George Brown College students can attend free workshops courtesy of a new partnership with activist training group

Justin Podur presents at a Tools For Change Advanced Media Skills workshop Nov. 10, 2012. Photo courtesy of Tools For Change.

In 2014, The Student Association (SA) of George Brown College (GBC) became community partners with Tools for Change, a highly sought after, well-connected, and established activist training program in Toronto.

The Tools for Change program was founded in 2010 and has since evolved into “an efficient, sustainable, practical, stable, very useful, one-of-a-kind training program committed to strengthening social movements and campaigns across the Toronto region,” according to their website.

Funded by a variety of contributors, it provides low-cost, affordable, high quality, and comprehensive training for people. Such training allows them to “develop skills to champion social, economic and environmental justice.”

Because the SA is now a community partner, it has a representative who sits on the program’s co-ordinating committee. With that comes the opportunity to help grow one of the few education programs in Canada that is geared towards empowering students and community members to take political action for social change.

A major part of Tools For Change is hosting workshops, and as a community partner the SA helps to determine the topics for the over 20 workshops they organize per year.

The SA has contributed $3,000 to become a community partner for the year which allows for all GBC students to attend the workshops for free, according to the website.

“GBC students are also able to register for our certificate for social change program, which recognizes their commitment to acquiring new and improving their existing social change skills,” said co-ordinator Demetria Jackson on the benefits of this partnership. “In order to participate in the program they must register, attend eight Tools for Change workshops within a two year period and then contact us when they have completed their eight workshops. Once we confirm their attendance at eight different workshops, we will mail them a certificate of completion.”

Michelle Pettis, the Community Action Centre co-ordinator, said, “interest in the certificate has been high since its launch and given GBC’s connection to community service drive programs, it would complement those studies in very tangible ways and would still have wide applicability for all students.”

Given the increasing cost of post-secondary education, Pettis also says that “it’s a unique offering to showcase alternative and more accessible education.”

However, due to the way the program operates, it will not be known how many workshop attendees actually identified themselves as GBC students until the Tools for Change year in review, according to to Jackson.

”What I can tell you is that the majority of attendees are not coming from George Brown, but from our long-standing and founding organizations,” said Jackson. “This is not uncommon as the Student Association has only been a member for six months. We look forward to seeing more attendees from George Brown at our events.“

As the program offers GBC students an opportunity for personal and professional growth, Jackson says that students should “grab it while it’s available to them.”

For more information students can visit www.toolsforchange.net