Just Ice: Collaborative Poetry in Multi-Party Mediation

Speaker Series Event

with Kathy Porter

Wednesday, March 2nd at 4:30 – 6:00 pm PST

Online via Zoom

Collaborative poetry creates an opportunity for parties to explore their similar and different emotional responses to a complex issue. Drawing on the idea that images and poetry can evoke emotional responses that can inform decision-making, participants work individually at first, recording their response to images and segments of a policy document. Next, small groups work collectively to create a poem using words or thoughts. The experience is debriefed as a way to explore how the experience might apply to their own planning or policy work. The title, Just Ice invites a consideration of how a collection of letters can have completely different meanings.

Kathy Porter works at planning tables where civil society and governments intersect. That conflict might arise at these multi-party tables, to the surprise of participants who expected everyone to agree with their point of view, led her to explore creative arts-based techniques as a way for parties to explore their differences and recognize that out of the chaos of conflict, creative solutions can emerge.

She is a Chartered Mediator and recently completed a Master of Design at the Ontario College of Art & Design University with a focus on creative arts in social justice mediation.

This past November, she attended COP 26 as an official observer through her Climate Change and Creative Arts work with Mediators Beyond Borders International.

Pre & post COVID Kathy and her partner live and work in Toronto although they call Falkland, BC home.