Learning Activities
Your MURAL concept mapping is revealing your competencies, interests, and narrowing in on where you can best apply them.
Perhaps your interest in climate data and analytics? Carbon accounting (emissions) and management (e.g. TCFD reporting) and/or nature-based solutions design and metrics? Is your resume and your passion aligned more to climate resilient health systems? Do you have an entrepreneurial interest in some facet of business and climate action? What about climate change and community planning? Or do you come from the transportation sector and want to be a part of scaling low emissions transportation? Perhaps you have experience in customer relationship management or a service industry and want to leverage your competencies in this domain to help an organization scale-up change? Are you savvy with visual web technology and want to be part of a climate communications team?
Pick your passion and let’s start networking! Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and has a narrative related to what you are doing in MACAL as well as your competencies that could be valuable in climate action leadership roles, drawn from previous positions.
Start easy, with figuring out who you might connect with – perhaps a person at Federation of Canadian Municipalities, or Canadian Climate Institute. Who are scholars that are doing research in the area of your interest? Check out both Canadian scholars and international scholars. What about your neighbourhood? What climate activist networks are operating where you live? Dogwood? Greenpeace? Which city councillors in your city seem to have an interest in climate action?
When you start to discover birds-of-a feather, and people have accepted your invite, check out who they follow and who follows them. But don’t just blast requests to random people “to connect”. Be intentional or it will backfire. Use the “message” capability on LinkedIn to write a short note on why you are interested in this person, and be authentic (e.g. “I read your paper and want to keep up with your work”; “I live in Toronto and am keenly interested in municipal responses to climate change and you seem to have your finger on the pulse” – accessible and friendly language.
Practitioner Portfolio: Using your LinkedIn profile plus regular postings as your digital portfolio space
In a perfect world, we all might have the technical patience to maintain standalone WordPress sites or perhaps we have invested in Substack or a “pay-for-use” site like the Ghost blogger platform. Fantastic! These are options for creating a personal-branded site for your practitioner portfolio, which is the basis of your PLN (e.g. a portfolio plus a network you are nurtuting). Your practitioner portfolio is where you can:
- showcase your experience (e.g. resume) and your competencies;
- capture reflections on “what’s happening in your unique climate action domain,” complete with summary examples of work and accomplishments;
- publish stories about where things went right and where they went wrong;
- provide links to interesting articles you have read, and webinar recordings that you participated in, podcasts you may have created, fabulous papers authored while in the MACAL program, etc.
If you don’t have the digital savvy or time to invest in creating your own standalone Practitioner Portfolio in a personal-branded site, then use LinkedIn postings as your go-to practitioner portfolio page.
Good stories shine through whatever platform you choose to use, especially if they have the essence of authenticity – “what I thought I was going to do and what actually happened.” You will recall in CALS 505 Leading Change (Denise Withers’ course), you learned about the key elements of a story:
- What is the problem to be solved?
- What barriers did the “hero” have to overcome?
- What was the outcome and impact of the project/initiative/journey?
Check out the Change Story Roadmap you were introduced to in CALS 505 as a reminder of the the structure of story. You may already be a subscriber to Denise Withers’ Q.West for Good articles and podcast series which provides great examples of climate leadership stories (sign up at the bottom of the webpage). Use these roadmaps and examples to learn how to write your own stories in your Practitioner Portfolio.
To gain traction in building social capital and showcasing social value, publish a monthly LinkedIn post that tells a story of your role in climate action leadership, in addition to the “repost with comments” action available in LinkedIn. This practice will help to forge your interests while making your public personae interesting.
Reflections on what’s happening in the world or in your domain of climate action or in your work all count as stories. Apply lessons learned from Week 2: Why Reflective Practice Matters.
You could start with a personal commitment to publish a post such as this one:
My Top Ten Climate Actions for 2024
Here is the task for getting started in using those academic papers and blog posts to build your personal digital presence:
- Gather up several of your blog posts and papers from the MACAL experience that can be repurposed. Give each article a fresh punchy title
- Create a prototype publishing calendar
- For each article that you plan to publish, block time in your calendar to do some editing before you publish.
- Block time in your calendar to remind yourself it is time to publish once a month, in LinkedIn
By the 6-month anniversary of shaping this practitioner portfolio you will have created original content and digital presence through edited versions of your MACAL work. As you move along in this process, you may have new ways of expressing your point-of-view on some of the themes and topics you wrote through assignments, and that’s great! There may be newsworthy events that provide an effective lead in to this collection of stories. Use those papers and blog posts to build your personal digital presence far beyond what your instructor requested as part of the course assessment.
Your MURAL can be linked to from some of your articles, and your MURAL is an ongoing workspace, not a static artefact, where you can continue to dive deeper into the particular domain of practice that you settle into for, in the next stage of your climate action leadership career. If some of your articles are too lengthy for an edited LinkedIn article, upload them as PDFs into ResearchGate or Academia and then write a teaser/precis in your LinkedIn post with a link to where you have uploaded your article, as a way to showcase a long form article.
Assessment each week can be found under the site’s Assessment Menu: Assessment Week 6