[Français – traduction par Coop L’Argot]

Call for Applications
Pathways to Community Safety

An in-person two-day workshop and community exchange in Ottawa.
Saturday, February 14 + Sunday, February 15, 2026
(with optional events on the 13th)

Application Deadline: Monday, December 15, 2025, 11:59p your local time
Online Information Session: November 27, 2025, 1-2p eastern (with automated transcription)
Event Updates

The Planning for Abolition team invites applications for a two day in-person workshop February 14+15, 2026 in Ottawa focused on building community safety without policing, centred around the skills, ideas and experiences of organizers and community members alongside urban, regional and community planners.

What is the workshop about?

Every day people are working to make their communities safer without policing, imprisonment and other forms of violence, for example through mutual aid, violence intervention, abolition organizing, peer support around mental health, substance use, housing or reentry after imprisonment. But they don’t always have access to resources or processes that could make large and lasting change in their communities.

Every day people are working in planning to make large and lasting change in communities through land use, housing and economic development, transportation and urban design, and social planning. But don’t always have access to ideas about how their work can support community safety beyond policing, or a clear sense of how to engage communities that are disproportionately criminalized.

If this sounds like you, this workshop is an opportunity to come together with other people doing this work to learn more about practices for urban, regional and community planning, and community organizing, transformative and restorative justice; to share your own expertise with each other; and share what you learn during the workshop through collaborative storytelling.

Our goal is to facilitate mutual learning and political education across both groups, changing the way planners, organizers and community members envision their roles in pathways to community safety.

Who should apply?

This workshop is for practitioners, organizers, volunteers, professionals who are already working in community, who are committed to community safety without the violence of policing, prisons and other caceral practices, who are ready to share their experiences and questions, and take what they have learned back into practice. 

Ideally all participants are interested in and committed to: 

• Promoting alternatives to incarceration;
• Working in solidarity directly with criminalized people, and currently or formerly incarcerated people;
• Understanding the root causes of violence, harm, and criminalization, and actively working to address these (i.e., structural and systemic issues, not individual blame);
• Promoting inclusive spaces that address social and economic barriers to social inclusion, through anti-oppressive, trauma-informed praxis.

Ideal community participant:  

• You are a community organizer striving for community safety without relying on police, prisons, or punishment;
• You might identify as an abolitionist, transformative or restorative justice practitioners, or have related values around non-carceral community safety including harm reduction and racial justice;
• You provide resources and supports to marginalized community members, without surveillance or collaboration with the carceral system, or assist marginalized or at-risk communities to access resources, provide workshops, deliver services; 
• You might also be working towards abolitionist goals e.g., defund police or decarceration.

Ideal planning participant:

• You are a practising planner who has been working for at least a year;
• This includes work in land use planning, as well as housing and economic development, urban design, environmental planning, social planning and community development, or providing direct services;
• You might work in the public, private or non-profit sector; 
• You are committed to community safety without policing and incorporating these ideas into your planning practice. 

If you are just getting started learning about both abolition and planning, a planning student, or primarily teaching or theorizing about these ideas this workshop is likely not for you.

If you are just getting started here are some resources to keep on learning, and watch this spot for more introductory resources.

We are only able to support people working and living in the territories that host Canada, but hope to be able to do more transnational work in the future.

What will we do together?

The workshop will take place in person in Ottawa. 

Before we meet participants will contribute photographs for an exhibition that helps us envision what community safety is and could be in our communities. The exhibition will be on view during the workshop and displayed in other settings afterwards. 

Saturday, February 14 – 10:00a-5:00p

• Learn from Planning for Abolition team about planning and abolition practice. 
• Participants and Planning for Abolition team exchange skills and experiences related to specific puzzles in their practice. 
• Followed by dinner together 

Sunday, February 15 – 10:00a-5:00p

• Storytelling and podcasting workshop 
• Collaborative podcast creation to share skills, experiences and learning
• Reflections and plans for what you want to do next 
  

We also invite participants to join us for an optional opening celebration, with the photo exhibition on display and a public film screening Friday, February 13. 

• Opening Celebration for participants and guests 5:00-7:00 
• Film screening open to all 7:00-9:00

We will also hold two online follow-up sessions in March and April 2026. 

• Podcast listening parties 
• Check-ins on action plans 
• Continue to share skills, learning and ideas 

How will we support?

We want to bring together a diverse group, so there is no cost to attend the workshop.

Travel to and from Ottawa, ground transportation, hotel stays, and most meals during the workshop will also be provided.

There is also limited funding for additional child or family care associated with participation.

English/French, English/ASL, or English/LSQ can be made available upon request.

We will work with participants around possibilities for removing other barriers to participation.

How to Apply?

Complete the questions and submit the following survey to apply.

Application information will be only be shared with the selection team.
We will begin evaluations right away, and aim to notify participants before the end of December.
We will ask selected participants to confirm their participation by mid-January.

Please reach out if the application process includes specific barriers to submitting your application that we can work to remove.

Online information session + FAQs

An opportunity to hear more from the Planning for Abolition team about the event, ask questions about participation and the application process.
Recording

You can still submit questions for us.

FAQs about the participation and the application process
(we’ll add to this as the process goes on)

Get in touch to with questions that haven’t been answered in the FAQ: planningforabolition@carleton.ca

A little bit more about us

Planning for Abolition is a research project funded by SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) and UofT School of Cities, and hosted at Carleton University in partnership with researchers and practitioners at Carleton, University of Toronto, Pratt Institute, and the Black Planning Project.

We are asking how planning practices can support the abolition of policing, prisons and other carceral institutions. Focused on the generative aspect of abolition, we find that there is a role for planners in supporting fully resourced communities built through ecosystems of care.

learn more about the project at: wheretohere.com/planning-for-abolition