This year we are back at Pearce Williams Camp on May 21-24, 2026.

Do you have a workshop proposal that you think would fit Cahoots? Do you know someone who has great thoughts and ideas that you would like them to share with the Cahoots Festival? Then fill out this form:

Location
We are excited to be heading back to Pearce Williams Family Camp in Fingal, ON after many a successful Cahoots. Take a look at our previous notes on accessibility, lodging, and getting to the site.

Sessions & Schedule
The 2025 Schedule is here! Take a look at this bad boy and plan your Cahootsian experience appropriately. Do not fear—just because you think you may want to maybe possibly attend a workshop doesn’t mean you’re locked in and can’t get out of it! We are flexible and gracious and want you to have the best experience possible!

Questions
Interested in the theory and principles we adhere to? Read: So…What IS Cahoots?
Other questions? See the Frequently Asked Questions.
Still more thoughts? Contact us at [email protected] and someone will get back to you as soon as possible—please be patient as we are a volunteer-run festival.

Grab your tickets today, and then tell a comrade!

The wonderful world of announcements are back! Take a look at the sessions below, and who is bringing them to us. You can view the overall schedule at this link, always noting that the schedule may change due to Reasons.

Each presenter has been asked to consider how to make their session valuable and engaging for all bodies, minds, and ages, but please check session notes to see any specific considerations of age and ability the presenter is planning for.

Sessions presented in alphabetical order by title—click on the title to learn more.

• A Musical Journey Through Homelessness, Precarity and Mental Health Crisis (12+)
• An Amateur Cartography: Learning From Strategic Failures (all ages)
• Befriending Your Stressed-Out Nervous System (12+)
• Cinema as Theological Partner: Advent in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (18+)
• Dance Our Dreams and Desires for This World (12+)
• Entering Into Trans Solidarity (12+)
• Faithful Climate Conversation: Building a Better Future (12+)
• Feel a Prayer: Encountering the Divine in Nature (all ages)
• Gospel Contemplation: The Spiritual Practice of Imagination! (12+)
• Love, Solidarity and Jubilee (all ages)
• Learning and Art (all ages)
• Over My Dead Body: Green Burial Today (12+)
• Playing With Emotions and Concepts Through Clay Sculpture (all ages)
• Protest as Prayer (12+)
• Recovering from Religious Trauma (12+)
• Screen Printing (all ages)
• Survival (all ages)
• Taize Prayer / Songs (12+)
• Ultimate Frisbee (all ages)
• Wool Felting (all ages)
• Writing from the Heart: A Spiritual Practice of Free Expression (all ages)

All Ages
With Bailey Eastwood

“If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep, woods, and I’d look up into the sky–up–up–up–into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.”

​Join Bailey for a walk in the woods and one of their favourite Anne Shirley-inspired spiritual practices. We’ll explore some of the trails around camp (perhaps learning about some of the plants and trees around us as we go!), stopping often to “feel a prayer” in the beautiful and holy spaces we encounter.

Bailey Eastwood (they/them) is a United Church minister and the National Coordinator of the Student Christian Movement of Canada. Their faith and ministry have been formed and shaped by summer camping ministries, a lifetime of reading, a deep appreciation for the natural world, and their undergraduate education in biochemistry. Bailey loves being in community, encountering new theologies, making things with their hands, and learning just about anything. Their life’s ambition is to be able to identify every tree.

12+
With Chris Clarke
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Come to sit and listen to stories and songs that will thematically march around experiences with homelessness, precarity, and mental health crises. Chris will weave together moments of reflection, dialogue and prayer throughout. This is likely to be a heavy session that will discuss severe mental health struggled so bring an open heart and only attend if you have the emotional capacity.

​Chris is a singer-songwriter from Toronto, ON trying to figure life out. An original and long-running part of the Cahoots organizing team he is enjoying seeing Cahoots from a slightly different perspective. Chris is extremely eclectic with a broad range of interests and has worked lots with children and folks experiencing homelessness.

12+
With Isaiah Ritzmann
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Just as in our personal life, our failures in activism have a lot to teach us. At this workshop we will have opportunities to share and discuss our strategic failures as activists (when we tried to make the world better by doing a thing, but it didn’t work), and what we individually and as group can learn from them. The workshop’s title comes from a Weakerthans lyric “armed with every precious failure—an amateur cartography.”

​Isaiah Ritzmann (he/him) has been part of the Cahoots “extended family” since the inception of the festival in ———–. A facilitator of community-based learning on sustainability, democracy, & degrowth in Kitchener, Ontario (Haldimand Tract), he also helped co-found a home-based hospitality network called Open Homes that serves newly arrived refugee claimants. A deep believer that God’s pedagogy includes our strategic failures, he’s excited to explore these in conversation with others.

12+
With Esther Townshend
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Do you ever feel like your body is fighting against you? Are you often feeling burnt out or stressed without knowing how to feel better? These signs could actually be your body giving you important messages about how to feel better! This workshop will discuss strategies for better understanding your body’s signals, and how to use these practices to release stress and calm your body and yourself.

Esther Townshend is a writer, organizer, peacemaker, disturber of the peace, Gestalt psychotherapy student, and nature lover. Since a concussion in 2018, she has been learning to live well with a finicky nervous system. Her favourite stress relief practices include yoga, singing, walks by the lake, tea and chocolate.

18+
With Jamie Gibson
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What is the future of humanity in the face of declining ecological conditions, credibility of institutions, and empire? In a world where communication increasingly comes in the form of audio-visual media, what does it mean to respond to a movie theologically? Film is both a valuable resource and dialogue partner, capable of tapping into popular culture and conveying deep spiritual ideas. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), the director seeks to describe the cause and effects of a politically- and socially-disenchanted society. Set in 2027, the film’s dystopian image of mass infertility is eerily similar to our present-day. In this workshop, the facilitator will exegete Children of Men and convey the film’s plot as an analogy for the Advent narrative of the New Testament. Using the film as an allegory for contemporary social despair, the facilitator will explore ways in which people of faith can re-enchant their spiritual and secular communities. This workshop is advised for those 18 years and older, given the sensitive content of the film discussed.

Jamie Gibson is a graduate student at Emmanuel College in Toronto. Jamie has worked as an activist and as a spiritual caregiver to activists, he is a songwriter and performer, he is a student-minister in the United Church of Canada. Jamie’s interests include outreach to non-religious people and developing a message of justice and hope in the midst of the decline of empire, the credibility of institutions, and ecological conditions.

12+
With Sheilagh McGlynn
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Let’s take some time to focus on our visions and dreams for our ourselves and for our world. Come and dance those intentions using the free form flow of conscious movement. We will follow our time of movement together with creating an artistic representation of that vision (collage, drawing, etc) that can take home as your vision board. Come and move, dream and tap into your creative spirit! No dance experience is necessary, just an openness to move and be moved.

Sheilagh has been involved in the Student Christian Movement of Canada since she was in high school. She found her faith identity in working for change in this world. She has worked in church settings (Youth Ministry and Campus Ministry) and in the last decade as a Psychotherapist. She loves helping people reveal their truest potential—finding their calling, expressing themselves fully, or celebrating the gifts they have to offer the world. She has found self-care through movement and playfulness and is looking to offer some of that to Cahoots participants.

12+
With Jack! (Silas Foxton)

This workshop will be largely geared towards cisgender folks looking to learn about trans experiences and how to be in solidarity with trans people, to hold a graceful space for learning and exploring uncomfortable questions. Through this workshop we will learn and discuss together the ways that we are all deeply interconnected to the struggles of transgender people and can find in trans liberation a movement towards life-affirming ways of being for all people. Trans and nonbinary people are also welcome to attend, as we can all learn and share something new about eachother’s experiences. Leave behind ideas of otherness but bring any burning question (or simmering ones) you might have about transness.

Jack is a genderqueer artist and writer of many names and occupations meandering around the great lakes basin. They are deeply invested in trans community care and the relationships that keeps us alive and make that life worth living. Jack has been a rogue trans inclusivity educator for over 10 years and loves having challenging, awkward and important conversations.