Jane’s Walk and Community Groups

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Jane’s Walk and Community Groups

Toronto Mayor David Miller at the Iranian Women’s Organization-led Jane’s Walk, Toronto 2009 (Credit: Tim Neesam)

Jane’s Walks are led by a wide range of individuals and groups. Sometimes people need a bit of help drawing out the stories of their neighbourhood and residents, and with this in mind, we have come up with an adaptable, straightforward curriculum that helps groups of people develop informative and entertaining stories that taken together make an engaging walking tours that showcases a neighbourhood. We call it the Community Walks Program.

The curriculum can be taught with or without Jane’s Walk facilitators and animators. Local Jane’s Walks organizers may be able to provide these instructors (get in touch with them directly), or you can follow the curriculum and modify it for your own needs.

In the past, the Community Walks have been some of our most successful and popular tours - a great mix of learning, creativity, fun and interactivity. This program encourages participants to take a more active role in shaping the places and cities where they live. The importance of engaging local residents in these sorts of conversations, a type of ‘active citizenship’ is vital for the health and sustainability of our communities and city. Everyone has a right to take part in that conversation.

The Community Walks Curriculum is available to all interested community members, groups, facilitators and teachers. Please use it and let us know about how your experiences, the ups and downs, so that we can continue to refine and share these teaching resources.

Below is downloadable powerpoint presentation that can be used to help develop a walking tour and supplement the community editions. We’ve also posted PDF files of the exercises and brainstorming questions to go along with it, which you can print out and use for getting discussion going, asking questions and digging deeper. Let us know what you think and if there’s any way we can make this presentation more useful.

Download Jane’s Walk Powerpoint (PDF)

COMMUNITY WALKS CURRICULUM
Click here to download the PDF version.

The Community Walks curriculum can unfold over as long as a five week period, or come together in as few as two sessions closer to the Jane’s Walk weekend.

The tools we provide to help develop a walking tour for community groups are basically simple exercises and discussion points to help organize people’s thoughts and inspirations. We use some ‘social mapping exercises’ to do this – these exercises get people to plot out the places and spaces they care about and use in their communities using photo-copied maps – these are the ‘tour stops’. Next we get the community tour guides thinking about what they want to say about these significant places and how they are going to present this information to an audience. Finally, we give you some pointers on how to organize the route of the tour, the starting and ending point, the distance covered, and so on.

The net effect of using our Community Walk Curriculum is that it helps draw out the observations you already have about your neighbourhood and the people who live there. By taking a closer look at how things are, and discussing it with others, it encourages fresh thinking about civic engagement, urban planning, local history and community-building.

The Community Curriculum is flexible, participants can pick and choose the components that work for them:

Powerpoint slide show that introduces some basic thinking about cities, urbanism, and the life and work of Jane Jacobs.

Social Mapping exercises: photocopy maps of your neighbourhood and get people to plot out where they hang out, work, shop, live and play – places that have a story to tell. People might also want to think about the strengths and weaknesses are of the ‘walking environment’ of their neighbourhood.

Telling your story on a Walking Tour: Tour guides have to think through effective and creative ways of telling their stories, sharing their observations, and encouraging others to take part in the conversation. The group decides together what stops on the tour will be included, sharing the research and ‘animating’ the site.

Practice Run: Visits to the tour sites and a doing a dry-run of the walk is essential. This gives people a chance to ‘rehearse’ their talks, scout out the locationm refine observations and get a sense of timing. Past tours have included included historical skits, puppet shows, poetry readings and in-person interviews with firemen, business owners and politicians

Jane’s Walk animators and volunteers can help make all this happen, but they are not essential to the process. Tours can be as idiosyncratic, personal and offbeat as you like. This Community Walks curriculum is intended only as a helpful resource for prospective tour guides, it is not a strict set of rules and guidelines.

The 6 Tips for Tour Guides is another helpful resource for pulling together the walking tours.