This summer the Toronto Youth Cabinet (which I'm in) held a conference in Toronto with about 50 youth from seven Canadian youth cabinets/councils: Toronto, London, Mississauga, Vancouver, Edmonton, Saint John, and Newfoundland and Labrador. It was relatively small compared to many conferences, but it was a pretty big effort on our part to organize this.

The conference culminated in the creation of a Youth Charter mural that we brought to the World Youth Forum and World Urban Forum in Vancouver. It all went by way too fast - more time was needed for having deeper discussions, but there is a wiki site with some of the conference notes.

We remained in contact by email and started to brainstorm how we could sustain and strengthen a Pan-Canadian Network of Youth Cabinets. In Toronto we submitted a grant proposal for a network coordinator to the Laidlaw Foundation, which was ultimately turned down.

Since then we have been trying get Toronto Youth Cabinet a student from Ryerson University for this purpose. It's been slow but surprisingly it's still a possibility because half the students in the fourth year social work class don't have placements yet!

Along the way, I have really been forced to re-evaluate the concept of a Pan-Canadian Youth Cabinet/Council Network, especially after corresponding with Kehinde from Laidlaw and finding Taking It Global's Report on National Youth Councils and the Creating Local Connections project.

But more on this next time. This already feels like it's way too long for a post.