Calgary on Purpose hosts discussions with as many Calgarians as possible to build our shared story.
2025
In 2025, the volunteers at Calgary on Purpose are planning the following opportunities, and we’d love for others to be involved. If any of this interests you, please contact us at -(insert our email):
Host at least three evenings of “Curiosity and Delight" with Contemporary Calgary.
Encourage civility in 2025 election campaigning.
Convene conversations that engage people where they work, live, and play. Whether it’s through conversation or playing games, we can imagine various futures together. If you’d like to bring together your family, neighbours, club, community association, faith group, or some other combination of Calgarians for one of these interactions, please say the word!
Share stories about inspiring Calgarians – individuals, groups, organizations – that are building community in caring ways. If you have a story that you’d like us to share or spread, get in touch.
And/or, if you want to be more involved in Calgary on Purpose overall, we love hearing from potential contributors.
2024
As we continued to have various conversations and host events, we knew people wondered what’s behind all of this. In an era of cyber attacks, scams, and people from every corner of the internet looking to capture your attention, it sometimes feels impossible not to feel skepticism when hearing or reading about an opportunity. And that’s just it: how can Calgarians wield enough skepticism to keep safe, while also being open enough to share in possibility?
We continued to hold some big questions: Do people want a shared purpose for this city? How might Calgarians achieve shared purposes? Do we already have a shared story? If so, what is it? More likely, there are multiple world views; how can we marshall these different perspectives to reach Calgary’s full potential? How do Calgarians of vastly different backgrounds and experiences work together for a shared future?
While facing complex challenges in Calgary and beyond, a group of folks came together in late 2024 with the support of a skilled mediator and a First Nations elder and confirmed that diverse Calgarians hold the desire to address the tough stuff together.
2020 - 2021
We identified a range of groups and sought input from citizens who are members of or are deeply familiar with these groups. This gave us our starting point to shape our next phase of community consultation in Fall 2020. Starting with one-on-one discussions, Calgary on Purpose spoke with 36 Calgarians to start building a narrative.
Five themes emerged from these discussions:
Being at a crossroads
Our western heritage
Being in things together
Being a space of opportunity
Economics on our mind
Using these themes as a starting point for further discussion, Calgary on Purpose hosted 25 small online group discussions with almost 300 Calgarians throughout the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021. Participants were asked how these themes fit or do not fit with their story of Calgary, what it means to be Calgarian and to describe their future vision of Calgary. What we heard was captured and summarized in our 2021 Report. We invite you to read it through the button below.
Photo by 99 Films, unsplash.com
“A lot of tension. Where do we want to go? And how fast and how hard? And who gets to drive?”
In any of our initiatives, the findings aren’t meant to speak for all Calgarians, but we hope that you will resonate with some of what we hear. We want to catalyze more courageous conversations, to refine and build on these initial ideas to better inform action and policy work—the “how” that supports the future Calgarians desire.
“If you have a good enough vision, and you have a good enough product, you can source money anywhere in the world. Money goes where there’s an opportunity. So we need to start thinking about ourselves as part of this global community. And how do we leverage that to Calgary’s advantage?”