Reclaiming Power, Rebuilding Futures: What We Learned When Women Came Together

There is a photograph from March 21st that we keep coming back to. It shows a pair of adult hands and a very small pair of hands reaching for the same yellow box of LEGO bricks. The small hands belong to a two-and-a-half-year-old, the youngest participant in the room that day. The structure being built was an economy — the kind of economy we deserve.

We did not plan for that image. That is rather the point.

Between February and March 2026, the Women's Economic Council convened three events under the banner Reclaiming Power, Rebuilding Futures. Two were virtual. One was in person, in Montreal. All three were built around a single question: what does a feminist economic future actually look like, and how do we build it together?

This series marked a deliberate shift for WEC. For years, our work was organized around programming — things we designed and offered outward. This series was designed around listening. We wanted to know what communities across Canada were carrying, what they needed, and what they could imagine if given space, time, and trust. What we got back was more than we asked for.

Event One: We're Still Here

The first gathering, on February 14th, was a story circle. We asked participants to share a moment when they had resisted or built something economically powerful in their life or their community.

What came back was raw. Women spoke about the shrinking space for equity work and collective feminism. About advocacy that has become genuinely dangerous — particularly for Indigenous, Black, and racialized women — as funding dries up and political conditions shift. About the exhausting work of staying inside harmful systems while making small, deliberate acts of refusal: setting a boundary, leaving what is toxic, reclaiming time.

But underneath the difficulty was something else, something that held for the rest of the series. One participant put it this way:

"Collectively, we are smarter than we are individually. We can lean on each other when we need. Women build heart forward."

People left that first evening feeling seen. And curious about what came next.

Event Two: Economic Justice Is…

On February 28th, we went deeper. Three questions, answered honestly, in breakout rooms that quickly became containers for real conversation.

What economic barrier feels real right now? The answers were immediate and physical: housing. Financial insecurity. Fragmentation. Isolation. Feeling unsafe. Being pulled in competing directions. These were not policy abstractions. These were lives.

What would meaningful support actually look like? The room reached for something specific and human. Connections. Open doors. Curiosity. Champions. Active listening. Policy that gets applied, not just written. Basic income. Collective action. Not charity — solidarity.

If justice were present, how would it feel? This is where the room stopped.

Safe. Peaceful. Belonging. Abundant. Light. Love. Heaven. Future active leaders.

Those words became the blueprint for everything that followed.

Event Three: Designing the Future Together

Sixteen women arrived at Connections by Ralia on a Saturday morning March 31, in Montreal. They came from different communities, sectors, and life experiences. Some knew WEC well. Some had never heard of us. Three children came too, and stayed for the whole thing.

We prepared the space with care — flyers at every seat, food on the counter, LEGO in a communal box in the middle of one table. Then we asked people to build a structure that shows the kind of economy we deserve.

What they built was extraordinary.

The first team named their build Fire Together, rooted in the Ubuntu principle I am because we are. It had a vetting process to protect the people inside it. A fairy at its centre holding an arrow of truth. Music as intergenerational healing. A creature at the entrance who welcomed all beings arriving in alignment and contribution. It was not a utopia without edges — it was a carefully imagined place where belonging came with accountability.

The second team named theirs Balance, Collective Living, Coexistence. It was open and generous, built across generations and identities, hands of different sizes placing pieces side by side. It had an elevator so no one would be left behind. Trees of life. Bridges connecting everything. A person with a crutch placed at the very top — not hidden, honoured. And a fairy grandmother watching over all of it.

Then we asked the teams to merge their builds. What emerged was something neither group could have made alone.

Participants named the process composting: breaking down what no longer serves in order to feed something new. They talked about how transformation rarely completes itself within one generation — and how the alpha generation, literally present in the room and reaching for bricks, may be the ones who finish what we are starting.

"Maybe some elements will stay, maybe others won't, but it cannot stay the same."

What we heard

Across all three events, certain things recurred often enough to be signals rather than noise.

The collective is the strategy. Mutual support and group wisdom were not named as nice-to-haves. They were named as survival strategies, in a moment when institutional backing is shrinking and individual advocacy carries real risk.

Safety and belonging are not soft words.Safe. Peaceful. Belonging. Abundant. These sound gentle. They are radical. They are the vocabulary of people who know precisely what the absence of those things costs. WEC's work lives in the gap between the world as it is and the world those words describe.

Joy is the architecture, not a distraction. Event 3 was full of laughter. The LEGO builds became meaningful precisely because they were also fun. Participants named this deliberately in their closing commitments: transformation rooted in joy is more sustainable, more generative, and more honest than transformation rooted in urgency alone.

Intergenerational co-creation is not a metaphor. The children in that room were not incidental to the day. They were the argument. The structures built that morning were not designed for the women who built them — they were designed for the people who will inherit them. That is seven-generation thinking, long practised by Indigenous Peoples, made suddenly literal on a folding table in Montreal.

What happens now

The room was intentionally small. We could have held forty; sixteen came. That number is exactly what made the depth of conversation, the quality of connection, and the level of trust possible.

Everyone left having written a commitment on a card and taken it with them — commitments ranging from personal awareness practices to macro-level systems change. All of them rooted, as one participant said, in joy and fun, because that is where the energy for change actually lives.

This series was designed as a beginning, and it behaved like one. Several participants have already asked about continuing to meet, to organize, to build pods. We are listening to that, and we are thinking seriously about what comes next: a second series, deeper Community Labs across WEC's city hubs, a longer-term community of practice.

The question in front of us is not whether this work matters. The participants answered that. The question is how we hold what was built — and what it takes to keep building.

If you were in one of those rooms: thank you. You are founding participants in something that is still taking shape.

If you weren't: there is room. Stay close.

The Reclaiming Power, Rebuilding Futures series was facilitated and organized by Julie Savaria for the Women's Economic Council / Conseil Économique des Femmes. Tickets were offered free or on a sliding scale so that cost was never a barrier to participation.