Look familiar? Yes, it's the lower level of the Dyment Recreation Hall. This is a concept for a new creative recreation space designed using AI tools.
How AI is Supporting Volunteer Boards in Northern Communities
Organizing community meetings and keeping local programs running is no small feat in places like Dyment, Borups Corners, or any northwestern Ontario community. Volunteers dedicate countless hours to making sure everything from meeting agendas to event schedules is in order—all while balancing work, family, and daily life. It’s a labour of care, and every minute matters.
That’s why we’re designing a digital platform as a supportive partner. Using agentic AI, we’re exploring how artificial intelligence can help with routine administrative tasks so that volunteers can focus on the work that truly matters: connecting with residents, planning programs, and shaping the community’s future.
For example, scheduling monthly board meetings involves several steps: coordinating calendars, preparing agendas, drafting minutes, and posting documents. Our AI-assisted system handles much of this automatically. Volunteers can input a simple rule—say, “third Wednesday of every month”—and the platform generates draft agendas, placeholder minutes, and correctly labeled documents. The time saved can then be spent on planning community initiatives, engaging with neighbors, or exploring new programs.
The benefits go beyond efficiency. By taking care of repetitive tasks, a platform powered by AI can free up volunteers to lead, innovate, and strengthen the community. And as the potential grows as AI continues to advance: meeting recordings could be automatically summarized into minutes, survey responses could be analyzed to highlight key trends, and grant applications could be drafted in minutes, helping small boards access opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach.
In communities where resources are limited and distances between residents are long, these tools aren’t just convenient—they’re empowering. They give volunteers the capacity to do more, connect more, and sustain the rich social and cultural life of northern communities. AI, in this context, becomes a partner: a tool designed to support the people who make these communities thrive.
2025 Fall and Winter Arts Program
ECO-STAR North invites artists, educators, and community leaders to join in co-creating this new path forward — where innovation grows from the land, the language, and the stories that have always been here in Northwestern Ontario and beyond. This project has been seeded in 2025 with generous support from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Creative Entrepreneurship Program, Enterprise Development Group, The Arts Incubator Winnipeg, Art Borups Corners, the Manitoba Arts Council Indigenous 360 Program, The Labovitz School of Business and Economics at the University of Minnesota Duluth, The Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program, and the OpenAI Researcher Access Program.
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