Biomimicry in Community
Learning about your community through biomimicry
CDLI is excited to announce a new resource developed by Julia Madden a Mount Royal University, sociologist student. Julia came to CDLI in 2026. Julia is part of the Catamount Fellowship with the Department Community of Prosperity. We were excited to have her energy, insights and dedication to answering the ‘How Might We Question’ , “How might we learn from biological systems to harness the collective power of people by valuing and fostering grassroots, community-based practices working at the systems level of change?” Helping us explore this question was biologist Dr. Robin Owen.
Wicked Problems?
At CDLI, we take a community-strength based approach to everything we do, including systems change. We engage with grass-root groups and how to make systems change at the level. There are many wicked, complex problems like climate change. We’ve had many past conversations on how we can learn from the land, plants and the non-human world.
Biomimicry definition: the science and practice of solving human problems by imitating the designs, processes, and systems found in nature. As a trio (CDLI, Julia and Robin) were interested in how we can understand and learn from nature on how community developed is practiced and connect people for change. Julia was provided books, articles and engaged with community to get an understanding of the ‘how might we’ question. For Julia, one idea that stuck out was fragmentation. “It’s one we feel in both our communities and can see in the land. From polarizing ideologies to climate change, fragmentation affects us and ecological species deeply. We often think of ourselves as different from each other, but we aren’t. Through this game, I wanted to highlight this topic and try to bridge that gap. The goal of this is to learn fun facts about the ecosystem and highlight our similarities to the land in a way that relates to community behaviours. The process of doing this is being in conversation with one another.”
Conversation
Julia created a community orientated conversation guide and game, CDLI’s Biomimicry in community. Feel free to download and play the game in your community. We played the game back in May, 2026 at Sandy Beach in Calgary with fellow community practitioners in the network. We used the conversation game to deepen our own collective and individual experiences of community. Learning about how the interactions of the non-human world relate to each other, can also help us with knowledge and new ways of understanding our own relationships with each other. Learn more about the Catamount Fellowship.
