigate each session.
Community Learning Model Legend
Use the following icons to understand which sessions will focus on each area of the Community Learning Model (CLM).
Results How do groups create a result they want to achieve? How do they measure their progress toward that result?
Include How do groups ensure the various people, perspectives and systems involved in the work are engaged in the process?
Dialogue How do groups create a high-quality conversation that clarifies values, surfaces tensions, and taps into creativity? How do we establish conditions of genuine respect for the views and needs of the other?
Act How do groups make sure the planning leads to action, both within planning processes and at each stage of implementation?
Learn How do they learn from experiences and translate that information into more effective actions? How do groups ensure actors remain accountable to a shared vision and “return learning to the system” as a mutual contribution?
Culture of Collaboration How do groups strengthen the capacities that support collaborative work such as facilitative leadership, communication, information sharing, and shared accountability?
Learning Styles Legend
While many conferences feature inspiring speakers with valuable expertise, they tend to focus on just one learning style. The Canopy Summit will feature sessions that engage participants’ head, heart, and hands.
Use the following icons to understand which sessions will engage the following learning styles.
Head – These sessions will get people thinking and learning with their brains. It may include a presentation, data, or a toolkit.
Heart – These sessions will get people feeling with their heart. It may include storytelling, art, or a performance.
Hands – These sessions will get people moving. It may include a hands-on activity, dance, or exercise.
Interpretation & Translation
The Summit will be conducted in English and Spanish, and all sessions will have bilingual interpretation and translated materials. Wearable interpretation devices will be available for all participants. Below you’ll see which languages the presenters will provide each session in. If you don’t speak that language, don’t worry, you’ll have interpretation.
We Already Have the Pieces: A Practical Approach to Shared Civic Purpose
In a world where citizens feel disconnected and institutions struggle to keep pace, clarity of purpose is more important than ever. In this interactive session, participants will engage in a hands-on group puzzle challenge in which teams use identical sets of limited resources to accomplish a task under time pressure. Although each group receives the same materials and instructions, they often approach the task differently — revealing how varying interpretations, assumptions, and decision-making styles shape collective outcomes. Through a guided debrief, participants will draw direct parallels to civic systems: What happens when communities have the same pieces but see the “point” differently? How do misalignment, unclear purpose, or uneven voice — rather than true scarcity — create barriers to collaboration? And how can greater clarity, inclusion, and shared purpose transform how we use the resources already present in our civic ecosystems? Together, we will explore how purposeful alignment, equitable voice, and adaptive use of existing assets strengthen civic participation and institutional responsiveness — key to reviving democracy and redefining civics.
Rhythms of Democracy—Drumming as a Pathway to Civic Engagement, Love and Collective Healing
Democracy, much like a drum circle, thrives when every voice finds its rhythm in harmony with others. Rhythms of Democracy invites participants to experience civic connection and collaboration through drumming—a universal language that transcends differences, fosters empathy, and reconnects people to shared purpose. In this immersive session, participants will explore how rhythm, listening, and group creativity can help communities transform tension into trust and polarization into partnership. Drawing on West African drumming principles, this workshop transforms civic engagement into a sensory experience—rooted in respect, balance, and love.
Co-Leadership in Practice: Sharing Power, Strengthening Organizations, and Leading Through Complexity
Teva Sienicki, Erik Hicks
What does it look like to truly share leadership—beyond titles and theory—inside complex, mission-driven organizations? This session explores Metro Caring’s lived experience implementing a co-CEO leadership model, examining how shared leadership can strengthen organizational resilience, improve decision-making, and better align internal culture with community-led values. Presented by Co-CEOs Teva Sienicki and Erik Hicks, the session offers a candid look at why Metro Caring chose co-leadership, what it required to operationalize, and how it has transformed governance, strategy, and day-to-day execution.
Pragmatic Conservatism in Blue America
Patrick McCabe, Shirley Peel
Join former Fort Collins City Council member Shirley Peel and campaign communicator Patrick McCabe to explore what it looks like when conservative voices show up, listen, and engage in communities shifting left. Through a hands-on value card-ranking activity drawn from Shirley’s mayoral platform, you’ll discover which values resonate across the aisle and how disagreeing with curiosity might be the most democratic act of them all.
Microdemocracies – Democratic Decision Making In Action
Hal Benninger, Paul Bindel
Cooperatives and self-managed projects invite us to practice democratic decision making every day. Join Center for Community Wealth to practice democratic decision making with fun member engagement and participation scenarios faced by cooperatives!
More Than a Vote: Everyday Advocacy and the Power You Already Have
Many people want to create change but aren’t sure where to start—or which actions actually make a difference. This interactive session focuses on everyday advocacy and the power individuals already have beyond voting. Participants will move through real-life scenarios, compare different ways to engage, and discuss why certain actions are more effective in specific situations. Designed to be welcoming and values-neutral, the session builds confidence, sharpens decision-making, and helps participants identify a realistic civic action they can take in their own lives or communities.
Leading Through Movement
In this workshop participants will experience a fun filled activity that focuses on connection, vulnerability, and creativity. Music will be the conductor of a story told through movement.
Progress moves at the speed of the Table: Re-Humanizing and Re-Connecting our cities over a meal
The session’s focus is the power of the table and shared meal as a model to cross-sector, cross-human connection, and the table’s remarkable ability to (re)humanize and create a safe place for humans to show up in authenticity and vulnerability, the building-blocks to true and lasting social connection and productive civic engagement.
The Rural Civic Renaissance: Lessons from the Edge of the Map
Across rural Colorado, communities are quietly leading a civic renaissance—reimagining democracy not from capitol buildings but from small-town gyms, libraries, and youth centers. CoCenter has spent five years weaving networks of residents, nonprofits, and public partners to co-create civic systems grounded in care, connection, and shared responsibility. In this interactive 90-minute session, participants will explore real stories of rural civic innovation—from youth-led policymaking to collaborative models that bridge county lines. Together, we will identify the design principles that make rural civic culture durable: small scale, high trust, distributed leadership, and shared learning. Participants will also engage in a hands-on prototyping activity to practice strengthening civic spaces in contexts where power imbalances, institutional distrust, and burnout are common. The session culminates in the co-creation of a “Rural Civic Renaissance Blueprint,” helping participants identify assets, allies, and first steps they can take to foster civic spaces rooted in love, belonging, and shared decision-making rather than conflict.
Creating Meaningful Community Connections in the Face of Dissent & Disengagement
This interactive session will combine brief framing presentations with facilitated roundtable conversations focused on strategies for making formal and nonformal public meetings and community engagement more authentic and productive. NCL President Doug Linkhart will highlight the League’s work in Colorado communities, including Boulder, to develop innovative alternatives to traditional public meetings and to advance civic health through inclusive engagement practices. He will share insights from the Colorado Action Guide for Civic Health and discuss strategies for building civic capital and broadening participation. The session will examine the evolving—and often contested—concept of civility, exploring obstacles that keep us polarized. This will include tools and approaches that could overcome those barriers and create time and space where disagreement can coexist and lead to productive dialogue resulting in shared goals. Significant time will be given for roundtable dialogue so that participants leave with reflective questions and adaptable practices they can apply to foster more authentic, inclusive, and resilient civic engagement.
Centering Historically Excluded Communities in City Decision-making
Adriana Paola Palacios Luna, Ana Silvia Avendaño-Curiel
Community Connectors empower the City of Boulder to make better decisions by partnering with staff to co-design culturally-proficient community engagement processes that elevate the experiences and voices of historically excluded communities. During this panel, Community Connectors themselves will share how they build trust between local government and community, increase inclusion within city decision-making, review and give feedback on Racial Equity Instruments, reduce barriers to better understand community input, facilitate ‘Building Power & Raising Voices’ sessions, amplify community needs during annual budget process, and share updates with city council. This session will also focus on how the city evolved support for Community Connectors, including on-going wellbeing programming and the co-development of a Community Connector Manual.
Leading with Love: Redefining Civic Power through Connection and Care
India Phoenix, Jamie Rasmussen
In a time when civic spaces are marked by burnout, polarization, and disconnection, this session invites participants to reimagine leadership through the lens of love. Drawing from community-based practices and the By the Brujas framework of holistic collaboration, this interactive session explores how connection, care, and compassion can serve as powerful tools for civic transformation. Participants will reflect on their own leadership practices, identify opportunities to embed love as a guiding value in their work, and co-create a shared understanding of what it means to lead with humanity in complex civic ecosystems. Together, we’ll uncover how love, not as sentimentality but as strategy, can reshape the ways we build, sustain, and repair community.
Turning Listening into Activation: Community-driven Democracy Redesign
Dr. Landon Mascareñaz, Amy Spicer
In 2025, Courageous Colorado conducted a statewide Listening Tour, visiting 20 communities to hear directly from Coloradans about courage, representation, and the future of our democracy. Those conversations inspired the Activation Tour, where local leaders began building cross-partisan teams and testing new models for civic collaboration across the state. Now, in 2026, this session—led by Dr. Landon Mascareñaz, Executive Director of Courageous Colorado and co-author of The Open System—shares how those efforts are translating into real action: community-led redesign efforts, new coalitions bridging rural and urban regions, and the growth of a statewide family of leaders redesigning democracy from the ground up. Participants will not only hear these stories—they’ll also have the opportunity to design their own open-systems process, learning how listening and activation can become practical tools for transformation in their own communities and organizations.
Those Who Gather Oats
We are living in unprecedented times – what Arundhati Roy has described as a new world being born. Life in this historical moment is characterized by the many truths of a birth – it is a painful time to be alive but also an age of great potential. Embodying democracy in this epoch will happen partly in the birthing rooms of governance, but primarily in the way we explore collective power in our interpersonal lives. For every midwife attending to a birth there are hundreds of hands across the village helping – tending fires, wrapping blankets around the elders. Some walk the fields gathering oats, preparing for all that is to come. Our collective resilience and ability to create democracy depends on many people faithfully doing small but impactful practices. As author Prentis Hemphill says, “a calm body is our most powerful body because it’s the body in which we have choice.” Through awareness, gentle movement, rest and other forms of somatic research, we’ll playfully expand our somatic intelligence, investigate the wonder of co-regulation, and explore what it takes to care for change as it is happening. Every small act or preparation and care matters – even the ones the size of an oat.
Transforming Language Equity Practices
Lauren Barrette, Isabel Serrano Torres
Most language equity trainings tell you why it matters; this session makes you feel why it matters. We begin with a deliberate reversal of the status quo by immersing the audience in a space where English is not the dominant language. This experience triggers the physical and emotional reality that multilingual community members face every day, serving as the catalyst for a deep dive into transforming our professional practices. Led by a bilingual facilitator and a professional Spanish interpreter, this session moves beyond theory into a practical masterclass on language inclusion. We will break down common mistakes that inadvertently exclude others and replace them with a proven partnership model. Attendees will walk away with a practical checklist for working effectively with interpreters.
Forged in the Fire: Transformative Lessons for Organizational Resilience
This interactive workshop invites participants to explore what it means to lead with steadiness, empathy, and adaptability when the pressure is on. We will reframe leadership through the lens of transformation: how pressure, conflict, and uncertainty can become catalysts for clarity and growth. Drawing on Metamorphic Consulting’s Forged in the Fire framework and the nine elements of organizational resilience, participants will identify the internal and external “fires” shaping their leadership, uncover the systems that either sustain or strain their teams, and practice tools for reflection, alignment, and renewal.
¡Aquí sí nos escuchamos!
Maricruz Herrera, Carlos Herrera
¡Aquí sí nos escuchamos!” is a hands-on session grounded in cultural circle practices and community dialogue tools we use to address fear, misinformation, and division affecting our communities today. Inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, participants will surface generative themes from their own lived experience, engage in guided storytelling, and practice forms of conversation that reduce isolation and build mutual understanding. This session mirrors what we have consistently seen in our community work: when people have a safe space to express themselves and be truly heard, connection grows, clarity emerges, and a renewed sense of unity, hope, and collective power becomes possible.
The Stories We Tell: Aligning Voice, Values, and Vision in Civic Work
Jamie Rasmussen, India Phoenix
Stories shape what we believe is possible about our communities, our democracy, and each other. In this interactive workshop, participants will experience a “mini” version of Metamorphic Consulting’s Narrative Lab, a participatory process that helps organizations and coalitions unearth, reshape, and amplify the stories that guide their work. Through guided storytelling, creative reflection, and collective sense-making, participants will explore how narrative shapes power and belonging in civic spaces. Together, we’ll practice tools for story mining, framing, and values-based messaging that center lived experience and collective wisdom. We’ll also experiment with creative methods, blending strategy and imagination, which are vital for generating creative solutions. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of how shared narratives can align internal culture, external messaging, and systemic impact, and with practical tools to shift stories in their own communities.
By Young People, For All People: Inside the Youth Agenda
Silvia Entenza, Jesús Calderón
We know that when empowered, organized, and prioritized, young people can transform their communities and strengthen democracy. In this session, participants will learn about the process New Era Colorado employed to compose the Youth Agenda, its core issues and how we advocate for positive change through policymaking, community organizing, and civic engagement, and reflect on steps we can collectively take to elevate young people’s voices.
Civic Power: Reimagining Participation Through Community, Culture & Collective Voice
Maryori “MJ” Guzman, Sandra Ortega, Cecilia Sanchez, Jason Medina, Kevin Hernandez
Civic Power is a bilingual, interactive workshop that helps individuals understand how to move from burnout and frustration into clarity, confidence, and collective action in their communities. Instead of traditional civic education, these sessions use storytelling, hands-on activities, cultural grounding, and community-led dialogue paired with a delicious culturally significant meal that brings together everyday people to learn and discuss how to influence local decisions. Without needing titles, credentials, or political connections, participants leave with a deeper understanding of their civic rights, their local power, and practical strategies to create change in their neighborhoods, schools, and towns, all while building a solid network of neighbors and allies.
Nothing About Us Without Us: How Directly Impacted Leaders Shape Our Ballot & Legislative Agenda
This session will explore Metro Caring’s community-led model for building ballot and legislative agendas alongside directly impacted community members. Participants will learn how we use insights from our Census-Based Action Planning process to identify community-defined barriers, narrow them into shared root causes, and then translate those root causes into targeted ballot initiatives and legislative priorities. Through real-world examples, facilitation tools, and a participatory mini-activity, attendees will see how lived experience becomes strategic direction, from listening and popular education to issue analysis, power mapping, prioritization, and democratic decision-making. The session will highlight how this approach centers community leadership while building alignment, momentum, and campaign readiness.
Designing Our Future: Community Engagement on the Estes Park Development Code
Melissa Westover, Susan Stewart
In 2025, Community Conversations, a partnership between Estes Valley Restorative Justice and the Estes Valley Library began collaborating with the Town of Estes Park’s Community Development Department to support public engagement around the Town’s Development Code update. While this work is ongoing, the process has already generated meaningful participation, insights, and lessons worth sharing. The engagement unfolded in phases. Five facilitated community sessions involving approximately 75 residents explored community values, growth-related tensions, housing pressures, and shared hopes for Estes Park’s future. Building on this foundation, two large-scale public deliberative dialogues engaged 87 residents and elevated areas of shared purpose to inform the Town’s Development Code update. This workshop offers a candid, mid-process case study focused on why the community undertook this work, how the engagement and deliberative processes were designed and facilitated, and what challenges and pitfalls emerged along the way. Emphasis will be placed on practical lessons for designing inclusive civic dialogue, managing expectations, navigating disagreement, and adapting engagement strategies which is particularly relevant for small and rural communities facing complex planning decisions.
Turning Outward: Using the Harwood Approach to produce greater relevance, significance, and impact
Diane Lapierre, Currie Meyer
Being “turned outward” is a mindset that uses community voices as a reference point to create meaningful change. Using this frameworks and tools have led to intentional choices and actions that have strengthened connections and sparked actions to build civic culture. This session will share how this approach has been used in several public library settings and give participants a chance to practice one of the basic tools to gather community aspirations.
Belonging by Design: Practices for Honoring Community Wisdom in Collaboration
Lindsay Reeves, Matt Guy
Communities thrive when people feel seen, heard, and trusted to help shape the future. Yet too often, technical assistance arrives as something to “implement” rather than something to co-create. This session reframes that dynamic. Through stories and lessons from community-led efforts, including work where residents, experts, and funders learned to design together, we will explore what becomes possible when civic spaces shift from compliance to collaboration. Rather than forcing communities to fit pre-set models, we show how local wisdom, lived experience, and shared purpose can strengthen any approach. Attendees will hear how neighbors with diverse perspectives built trust, found common ground, and transformed challenging conversations into opportunities for connection and creativity. Participants will walk away with practical ways to foster belonging, spark shared vision, and create civic spaces where everyone feels empowered to shape solutions, not through conflict or hierarchy, but through curiosity, collaboration, and collective ownership.
Planning Through Play
Not another community meeting! Learn how the Town of San Luis used community recreation events to plan for the development of a new recreation site. This session will be interactive and on your feet as you learn about creative community engagement strategies to bring residents out of their homes and into the very spaces they are planning around.
The Secret Sauce of Cross-Sector Leadership: Building Systems That Actually Work
Adrienne Russman, Carlye Sayler, Eudelia Contreras, Elsa Tharp
What happens when leaders who often work in isolation step into a shared space to build trust and tackle challenges together? Lake County found that by bringing leaders together around a set of shared goals and responsibility for the community, they can respond faster, stretch limited resources further, and move from scarcity thinking to genuine problem-solving that centers the community’s wellbeing over the long term. In this session, members of Lake County’s Leadership Roundtable will candidly share what it takes to lead collectively: building trust across disagreement, expecting negotiation, compromise, and conflict as essential parts of shared leadership, and leveraging institutional roles to serve the interests of all community members. Attendees will hear an honest conversation about real wins and real challenges—and the joy and possibility that come from tackling urgent issues together. For leaders, community members, and funders, this is a unique opportunity to see what happens when leadership moves at the speed of trust—and to imagine what’s possible when a community chooses collaboration over competition. Lake County’s Leadership Roundtable isn’t just a meeting—it’s a bold act of civic love.
From Polarization to Progress in K-12 Education: Leading and Impacting in a Time of Challenging Polarization
K-12 Education systems, like others are struggling with how to solve problems in the midst of political and cultural polarization. How can we strengthen our relationships with our communities, civic leaders, educators and citizens in a time of challenging polarization in our country? Data shows a continued and dramatic increase in polarization within our communities and because of that we are losing trust and civility with each other. This prevents us from working together and solving tough problems in K-12 education systems. The FORWARD initiative at PEBC contends that If we build awareness with educators and education policymakers and knowledge about deep polarization forces, and we skill up in strategies to prevent, manage and deescalate polarization, then we will have stronger communities, more sustainable governance structures, and more productive conversations about issues in public education. Come to this session to make progress toward leading this environment by building our “healthy conflict” muscles—muscles that allow us to be curious, disagree, problem solve, bring new ideas to bear and then go have dinner or go to a little league game with the people we disagree with.
Imagining What’s Possible: Equitable Engagement for Our Current Moment
Nikki Murillo, Kerri Drumm
As organizations grapple with shrinking budgets, increased urgency, and a rapidly changing social landscape, the need for equitable community engagement has never been clearer—or more complex. How do we design processes that center impacted communities, honor lived experience, and still move toward collective action? This 60-minute session invites participants into a collective exploration of what engagement should look like to meet the moment. Through a Head–Heart–Hands design, we will examine multiple perspectives on engagement, uncover present-day barriers such as participation fatigue and community anxiety and fear, and ground ourselves in stories from community. Participants will then engage in a collaborative gallery walk or collective visual activity to map out the conditions, values, and practices that make equitable engagement possible. Together, we will dream toward a shared “North Star” for equitable engagement and identify actionable steps to move from intention to practice.
