Big Meet Up 2025: Making Space For Celebration

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Big Meet Up: Making Space for Celebration!

On the afternoon of November 8th, CDI hosted our annual Big Meet Up, an opportunity each year to gather people from across our work in conversation, connection, creativity, and learning.

This year’s theme, Making Space for Celebration, invited us to pause and recognize the many forms of celebration that show up in our communities: celebrating our organizations, the work you do every day, and the big and small wins that remind us why community work matters. Together, we created an atmosphere where play, imagination, and collective care took centre stage.

One of the highlights of this year’s event was building a cardboard community! Attendees had the opportunity to collaboratively design and construct everything from wild spaces to community halls to collaborative making spaces, even a community bingo hall!

Participants also had the chance to join a grounding movement session led by Trisha (lvnd.rhaze), offering a moment to pause, breathe, and reconnect. Throughout the afternoon, folks shared reflections, takeaways, and insights by responding to prompts and engaging with offerings and challenges laid out across the space, thank you to everyone who contributed their reflections! Celebration in community is continuous and should be recognized at every step along the way. There are a variety of different kinds of successes, which can fall under the four categories listed below from the SiCA Community Guide toolkit.

Thank you again to everyone who joined us to make this gathering meaningful and memorable. Your energy, creativity, and commitment to community work truly made the day special. If you have ideas for Big Meet Up topics for 2026 or want to collaborate with us to help host, we’d love to hear from you!

To close the day and celebrate the spirit of community, collaboration, and joy, we’d like to share a poem that captures what we experienced together:

Whose Imagination are we living in? 

We practice expressing our imagination 

Everything comes from imagination.

The imagination has no bounds.

Whose Imagination are we living in? 

Imagine healing

Imagine resistance

Imagine community

Whose Imagination are we living in? 

We can imagine the celebration of our strengths

We can imagine the celebration celebrate our collective strengths 

Our communities have everything they need - can you imagine?