Making Halifax a youthful city

Halifax is a university town, with schools like Dalhousie attracting thousands of students to the region from across Canada and around the world.

But is Halifax living up to its true potential as a youthful city?

That was the question that the DSU posed earlier this week, bringing together more than 50 students, activists, politicians and community leaders for a discussion forum titled “The Youthful City.”

Encouraging engagement

The past few years has seen a notable growth in the DSU’s student leadership mandate. It started with the annual Brains for Change conferences but has since expanded into other activities, including the Bigger Pitcher gatherings at the Grad House to discuss student leadership, this year’s TEDx Halifax conference, the interest-free loan program for student businesses, and the “Sandbox” in room 214 of the SUB, designed as a collaborative working and collaboration space.

Monday’s morning-long event was designed to build on this work by focusing on the role of students in the city and on improving opportunities for student/community connections. Looming over the discussion was the upcoming municipal election, in which new rules will make it so students can vote easier than before.

But obviously, engagement with a community is about far more than just voting. The sessions, facilitated by Sophia Horwitz and Rachel Derrah of Co*Lab, started by allowing attendees to select a discussion based on general areas of interest: healthy city, local politics, arts and culture, and more. Then, after sharing some initial thoughts, the bulk of the morning saw participants forming their own group discussions, with topics ranging from encouraging student voting, to intergenerational learning, to improving community involvement in orientation week.

Advancing new ideas

Florencia Berakha, study abroad and exchange advisor (inbound) with Dalhousie’s International Centre, led a discussion about ways to foster a sense of community belonging among international students new to Halifax.

“It’s a huge transition at a very important moment in your life,” she said.

The group’s ideas focused on items like space and programming, and sparked some discussions that Ms. Berakha plans to bring back to her team.

The idea was for each group to come up with takeaways that could be further developed down the road. DSU President Jamie Arron explained that his team will work on synthesizing the notes from all the discussions, with the goal of following them up with smaller working group sessions later this summer and a large gathering in September.

“From the first Brains for Change, we knew that a one-time event wasn’t going to be enough to tackle the challenge of student leadership in our community,” he said. “Our goal is to do what we can to create the preconditions for those relationships to emerge.”

To keep up with the Youthful City discussions, join the Facebook event.