We often talk about our mission, which is to empower as many people as possible in their daily lives.
And for some time now we’ve been seeing people from Toronto coming to Montreal to take several workshops in a row over a weekend, because they can’t find an equivalent locally.
Bringing manual autonomy to Toronto
This inspired us to bring our workshops and tools to Toronto. By taking the time to visit the city several times, we quickly realised that, when all is said and done, the people of Toronto and Montreal are very similar. The same lifestyle, balancing urban pleasures with environmental responsibility, the same taste for cycling and good food, the same individual desire to do more for our planet and to feel capable of carrying out all our projects on our own.
Protecting the structure of Montréal
Nevertheless, we’ve always said that our aim at Les Affûtés is to create a solid, sustainable project that will be with Montrealers for a long time to come, and that won’t disappear at the first sign of trouble.
To reconcile these two desires (to spread our mission while protecting what already exists), we’re doing what we did when Les Affûtés was first launched, and then when the kitchen and garage were created: we’re starting slowly, by subletting spaces for our first workshops, to humbly test and adapt what we’re doing to Toronto’s culture.
The perfect place to start
And we’ve found the perfect place to do just that. Toronto has a place dedicated to social innovation and positive impact projects, the Center for Social Innovation. It’s a project that’s over 20 years old, and houses hundreds of social and environmental projects in 2 beautiful buildings. And they have the perfect space to start giving our first workshops. What better solution than to start spreading our workshops in a community that corresponds so closely to our values?
After looking around for a few weeks, thanks to Gilles who set up the cooking workshops at Les Affûtés and has now moved to Toronto for the project, we quickly decided on this option to run the first workshops.
The next steps
We still have thousands of things to do and communicate, but the project is coming to life, and we’re really excited to see a sister project to the one in Montreal emerge, with its own identity, its own Sharpeners and its own tone.
Would you like to help us bring this project to life? All you have to do is share the first workshops and our social networks with your friends in Toronto. It will help us enormously to spread the word about the project!
And we’ll be bringing you lots more news about this new project soon!
