Volume 3, Number 4 - Ideas That Matter

Transcription

Volume 3, Number 4
www.ideasthatmatter.com
Building
Strong
Communities
A publication to stimulate public discourse
.... Editor’s Notes
Ideas That Matter
Volume 3 Number 4
November 2006
I
n May 2005 Ideas that Matter, in
conjunction with our sister organization, The Maytree Foundation, brought together a diverse audience of over 400 established and
emerging community and civic leaders in the Toronto area. The conference, Building Strong Communities,
explored the ideas, organizations and
people who help make our communities more liveable. Workshops also
provided practical tools and strategies for strengthening institutions,
individuals and our social fabric.
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Public space, civic engagement,
social capital, public policy advocacy, collaboration and partnership,
mentoring, networking and public
celebrations are all threads of our
collective life which support and
weave together our ‘commons’. We
thank more than 40 leaders who
shared their expertise and passion.
The conference included a presentation of new work from Diaspora Dialogues, a project that fosters that creation of written and performed
narratives reflecting the city of
Toronto through the eyes of recent
immigrants. And the day ended with
the 2005 Jane Jacobs Prize Ceremony, hosted by Mayor David Miller
and attended by Jane Jacobs.
This issue also marks the passing of
Jane Jacobs. Jane has been a mentor
and friend of Ideas that Matter over
the last ten years. Her ideas formed
the basis of a remarkable event held
in 1997 called Jane Jacobs: Ideas that
Matter from which this publication
ultimately took its name. Her ideas
continued to inform and animate us
through her role in bringing together
the mayors of Canada’s five urban
regions, the C5 initiative, and subsequently, the civic dialogue around an
increased role for Canadian urban
regions in the governance of this
country. As well, the Jane Jacobs
Prize recipients enjoyed Jane’s wit,
insight and friendship around her
famous dining room table. We continue to be enriched by her ideas and
writings.
Ann Peters
Editor
[email protected]
Executive Publisher: Alan Broadbent. C.M.
Editor: Ann Peters
[email protected]
Layout/design: Sarah Gledhill
Copyright: All articles © the author, 2006
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To stimulate public discourse
Contents
4 Refuge and the Canadian
37 Telling Your Story
Idea
Suzanne Gibson
Mark Starowicz
14 Scaling Up: Advocacy
43 Making A Difference:
from the Grassroots
Participation and
Engagement in Civil Society
Harry Kits, Gord Perks, Maureen Fair
Anil Patel
21 Building the Commons
46 Jane Jacobs 1916-2006
Maureen Bryant, Rob Howarth, Michael
Rachlis
47 Resources
27 Community
Collaboration
Paul Born
31 Building a Better
Foundation
Photo by Mark Trusz, copyright Ideas That Matter
Cynthia Reyes, Kay Blair
Volume 3 Number 4 3
Refuge and the Canadian Idea
Mark Starowicz
Ideas That Matter and The Maytree
Foundation jointly sponsored the conference “Building Strong Communities” on
April 5, 2005 in Toronto. Mark Starowicz
delivered the following keynote address to
400 community and civic leaders.
4 Volume 3 Number 4
I
’ve inhabited several identities in my
life. I was born in England at the end
of the war of Polish parents. I spent
my early childhood in Argentina, and
spoke Polish and Spanish. Then I came
to Canada at the age of eight, a complete
stranger in an alien climate, speaking
neither English nor French. It was unbelievably awful. From the warm and beautiful climate of South America, we
arrived in Montreal in March –frigid
winds, grey skies, black ice and sooty
snow. In Argentina I knew all the neighbours, all the kids on the block, and we
all played communally, everyone knew
me as Marecito, everyone knew my personality and my interests. Within two
days of arriving in Canada I was walking
alone to school, with no friends, without
knowing any neighbours, and was put in
front of a Grade Two class to read aloud
so they could assess if I could handle
Grade Two –which I had been attending
in Argentina.
The sentence that I had to read is still
engraved in my mind. It was a religion
book, for I was in a Catholic school. The
sentence was: Mother and David pray to
the Saviour.” Since Spanish was
phonetic, I read it as: “ Mot Her and Dah
Veed Pry Ed toh t-h-eh Sah Vee O Ur.”
Within ten minutes I was put into Grade
One with kids 18 months younger than
me, and I would always be the oldest kid
in my class all the way to university.
I learned English quickly, but I didn’t
recover a sense of community and or
neighbourhood for many years. The only
community our family belonged to was a
Polish immigrant one, which existed
only on Saturday nights in my parents’
Ratna Omidvar, Executive Director of The Maytree Foundation
and Mark Starowicz
kitchen, because their friends lived all
over the city, and there was no Polish
neighbourhood. There were many other
immigrant kids in school, but being
immigrant is not an ethnicity. Poles and
Czechs and German parents didn’t
socialize together just because they are
all immigrants, and neither did their
kids. The only unifying thing about the
immigrant experience then was exclusion. It was a different English Canada
then, dominated by descendants of the
British Isles. We all lived in a largely
Anglo-Irish and Scottish area, where
people knew each other from birth, and
we were the outsiders. We didn’t know
the rules of baseball because we came too
late; we couldn’t skate to get into the
pee-wee league, and didn’t get invited to
birthday parties in the neighbourhood.
I always refuse to caramelize the
Canadian immigrant experience. Your
family usually drops down the social scale
because your father’s engineering degree
or medical or accounting degree is not
recognized here. My father was a highly
decorated Air Force officer in the war,
but now he had to work as a mechanic,
surrounded by young trainees who barely
heard of the war and had no interest in
the older man with the thick accent in
their midst. You have no standing in the
society.
You can also be trapped in your ethnic
community, which is sometimes nurturing, but sometimes stifling and orthodox,
Mark Starowicz
resentful of past wrongs in the homeland,
often full of internal divisions and
grudges and closed to fresh ideas and perspectives.
The immigrant experience was a
melancholy one for me all through elementary school, and I only began to feel
accepted once I went to college, where
everyone came from different parts of the
city and the country, and everyone was a
stranger. And therefore you had a chance
at a fresh start.
So, given that I wasn’t born here, didn’t speak either official language when I
arrived, and was so unhappy with my
experience in Canada for so many years,
it was supremely ironic that I was asked
to make the first History of Canada for
television, some 40 years later, in both
languages. And what I learned in the
four years it took us to make it, surprisingly, had everything to do with the
immigrant experience.
As you probably know, the series
Canada: A People’s History, surprised
everyone –including myself—by taking
the country by storm. More than two
million people watched the first episode.
For the rest of the series’ first year, as
many Canadians watched their history
unfurl as have ever watched major
Olympic events or Stanley Cup playoffs.
In fact, the first episode alone ranked as
the most viewed documentary in the
entire fifty-year history of Canadian television going back to when we had only
one channel. The series book became the
best selling non-fiction book in Canada
last year, the video cassettes the highest
selling Canadian video in Canadian history. This is fairly distant history we were
dealing with. No Starowicz’s, hardly any
Asians, Jews or East Europeans; in other
words, no direct roots to Tecumseh,
Montcalm or Champlain, at least among
the English audience. Yet, to quote the
Ottawa Citizen the next day “Who wants
to be a Millionaire? plummeted by one
million viewers under withering fire from
Canadian history.
Clearly, a chord had been struck in the
Canadian psyche; but what was the
chord?
I got my first hint of it the preceding
year, before the series aired, when a group
of us were in a small CBC theatre watching what we call “rushes”, which are
rough drafts of scenes that just came out two countries – the United States and
of the edit suite. That afternoon, we were modern Canada – by provoking one of
watching an account of the American the greatest human migrations of the
Loyalist
fleeing
the
American continent’s history: the Loyalists who
Revolution to British soil, in Nova sailed to Nova Scotia, crossed rivers and
Scotia. Images of transport ships filled swamps into Quebec, sailed on to the
the screen, and the sight of thousands of Thousand Islands and to the Niagara
families being unloaded, tired and cold, Peninsula. English Canada was born in a
onto a rocky Atlantic beach. I could blink of an eye, historically speaking –
have been watching the news on refugees just nineteen years – creating the
fleeing Kosovo, which was happening at French-English duality which has govthe time. Then came these voices, over erned Canada’s destiny ever since.
Modern Canada was founded on two
the achingly lonely scene of huge ships
abandoned peoples. The first, the French
departing on the horizon:
Sarah Frost: “It is, I think, the rough- of two separate colonies – Acadia and
est land I ever saw. But this is to be our Quebec – both occupied by the British
city, they say.”
Sarah Tilley: “I
climbed to the ...the experience of refuge, of arriving in a
top of Chipman’s strange place of terrifying beauty, the fear of an
Hill and watched uncertain destiny – this is the common thread
the sails disappear. Although I of the Canadian experience.
had not shed a
tear throughout all the war, I sat down on and abandoned by the French, who didthe damp moss, with my baby in my lap, n’t even want Quebec back after the
Seven Years’ War and traded it in 1763
and cried.”
It affected me emotionally, and when for the tiny sugar island of Guadeloupe.
the lights came on, I saw that I wasn’t the The second, their ancestral English eneonly one trying to hide my emotion. The mies from the American colonies, driven
history project staff in the theatre that out of their homes in the years after
afternoon were of French, Chinese, 1776.
Thus, the experience of refuge is at the
Jewish, and English descent. There wascore
of the Canadian identity. We are
n’t a Starowicz or a Bernstein or a
refugees
or the descendants of refugees
Gendron among those Loyalists, yet
these grizzled journalists were reacting who came to our shores like the recurring
like schoolchildren. They were averting tides: the Scots left landless by the
their faces, drying their eyes, of covering Highland Clearances, the marginalized
up streaks of tears. And I finally under- English gentry of Susannah Moodie’s
stood why the scene had moved me, had generation, the hundreds of thousands of
moved us all. This was our story too: the starving Irish families ousted by landlords
experience of refuge, of arriving in a and famine. Countless black people came
strange place of terrifying beauty, the fear here too, refugees from the American
of an uncertain destiny – this is the com- Revolution and the Civil War. In turn,
mon thread of the Canadian experience. they were followed by the landless from
We are not linked by blood, but we are eastern and northern Europe: the
inextricably linked by the experience of Galicians, the Mennonites, the Poles
and the Jews, the Russians, the
refuge.
If we cast our eyes over the hundreds Scandinavians, the Dutch – all fleeing
of years of Canadian history, we can see war, persecution, economic devastation,
this thread running through it, although or famine. Thousands of Chinese young
the aboriginal story is different. New men crossed the Pacific Ocean to escape
France was peopled by the landless of poverty and sent their paltry earnings
Brittany, Normandy, and the displaced home to families they would never see
and abandoned daughters of Paris. The again. Thousands of British orphans were
American Revolution transformed this sent here in a systematic relocation of
continent and created the foundations of the abandoned.
Volume 3 Number 4 5
Germans, English or Italians in the Old
World.
This makes us different from the peoples of the Old World. This breeds certain characteristics which are visible
today. We are disdainful of class and privilege; there is no greater social sin here
than trying to pull rank or jump the cue.
It is unacceptable to be rude to a waiter
or waitress, because our sons and daughters are likely to be one at some point in
their lives. We are suspicious of government and ideology because we are
refugees from governments, armies, and
ideology. We are vigilant that no one
claims more rights than we have. Try
making an illegal left turn at a nearly
empty downtown intersection at midnight, and someone will honk at you in
protest. Canada – cranky, forever courting and rejecting a break-up – is a perpetual negotiaof its conWe have to participate in the architecture of our tion
stituent parts. To
cities, debate our use of public space, the nature the
frustrated
of our schools, the state of our national culture, question: “When
are we finally
the democratic process, the law.
going to settle all
this?” the answer
street children of Paris – or from is, of course, “Never.” That’s not the
problem, it’s the point. The genius of
Galician villagers.
A hundred different histories have Canada is the constant search for equishaped the Canadian identity. And there librium, where no one ever fully gains
is a river that runs through those stories the upper hand. That, also, is not the
– we have all been shaped by the experi- norm of most countries of the world.
Climate is history too, and it shapes
ence of exile or the experience of
wrenching departure, perhaps through identity. Many sociologists –most recentthe memory of it by our grandparents or ly Michael Adams in his surveys of
parents. And whatever the causes of our Canadian versus American attitudes—
ancestral exile or departure, everyone in observe that there is a communitarian
this room shares another common expe- streak which runs through our civil life,
rience: the trauma of arrival, of and it’s most readily explained by cliendurance in a hostile landscape, fol- mate. It is impossible to survive the winlowed, inevitably, by the story of redemp- ter without your neighbour’s help in an
tion. That redemption can be the first agricultural society. The roads have to be
harvest or the first child to graduate from cleared somehow to get goods to market
an university. Everybody, almost without or children to school. It is foreign to our
exception, has the same three-part story: nature to have a common water supply
the exodus, the endurance, and the privately owned, for example, and second nature to erect a barn communally. I
redemption.
This is not true of most of the popula- appreciate not many of us are erecting
tion of this planet. It is true of barns these days, but the need to mainAustralians, Americans, New Zealanders tain civil relations with your neighbours
and some Latin American peoples, to assure survival is imprinted into the
which is why we often feel a cultural culture. It is not so large a leap to go from
affinity with these peoples. But it is not common road clearance, to non-denomwoven into the memory of most French, inational schools, to group care for the
After the end of the Second World
War, came the East European people the
war had displaced (among them, my parents). Then came the Sikhs, the Italians,
and the Portuguese in search of a better
life; the boat people of Vietnam; people
from the Caribbean. Today, the refugees
from war still arrive – from the Sudan,
from Somalia, or the Balkans.
They were, for the most part, the displaced people of history: the expelled,
the persecuted, the landless, the marginalized, the victims of imperial wars, of
economic and ideological upheavals. At
best, they were economic migrants, perhaps adventurers, but all seeking a better
life for their children. In a sense we are
all boat people. We just got here at different times. Every one of us has the
same story in our past, whether we are
descended from the Filles du Roy – the
6 Volume 3 Number 4
Mark Starowicz
elderly, and finally, to medicare. There is
demonstrable social similarity between
maritime people of the Canadian and
American Atlantic coasts, and a marked
similarity of attitudes within the snowbelt from Quebec and Ontario to the
New England states, as there is for peoples of the American border states and
the Canadian prairie provinces.
Distance has also shaped us. It has
allowed communities to retain their ethnic or religious particularity in a way that
was not possible in smaller countries.
Consequently, when we have had to
come together in our political arenas, the
tendency for accommodation and compromise is built in.I don’t want to sound
Pollyanna here. Canadian history is
marred by appalling racism, the systematic expulsion of entire peoples, a system
which made our native peoples refugees
in their own land, violent anti-immigrant attitudes, institutionalized antiSemitism and religious prejudice. All of
those, we made sure, were justly woven
into the history we produced.
My dear friend, historian Gene Allen,
says he always thought of Canada as the
intergalactic Bar Scene in Star Wars.
Nobody, he argues, can afford to win outright. And they know it. Everybody has
a stake in the constant operation of a
platform resting precariously on a hundred gyroscopes and stabilizers. It’s considered bad form to jump up and down on
this platform.
Some people suggest that we have a
tepid history, compared to France or
Russia, for example, because there are no
vast Napoleonic armies and because we
don’t have a civil war or a revolution in
our past. Instead, the Canadian experience has bred a grumpy civility that has
given rise to one of the great mysteries of
history. We have all the ingredients, all
the toxins, to create a Kosovo or a
Northern Ireland: two major religions,
two languages, contested land, racial and
ethnic divisions. How we didn’t become
the Balkans, or Vichy France, is a far
more intriguing story than any
Napoleonic battle, and far more pertinent to the modern world. Six hundred
thousand people died in the American
Civil War. Seventeen thousand fell in
ten minutes at Cold Harbour. Tens of
thousands of Canadians have died on
Mark Starowicz
bles the way I think the world will be,
and must be, in the years to come.”
It would seem that in this cranky, litigious and insufferably contentious collection of the Old World’s unwanted , we
may have created the model of the postnational state. If that is the case, history
has determined identity in a way that is
peculiarly pertinent to the modern
world.
This country has evolved from the one
I arrived in. It is no longer a New Britain
and a New France. It has evolved into an
unprecedented historical experiment,
and become a collective idea, and a
The Canadian immigrant experience must not project. We are
be one of isolation...but an exercise in cross-cul- no longer scattered, ethnic and
tural collaboration.
religious communities on the
Instead the continent divided into two prairies, separated by great distance, and
experiments: One, a unilingual, unitary can no longer behave like isolated
centralized state, the other a bilingual, enclaves. The country is a collective prodecentralized state. It is tempting to see ject which requires us to construct new
one as more chaotic than the other. On forms of community.
We can cherish and protect our ethnic
the surface they are, and we can long for
the political cohesion of the United and religious heritages, but we cannot
States, which is also a republic woven exclude ourselves from the great project
from many national strands. But the peo- by remaining locked up in them, and
ple who died in the Civil War of 1860- devoting our efforts only to the welfare of
1864 to make that political entity more our particularity. We can’t just give
unitary, had they been allowed by histo- money and our work and our talent only
ry to live, their children would now num- to our specific national group, or faith
ber forty million people - more than the institution, or cultural group. We have to
population of Canada. We should pause participate in the architecture of our
before we endorse any political cause as cities, debate our use of public space, the
nature of our schools, the state of our
being worth that many souls.
That was the observation. Here’s the national culture, the democratic process,
story I promised to end on. My dear col- the law. We have to act as part of an
league William Thorsell, who runs the integral whole. The Canadian immigrant
Royal Ontario Museum, told me this experience must not be one of isolation,
as it was for many in my generation when
story:
Xavier Perez de Cueillar, when his we were young, but an exercise in crossterm as Secretary General of the United cultural collaboration.
The very definition of this country is
Nations ended, had to decide whom he
would donate the hundreds of gifts he the eternal dialogue of its constituent
received from heads of state when he was parts. That was the reason to come here
in office. He chose to give them all to in the first place: the civility of public
discourse, and the maintenance of public
Canada.
At the dinner honouring this occa- peace. There is no country on earth that
sion, William asked him: “Why Canada, makes it so easy for the newcomer to be
involved in the project of its own conafter all, you are a Peruvian?”
He replied: “Of all the countries I have struction. But this is more than an issue
come to know in my tenure, Canada, of opportunity. It’s an issue of civic duty.
with its capacity to absorb and tolerate We are all in a project that has global
all nationalities and races, most resem- consequence, the first post-national state
foreign battlefields. But more Canadians
die on the highway on a single Labour
Day weekend than all Canadians who
fell on any battlefield on Canadian soil
since the Riel Rebellion.
If the United States, at its independence, had consisted of a federation of
two languages and cultures –say that the
Continental Congress had included
Mexico, a Hispanic, Catholic people—
then it would have evolved into a far
more complex, pluralistic and decentralized federal state. It would have been
much more like Canada.
on the planet. Its continued existence is
a powerful affront to global racism, religious hatred, toxic nationalism and war.
Our very existence is a front to that.
The country has been a 400 year-old
dialogue and we have come to like what
we have found. And in the past 20 years
you have seen it happen in your own
generations. We have collectively come
to like the idea that we are the sanctuary
and the refuge of the planet. We like
what we see which is that we are not all
of the same colour, language, identity or
ideologies. Listen to our children. They
like it. Their fourth grade and fifth grade
essays say that we have in this generation
arrived at an identity and that that identity is a plurality. And with that comes a
set of principles and a set of ideas that we
have collectively agreed upon. We define
it with medicare, peacekeeping, and
environmental issues.
When we have finally come to
embrace who we really are, how we came
to be who we are and how extraordinary
our improbable project is, we will find
our moral power. Thank you very much.
Mark Starowicz is the creator of several
of the most influential news programs in
Canada. These span both radio and television, and include As It Happens, and
The Journal, with the late Barbara Frum,
He has won seven Gemini Awards. Mark
was also the creator and Executive
Producer of the 32-hour documentary
series, Canada: A People’s History.
Mark subsequently headed CBC Television’s Documentary Programming Unit,
responsible for such series as Witness, Life
& Times, and all TV network documentary series and specials. His latest enterprise is the formation of CBC’s Documentary Production Unit whose productions
include: The Greatest Canadian, the popular series where Canadians voted on their
choice for greatest Canadian; and The
Canadian Experience.
Born in England in 1946, Mark and his
family immigrated to Montreal in 1954,
after an interlude in Argentina. Raised in
Montréal, he is trilingual, speaking Polish,
as well as French and English. In
2004, he was named an Officer of
the Order of Canada.
Volume 3 Number 4 7
The State of Community
Building Across Canada
Derek Ballantyne, Jian Ghomeshi, Frances Lankin, Sherri Torjman
What are the ingredients for creating
strong communities? The following five
panelists presented their perspectives at
the Building Strong Communities conference on April 5th, 2005. The panel was
moderated by Mary W. Rowe.
Sherri Torjman, Vice-President, Caledon
Institute of Social Policy
8 Volume 3 Number 4
O
ur experience at the Caledon
Institute of Social Policy comes
from a Pan-Canadian project
called Vibrant Communities. We’re
working with a national partner, Tamarack Institute, and at the heart of the
program are fifteen communities that are
working together to try to find local solutions to reduce poverty. They’re talking
together, meeting with each other and
trying to help each other find solutions.
Of these fifteen communities, six are
called Trail Builders. These communities
are receiving extensive funds to develop
comprehensive plans to reduce poverty
and then to implement those plans. They
involve a wide range of sectors including
business, the voluntary sector and governments around the table, and they seek
actively to engage low-income people, in
both creating and implementing these
plans.
What makes these initiatives strong?
I’d like to share some of the lessons we
have gathered so far.
Tom Thomson, one of Canada’s most
famous landscape artists, inspired a
whole group of Canadian artists – actually seven Canadian artists who came
together to form, in 1920, the Group of
Seven. The Group of Seven was trying to
bring in a whole new style of art. They
were very instrumental in terms of Canadian nationalism at the time and were
trying to break with the European tradition which was, at that time, painting
wilderness as though it was a museum.
You literally could say there was no ‘wild’
Faduma Mohamed, Jian Ghomeshi
in the wildlife. The Group of Seven
decided that the only way they could
break with tradition was by forming a
group and trying to put forward a new
idea together as a group. And so they
went off into Algonquin Park to sketch
together.
The lesson for me is that we now have
a Group of Six in our Vibrant Communities project. Each community is very creative and talented and their strength is
built on the talent of each community.
They have tremendous people working
together creating comprehensive long
term work, engaging people living in
poverty and engaging various sectors to
work together in a new form of practice.
In addition learning is embedded in
their work because there is a structured
learning process in which they’re all
working together in a very strategic way
to try to help each other. And the third
aspect of what I think is helping build a
strong movement is the fact that they
have incorporated a policy dimension
within their work. The role of Caledon
is to write some of the policy papers to
create a policy dialogue between the
communities and government so that the
private problems of individuals can be
linked to broader national and federal
policies.
The Group of Seven called themselves, “adventurers in paint”; our group
of six are “adventurers in practice”. One
of the Group of Seven, Lauren Harris
Ballantyne, Lankin, Ghomeshi, Torjman
said, “The story of the Group of Seven is
that of seven artists who came together
in a creative venture that no one of them
could have carried through on their
own.” And to me Vibrant Communities
is a similar creative venture. Its life
derives from the talent and creativity of
the individual communities but its power
derives from their combined passion and
strength in working together.
Faduma Mohamed, Executive Director,
Labour Community Services
Almost everybody in Canada has been
a newcomer at a certain period and most
of the established communities in Canada have been able to develop and settle
here because of good public policies that
supported their efforts to collectively
build strong communities. It’s newcomers who have made Canada what it is
today and will keep doing so in the
future. We know that today’s newcomers
to Canada are very highly skilled and
well-resourced. I think it’s only wise that
we need to better utilize and engage
them.
The newcomers’ experience is divided
into two phase; the first phase is when
they are in survival mode, trying to settle
and get jobs and find their place in society. Some communities settle faster than
others depending on their host communities and their strengths and resources.
If the community is coming to Canada
for the first time as refugees, it will take
longer to settle than the situation where
there is an established community, who
will support and guide them through the
settlement process. The longer this first
phase is, the less empowered the newcomers are and the less involvement they
can give to the community building
process.
The second phase is after the person
has got their job and feels settled and can
be assured that their kids’ future is in
good shape. This is the period where
newcomers can effectively participate in
the community building process. There
are seven key elements of community
building which are important.
The first is ensuring that representatives of newcomer communities participate in the creation of responsible public
The State of Community Building Across Canada
policies. We cannot exclude newcomers
and then make decisions for them when
they are not invited or when the doors
are not open for them to participate in
the policy-making process. Coalition of
social justice groups and newcomers have
to closely work together to effectively
influence and support policy-making
that is inclusive and fair.
The second point is that active and
continuous dialogue about the community’s future has to be ongoing and newcomer participation has to be facilitated.
We cannot afford to have sporadic dialogue only when there is an urgent situation to talk about. The dialogue has to be
ongoing and has to be carried out in a
way that newcomer communities can
participate in the process through language and cultural concentration. Some
communities are oral communities, other
communities are not oral communities.
One size does not fit all.
The third is the creation of regional
schools of cross-culture learning. Cross
cultural education has to be moved into
the newcomer and host communities in
order to avoid building prejudice and
stereotype. We don’t know each other
and we don’t learn from each other and
that’s why many stereotypes and prejudices are built. It’s not only newcomers
who have to learn and adapt, but the
mainstream community and host community have to also learn about the newcomer.
Young and new Canadians should be
actively engaged in community building
as they are the future of their communities. Child and youth serving institutions
are very important for all communities,
but especially for newcomer communities. One of the reasons why many newcomers come to Canada is to give their
children a better future. Institutions like
the Boards of Education and the Children’s Aid Society have to be fully aware
of newcomer issues and the emotional
stress around education and child welfare
for families.
The fourth point is that building from
the inside out needs to focus on assets
rather than limitations; community
building through the grass roots requires
the specific nature of the community,
respect for honest flexibility and
resources. Newcomer communities have
particular stress factors and organizations
within these communities must be able
to deliver the services that newcomers
need. In particular, the education and
experience of newcomers have to be better utilized and recognized to facilitate
settlement in their new home country.
The fifth factor is that change and
alternative thinking has to be anticipated, planned and supported. So we may
have to empower newcomer communities with information and education on
Canadian systems and institutions. The
historic development of Canada, as we
have heard from Mark Starowicz is very
important. Many of the newcomers who
arrive today are coming from a homogeneous society thinking that Canada is
also a homogeneous country. We are not
doing enough to teach Canadian history,
so that newcomers know where the systems in the society came from, that they
were built by immigrants in a historic
process, and that it’s now the newcomers’
turn to build the future history of Canada.
The sixth factor is the role of leadership. Leadership processes have to be
continuously examined to make sure that
they’re inclusive and reflect the society.
How can we make our institutions inclusive? There should be an honest effort to
engage newcomer leaders in all aspects
and levels of the decision-making
processes.
And my final point is social justice
and equity. Defeating racism should be
documented and celebrated, so we
should dream of a day that this will not
be an issue in our society. We cannot
keep doing anti-racist mediation year
after year without examining and measuring the positive progress are we having and documenting how far we have
improved. Social justice and equality
shouldn’t be only for people who need
this; it should be everybody’s business
and it should be on everybody’s agenda.
And lastly, inside newcomer communities power dynamics must change so that
women and youth are supported in their
challenge to take up their new role in
Canadian society.
Volume 3 Number 4 9
Derek Ballantyne, Chief Executive
Officer, Toronto Community Housing
Corporation
I was asked to share some ideas about
how Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) is building and
strengthening communities. To give
some context, TCHC is home to about a
hundred and sixty-five thousand people
who are of the lowest income bracket in
the city. We deal with a number of issues
that have to do with low-income communities and particularly marginalized
communities.
We’re prototyping three ideas; I want
to be clear that, while they’re ideas we
are practicing and experimenting with,
they remain ideas because I don’t think
that we have been entirely successful in
drawing all their benefits but we still
think they’re quite powerful. There is a
realization that while there is a growing
democratic deficit in our society, it’s
exacerbated for low-income households
and low-income communities, by a lack
of access to institutions and institutional
control.
When we go out and speak in our
communities to identify what are the
most pressing issues, there is a growing
sense of the inability of individuals and
individual households to actually have
much control over their lives because
they’re faced with a lot of institutional
presence, and a number of other factors
which pull them away from being able to
have a measure of control and ability and
predictability in their lives.
There is also a realization that in our
world, we’re supposed to speak about
assets and asset building, but this means
that there is a need for capacity building
both at the individual and the community levels if we want to change the nature
of poverty and change the circumstances
of households. We have tried three ideas
which I’ll go through very quickly.
One is a very simple idea, that in order
to bridge some of the democratic deficit
that we have within our own world and
to start building capacity, we have created a simple system of tenant representation. This builds representation both
within our organization and within the
housing communities by building individual leadership skills, and also building
opportunities for community interven-
10 Volume 3 Number 4
tion. It also then uses these representatives as a fundamental building block in
decision-making within the TCHC organization and creates a public accountability for actions that we might take.
That’s a very internalized kind of
response, but it’s one that others may
want to think about in terms of organizations which deliver services but don’t
really engage recipients in the prescription of what those services should be and
how they might be delivered.
The second is a slightly more powerful
idea, which we’ve been trying for three
years now. It’s a participatory budgeting
approach which comes from Latin America. We have started to move a greater
proportion of our spending decisions into
a participatory framework in which we as
the organization, do not make the decisions on where the money will be spent,
but put capital spending dollars, in the
hands of the particular communities to
which they’re destined. It’s working on
the idea that we will tap the ‘wisdom of
the crowd’ in trying to identify how best
to go forward and make decisions that
have meaning in communities. Meaning
in our communities has a lot to do with
the kind of living environment you’re in
and what you can do to improve it, as
they are not all that healthy at the best of
times.
The last point is a fundamental
change in the behaviour of our organization. We used to take our resources in
community development and decide
how best to allocate those ourselves,
because after all, in the good tradition of
large institutions, we certainly knew best
what to do. As a result we didn’t seem to
make much progress on addressing any of
the three key issues I outlined to begin
with. So we have shifted a lot of our
spending into community development
and community investments, put it into
a more competitive environment and
asked communities that have ideas to
bring those forward so that we can sponsor ideas and actions, rather than more
generally allocate broad sets of resources
through our own staff. This approach
tries to address particular local issues that
the communities, in partnership with
other organizations and agencies, have a
much better ability to respond to.
There are two things that come out of
the experience we’ve had so far with
these ideas. One is that it has strengthened community; giving the ability to
individuals and communities to have a
direct response does strengthen community. From my own perspective, the
strength of community and the capacity
that gets built is largely through action
rather than through a sort of theoretical
construct or framework or an over layering of imposed actions from external
agents. The communities themselves are
able to give action to particular ideas, no
matter how small, and they become their
own agents for building capacity in their
own communities.
Secondly, this has created a fundamental change in organizational behaviour for a large public institution, and
one that I think should be watched
closely by other institutions working in
communities and, having the same sorts
of objectives that we have.
Frances Lankin, Chief Executive Officer, United Way of Greater Toronto
How do you talk about community
building to a group of people who are
community building every single day of
their lives? Let me start with a couple of
challenges. A recent United Way report,
Poverty By Postal Code showed that in
the last twenty years in Toronto, we have
gone from roughly 30 neighbourhoods of
concentrated urban poverty to about
120. Of the poor families living in those
deep poverty neighbourhoods, sixty-five
percent are newcomer families and seventy per cent are visible minority families, whether they are newcomers or
whether they have been here for many
generations.
If we want to talk about where change
has to happen to build a strong, vibrant
city, we need to move into these neighbourhoods that have huge challenges,
but also have huge resources with people
of superb credentials, in terms of education and international experience. We
need to draw on these assets to change
the neighbourhoods where these people
are living their lives, raising their children and where their futures are being
determined. In the work that has come
from Poverty By Postal Code, the Toronto City Summit Alliance has launched
The Strong Neighbourhoods Task Force.
at this point in time. Let’s not let government off the hook. Let’s make sure we
bring them to the table as a partner; not
as controllers, not as regulators, but as a
partner to create the environment to
allow communities to thrive, to grow and
to become strong.
Frances Lankin
With the city and levels of government
and community and business all coming
together, we’re documenting why neighbourhoods matter. And we’re documenting the institutional assets, the kind of
social infrastructure and social capital
that we have to work with in our communities.
It isn’t a surprise that some of the most
social economically stressed neighbourhoods are those that have the least social
infrastructure. Parts of Scarborough and
North York and North Etobicoke, outside of the old downtown core, were built
with an urban form to have middleincome neighbourhoods, where people
lived and then commuted downtown to
work. The communities have changed
but the social infrastructure hasn’t.
This is a key challenge. All of the
comprehensive planning initiatives that
we’re trying to do at a neighbourhood
level, whether it be Vibrant Communities or Action For Neighbourhood
Change, are terrific but we do not have
the political and social structure constructs in place to create partnership
with governments. Governments have to
be part of the solution. The federal government has a role to play. The provincial government has a role to play. The
city has a role to play in working with
communities directly. There needs to be
a tripartite agreement in place to deal
with neighbourhood development.
Secondly, there needs to be a new deal
for the City of Toronto, and a new deal
in general in this country for large urban
economic regions. Mark Starowicz talked
about the post-national state and what it
would look like in terms of demographics; we also have to look at what it would
look like in terms of political structures.
If we’re going to talk about community
building, we have to have political structures that are empowered to respond to,
and to deal with, the issues at that level.
Focusing on inclusion, understanding
the role that neighbourhoods play and
building the political constructs to work
with community in strengthening these
neighbourhoods, and continuing to focus
on a new deal for cities; these are the
three highest social-political imperatives
Jian Ghomeshi, Writer and Producer,
CBC Television
I want to go back to the identity issue
and the question of who we are versus
where we are. In some ways I feel like the
poster boy for the new face of Canada. I
came to Canada in the mid-late 1970’s as
a seven year old. I’m of Iranian background and we moved to what could only
be described as the multicultural mecca
of Thornhill, Ontario which at that time
was largely populated by white, traditional, conservatives. I read a report in the
Toronto Star which stated that in the
1970s there were 50 people of Iranian
background in Canada.
There were three effects that this had
on me as a kid; one was denial of heritage
and lack of pride. As we segued into the
1980s and Iran became the enemy, people would say, “Oh, Jian, that sounds
French.” And I’d say, “No.” That’s pretty
much what it is.” I was scared. I didn’t
want to be ostracized by all the people I
knew who were different from me. I didn’t want to endure another joke about
being a terrorist, it’s still a funny joke to
some people.
The second effect it had on me was an
attempt to change who I am. I did anything I could to really hone Canadian
accents and try and act in ways that
weren’t necessarily natural to me, especially in terms of my personal habits and
home life. I really wanted to try and
change myself.
And most significantly, the third thing
it did was to put parameters around my
ambitions. I was always a little political
junky, even as a kid and I remember
thinking, “Wow! I could never run for
political office in this country. Even for
the Liberals! No one would vote for a guy
with my funny name.”
There are now a few hundred thousand Iranians in Canada and many of
them ironically, are in Thornhill. Now I
have a community although I don’t necessarily know where I fit in that commu-
Volume 3 Number 4 11
nity either. It’s a wonderful community,
but it is quite inward looking and at this
point, as first generation immigrants
who’ve just come here, almost fearful to
speak as a community.
What’s really important, is not just
intra-community development, but
inter-community development for this
Iranian community of various classes and
ages and abilities, to be able to make
itself a part of Canada. Part of that is
being seen as part of this country and
arriving at that sense of identity and plurality. Some people say to me every once
in awhile, “Well, you know, what’s the
problem? Everything’s okay now, right?
There’s no more race issues, especially in
this country.” And sadly, we all face
reminders of the spitting disgust on the
face of someone who will still call me a
‘Paki’, most recently in Guelph, Ontario
in a Subway sandwich store. The letters
that still come to the CBC saying, “Go
back to where you came from” and I’m
thinking, “Thornhill? Do you have cab
fare? …”
So empowerment and active involvement is important from within, (in this
case, the Iranian community) and from
the outside community for dialogue to
happen.
Mary Rowe, Facilitator
I think each of us could probably identify with any number of communities - a
religious community or an ethnic community or a racial community or a particular affiliation that we would have. Have
we moved to a notion of a community of
place? Is that the primary community?
Faduma Mohamed
When I think of myself, I think I
belong to the Somali Canadian community. I can’t identify myself with the
neighbourhood I live in because I have
lived in different neighbourhoods in
Toronto and there were always different
communities within a neighbourhood. I
have spoken a lot about a multi-culturally dynamic society, but as Jian has said,
there are few inter-community connections in the mosaic of multiculturalism
within our society.
Francis Lankin
I think that there are multiple communities in our life that we connect
with. In terms of building strong and
vibrant community where we can live
and flourish together, where we can build
the kind of city we want to live in, where
our kids are going to get good education
and where the streets are safe, my point is
that these things have to be built in a
place in the sense of a neighbourhood.
For that to have a vibrancy, the building
blocks have to come from people who are
living there - whether it’s the way business plans where banks are put or where
they’re not put, where grocery stores are
put or where they’re not put or whether
it’s the way governments, particularly the
provincial and federal orders of government, as opposed to the city, plan or
think about supporting people through
the variety of programs and services that
they offer – we don’t think about space
and place and neighbourhood enough.
In many parts of Toronto there isn’t a
strong sense of place because there isn’t a
strong sense of vibrant street life and
infrastructure and other sorts of things.
It’s very different, irrespective of the multiple communities that we may belong
to, if you’re in one of the downtown
neighbourhoods. There’s often a very
strong sense of neighbourhood identity
in these neighbourhoods and that that
needs to be part of how we organize ourselves to respond and build stronger communities across our city.
Sherri Torjman
Our primary focus has been neighbourhoods. We see affordable housing as
the centrepiece, the point of stability.
Around this core you build supports and
childcare and places for people to go and
talk and engage with each other. Within
those neighbourhoods, we are recognizing that there are communities that have
particular interests.
In Calgary, for example, a group of persons with disabilities has come together
to see how they can improve some of the
supports to help accommodate their particular areas of concern. In Halifax we’ve
worked with the black community and
their concerns with respect to racism.
And in central Winnipeg, the urban aboriginal community is concerned about
the kinds of problems that they’re facing.
It’s a multi-layered approach in terms of
community, both a focus on neighbour-
hood, and the kind of areas that you can
work on in place and then within that,
the specific concerns that communities
of interest face.
I just want to speak to it briefly about
engaging government. How do we do
that effectively? How do we bring government to the table as real players to do
something concrete and specific?
One of the things that we will be
doing in Action for Neighbourhood
Change, is engaging government folks in
a policy discussion. In one of the projects
we had people from ten different federal
departments coming together on a
monthly basis, to hook them up on lines
throughout the country and to talk with
communities about the problems that
they were facing with respect to substantive policy issues around poverty – like
affordable housing and training, for
example or around communication procedures and overhead and monitoring
issues that are killing community organizations right now. We engaged them in a
discussion, not just the one-shot meeting
together, to work through some of these
issues. The nice part about this is that
the government people themselves have
asked to continue this in a different
process. There’s now a group of assistant
deputy ministers who have asked
whether we would be involved with
them in a discussion at their level. We
have to, as communities, figure out a way
to engage with government in solving
some very real and concrete problems
that they’re creating for communities at
the grassroots level.
Faduma Mohamed
In engaging government, we need to
look at our democratic process. We have
some levels of government in this country where only 30% percent of people
have elected someone who is supposed to
represent the whole area. This person
feels only accountable to the 30% that
elected him or her. So I think we need to
revisit the democratic process: why are
these other 70% percent not voting?
And in analyzing that, I think we could
raise the accountability of the government and politicians in addressing a lot
of the community needs.
Derek Ballantyne
I don’t, in any way, diminish the
incredible importance of engaging gov-
ernment but my concern is always, who
is the intermediary between community
and government and how does government actually interact with community?
And it’s a hugely difficult equation to
solve.
There are a lot of community-based
intermediaries that exist and they have
democratic processes that allow a voice
to be heard. But I’m not always convinced that governments have a capacity
to actually engage with community in a
way that is respectful of what might be
needed. I think that’s where you get the
difficulty of the interaction; we have to
really figure out how those interactions
work. The urban development agreement frameworks are good tools to start
opening up these kinds of discussions
and re-shape some of that relationship.
But I do think it’s an area in which we
have not spent enough time thinking
about how engagement actually happens
in practice.
Francis Lankin
It is critically important for us to
understand that we are talking about
building capacity not just at the community level, but within the structures of
government as well. When I think about
the debate on the New Deal for Cities
and the fact that, some time ago, a number of people came to the conclusion
that we needed a change in the relationships, it took a while before politicians
were able to speak to that. They now
speak about a new deal, but inside government we’re still struggling to find the
mechanisms to make that real with the
constitutional constructs that we have.
Urban development agreements are a
tool and they’re evolutionary. The Winnipeg Agreement and the Vancouver
Agreement are places for us to learn
from. What we do in Toronto must be
different. What we do in Regent Park,
where we may have the opportunity for
the first such agreement, based on a
neighbourhood tripartite agreement, will
be different that what we do in Black
Creek. It is the communities of interest;
it is the assets that are there to build on;
it is the aspirations and the hopes of the
plan that’s developed with the communities that will drive the actions inside
those agreements.
While struggling to build capacity,
often as is the case when working with
government, if you can have a structure
put in place, it starts to enable people. It
gives permission to people who work
within departments and ministries of
governments, to work on a project.
There’s a sense of a political ‘laying on’ of
hands – it is okay to work within this
structure. That then opens up a whole lot
of possibilities.
Sherri Torjman is Vice-President of the
Caledon Institute of Social Policy. The
Institute, established in 1992, does rigorous, high-quality research and analysis;
seeks to inform and influence public opinion and to foster public discussion on
poverty and social policy; and develops
and promotes concrete, practicable proposals for the reform of social programs
at all levels of government and of social
benefits provided by employers and the
voluntary sector.
www.caledoninst.org
Faduma Mohamed is currently the Executive Director of the Labour Community
Services of Toronto and York Region
Labour Council. Prior to this position she
was the Executive Director of the Somali
Youth Association of Toronto, a Settlement
Coordinator with the Rexdale Women’s
Centre, a Youth Settlement Worker with
Cultural Link and a Youth Outreach Worker with the African Youth Settlement and
Development Project. In 2004 she was a
recipient of the Person’s Day Award from
the City of Toronto which honours women
who have made significant contributions
to society, and have advanced the standing of women in Toronto.
www.labourcommunityservices.ca
Frances Lankin was appointed to the
position of President and Chief Executive
Officer of United Way of Greater Toronto
in September 2001. In January 2004, the
charity celebrated its most successful
fundraising campaign ever, raising $84.3
million for 200 social and health service
agencies in Toronto. Elected in 1990 in
the provincial riding of Beaches-East York,
Frances was appointed Minister of Government Services and Chair of the Management Board of Cabinet. She went on
to serve as Minister of Health (1991-93),
and Minister of Economic Development
and Trade (1993-1995).
www.unitedwaytoronto.com
Jian Ghomeshi is a musician, writer, producer and broadcaster. He is a regular
contributor on Newsworld’s primetime
current affairs show, The Hour, and host
of 50 Tracks on CBC Radio. Jian is perhaps best known as a singer, drummer
and songwriter in the folk-rock group,
Moxy Fruvous. Jian heads up his own production company, wonderboy entertainment inc.
www.jian.ca
Derek Ballantyne is the Chief Executive
Officer of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, a position he has held
since 2001. Toronto Community Housing,
the largest social housing provider in
Canada and the second largest in North
America, is home to about 164,000 low
and moderate-income tenants including
seniors, families, singles, refugees, recent
immigrants to Canada and people with
special needs. www.torontohousing.ca
Scaling Up:
Lessons in Building Advocacy through
Grassroots Experience
Maureen Fair, Harry Kits, and Gord Perks
The following are three presentations
from the Building Strong Communities
conference in April 2005. The “Scaling Up”
workshop explored how public policy can
be influenced by lessons learned through
frontline grassroots experience.
Harry Kits, Citizens for Public Justice
R
efugees come from all over the
world to Canada to seek a new
life and to seek protection from
persecution. Our organization, Citizens
for Public Justice (CPJ), is interested in
how these refugees participate in
Canada, in our cities, our educational
system and in particular, our universities.
CPJ has scaled up some of the impacts
of what happens to refugees locally in the
city of Toronto to advocate for policy
change on both a federal and provincial
government level. In doing so CPJ has
managed to mobilize both local city community support and a broad range of
organizations across the country. I’m
going to explore some of the lessons
learned in scaling up a particular local
issue and how some of these lessons
might be useful in thinking about other
social issues as well.
In Toronto there are lots of people and
different types of organizations who work
with refugees working together as a coalition. The trick always is that the people
who are working directly with refugees
on the ground - dealing with their immediate needs - are always running into barriers. Organizations come together to
help each other figure out how policies
that affect these barriers can be changed.
In this context, it is federal and provincial government policies which are the
most significant. They have a huge
impact on the day-to-day lives of people
living in our communities and cities who
are trying to find ways of getting ahead -
Maureen Fair, Gord Perks, moderator Ben Peterson, Harry Kits
getting an education or a proper job.
The Getting Landed Project deals with
refugees in limbo, the term that was used
in previous legislation to describe how
refugees became landed immigrants, the
step before becoming a Canadian citizen.
The actual legal title now is ‘permanent
resident’. CPJ has addressed issues in this
area since the ‘90s, in particular in the
late ‘90s dealing with the ‘right of landing’ fee, or head tax. There’s a whole
range of other issues that affect refugees
and one of them is student loans.
So, meet Sarah. She arrived in Canada
in 2000 from Afghanistan. She was recognized as a ‘Convention refugee’, the
term that was then used. Now she’s considered a ‘protected person’. She graduat-
ed from high school as an Ontario
Scholar with a 92.5% average. She won
the Governor General’s Academic
Medal. Her dream was to become a doctor, to study biochemistry at the university, but –- and it’s the ‘but’ that hurts –her parents were still in Afghanistan.
Her only relative in Canada was her
brother who also struggled financially. As
a refugee, she was unable to afford university and was ineligible for student
loans prior to 2003. She ended up abandoning her dream.
Meet Richard. Richard was from the
Congo. In 1995 he fled alone to Canada
at age 21. He was recognized as a
Convention refugee. He supported himself, graduated from high school with an
Scaling Up
Kits, Perks, Fair
average in the 90s, took up tutoring to
help younger students, was a computer
whiz, helped to keep his high school system up and running, and was accepted
into Computer Programming at the U of
T. He couldn’t afford university, was
ineligible for student loans at the time,
and dropped his dream.
As a little background, there are two
processes for refugees who come to
Canada. You can be sponsored by the
Canadian government or by some community organization – a church or a
mosque for example - and you are
checked out overseas to ensure that
you’re a legitimate refugee as per the
Geneva Conventions.
Immediately
upon arrival in Canada you are granted
permanent residence status, which gives
you eligibility for Canada Student Loans.
The other process is to make your way
to Canada however you can - flying,
boat, travelling across the country - and
upon arrival in Canada to declare yourself as a refugee. Once a person has been
determined to be a refugee by the
Immigration and Refugee Board, they
can then apply for their permanent resident status. Refugees who are ‘in limbo’
are the people who have been determined to be refugees but do not get permanent resident status with their landed
immigrant status. Right now in Canada,
there are about 22,000 people who have
been waiting for more than two years to
get their permanent resident status. Prior
to 2003 they would not have been eligible for Canada Student Loans and would
have to find their own money to go to
university.
There are all kinds of other barriers for
these refugees. They have a “9” in front
of their Social Insurance Number (SIN)
cards, which means that employers are a
little bit suspicious about the fact that
they are not yet permanent and settled.
CPJ, along with The Maytree
Foundation, began in 1998 by identifying
the area of student loans as a problem for
this particular group of people. There
was some initial research on the problem,
to sort out what the opportunities and
possibilities were for making change.
This research then became the basis of
all the work which followed. Maytree set
up its own scholarship program to
demonstrate the potential there was for
these students to go on to university and
how financial resources made a huge difference to what they could do. The
Foundation took a very personal interest
in the people that it supported and
helped them to make their way into the
system to sort out all the difficulties that
they experienced. The program demonstrated to the government the problem
that needed to be addressed and showed
that while only a small group of people
could get these scholarships, there was a
much larger need.
So these two things – the research and
the practical experience - were the
beginning pieces of addressing change. It
involved making sure that government
officials knew what the research was,
understood the issues and agreed with
the policy change proposals. So when we
began to advocate for changes there was
already the beginning of support within
the government itself, for change to happen.
What we wanted to do was to make
this issue a ‘no-brainer’ for the government. We attempted to do it in all kinds
of different ways. We met with Cabinet
Ministers, with department officials and
with Members of Parliament. We
engaged the Prime Minister’s Office, the
Privy Council Office and we presented to
Standing Committees. We convinced
the Minister of Human Resources
Development Canada, Jane Stewart, of
the issue and she became an advocate.
We got the provinces onside. We got
partners together from a whole range of
organizations outside of the government
to seek solutions. We encouraged the
media to write about the issue. We finally found a way in the very end, to reach
Finance Minister John Manley at the
time, and to make it personal for him.
This was a student who was known in his
own constituency as a whiz at aerospace
science or something similar; another
one of these students who had attempted
to go to university and couldn’t and gave
up on his dream. The story was told to
Minister Manley: this is your con-
stituent, a person from your community
who is not able to go to university and
contribute in some particular way in science. The Minister started to think and
speak about this person and say something needs to happen. As we began to
hear this we knew there was the potential for change to happen. And it did
with the next budget in 2003.
So we worked at a lot of things to
make sure that there was a broad community of support and that a whole variety of people were involved. But the
process was jolted by political circumstances throughout. From 1998 to 2003
there was an overall review of all the laws
around refugees which affected what we
were asking for. 9/11 of course happened.
We worked with three different immigration ministries who were constantly
changing staff in their departments and
various ministers’ offices. There was an
election. There was a new Throne
Speech. There were delayed budgets and
then a budget with a focus on security.
Throughout all of this we tried to get our
message forward. In the end the community of partners and supporters were a
wide group of people. Federal legislative
change occurred in 2003, and the
Ontario legislative change in 2004.
I’m just going to mention a few lessons
learned. They are outlined more fully in
the Caledon Institute paper, Student
Loans for Refugees: A Success Story in
Policy (December 2003) but I’ll just pick
out a few that I think are really important.
The first lesson was to seek authentic
voices and to tell stories. It’s incredible
what a difference it makes for politicians
who are busy every day to recognize that
there are real people affected by their
laws. At one point Maytree arranged for
some of their scholarship students to present in person to a federal Standing
Committee and to say this is what happened to us, this is why it’s important to
make this change. We tried to use stories,
as much as we could in our advocacy to
government, to show the local impact of
what was happening. These people can’t
go on to get university education because
they can’t afford it and important change
Scaling Up
needs to happen. We pointed out that
the City of Toronto is one of the places
where most of these folks live.
Another principle that we try to use is
to take away the “no”. Look at the issue
from the point of view of the people
you’re asking to make change and define
what areas they might find to make that
change. That’s why we found it important to continually refer to the research
and to the policy proposals that government officials had already approved
themselves. In the end, eventually, it has
to make its way through all the political
hoops, but the arguments have already
been resolved. There was no doubt that
this had to happen. It was a matter of
how and then to keep pushing the whole
thing.
Another important lesson is to ‘carry
the file’. There are lots of different parts
of government that make decisions on
any particular policy and they don’t often
talk to each other. As an advocate you
need to keep bringing your position forward to all the different stakeholders
within the government. We went to different departments, different staff within
departments, different Ministers, and
even to the Prime Minister’s office. So
keep pushing the point in a variety of different places so that change happens. For
us, it was finally during budget decisions,
which is not the typical case (usually a
recommended change would come
through a department first) but that was
the place where we could make the
change.
And finally, encourage champions. If
there is anyone who is willing to keep
pushing this, keep connected to them.
Try to encourage them to keep speaking
about the issue. We in fact, started with
Bill Graham when he was just an MP. He
tried a Private Member’s Bill, and that
didn’t work for a variety of reasons, but
he was always a person who was onside.
We kept connected to him when he
became a Cabinet Minister. He couldn’t
do anything officially, but we knew that
he continued to be committed to the
issue and when it came to the Cabinet
table, he would be there to support it.
So we were dealing with people who
Kits, Perks, Fair
come from the globe to Canada, to
Toronto, who want to make a difference,
who want to live their lives, who want to
get an education. We took the issue from
the local to the provincial and the federal level, trying to make a difference in
decision-making so that these folks could
get on with their lives and become contributing members of Canada.
Gord Perks, Toronto Environmental
Alliance (TEA):
The globe is just too big a thing for me;
it’s complex, it’s strange, it’s something
you can’t really directly experience, so
we invent conceptual frameworks to try
to understand the globe. I’d like to contrast two frameworks that are prevalent
these days.
The first framework is one that as an
environmentalist I like to use, “Think
globally, act locally”. It tries to describe
the globe as a physical, biological system
that we all interact with, but we interact
with it in the particular places we are
located. The second framework is globalization, which is tries to understand the
globe as a commercial system, one where
you move resources and capital around as
fast as you can in order to generate a
profit. There is the old saw, money makes
the world go around. In fact, money
doesn’t make the world go round.
Nowadays, the world makes money go
around, and it goes around incredibly
fast. It’s the only thing on the earth that
travels the speed of light; trillions of dollars move; the yen, the euro, the dollar,
they are always in motion. The money
market operates 24 hours a day moving
vast amounts of money.
The next biggest category of stuff that
moves is commodities and consumer
goods. The average meal you eat has
travelled about 2,000 or more miles to
get to you. That’s the average meal you
eat. That always astonishes me particularly given that we live in one of the very
best agricultural areas in the entire
world.
What moves most in our biological
system is waste products. One of the
highest toxic concentrations you can
find, polychlorinated biphenyl com-
pounds, is in the fat of polar bears. I’ve
done a little bit of research and no one
ever manufactured PCBs anywhere in
the Arctic. But what’s happened is these
chemicals persist – they’re essentially a
waste product of our production systems;
they circulate the globe. Because the
Arctic’s cold, a lot of the fallout can
accumulate in the ecosystem there. The
fact that we send our garbage to
Michigan is trivial compared to how
much the rest of our waste travels.
One of the hopeful signs against these
trends is the degree to which knowledge,
wisdom and experience is ‘going glocal’.
Activists who are concerned about any
number of social issues have to say, no,
the world isn’t for moving money
around, it’s not for moving resources
around, it’s not for moving waste around,
it’s for moving knowledge, wisdom and
experience. This can be productive and
valuable in activists’ practice.
First of all, one of the issues that I
worked on years ago was how paper gets
bleached. I know it sounds obscure, but
dioxins from bleaching paper with chlorine was actually one of the largest
sources of toxic chemicals in the
Canadian environment. I was working at
Greenpeace at the time, which is one of
the few non-profit, non-governmental
organizations that works globally. As
Canada was developing regulations on
what pulp mills were allowed to dump
into the environment, the regulators and
the corporations were saying, oh, this
stuff Greenpeace wants is ridiculous. We
can’t possibly meet the standards you’re
talking about. It’s technologically not
possible. And the really fun thing is that,
in 20 or 30 minutes – this is back in the
early days of the email traffic — I could
actually get the technical specs of a pulp
mill somewhere else in the world, that
was doing exactly what these guys said
couldn’t work. And in fact, I could get
the specs for a company that was owned
by the same company that’s operating
here. There’s nothing like telling an
engineer that he doesn’t even know what
his own company’s doing anymore.
The other thing in that campaign is
that we were able to track how some of
Scaling Up
Kits, Perks, Fair
Workshop Participants
these commodities were moving from
pulp mills to particular end markets. We
found the wood from a particular piece of
land that was being cut near Prince
George in British Columbia and was in
an area contested by an outstanding
Native claim, was being cut, milled and
turned into pulp, and then sent over to
Germany where it was made into paper
that was used to produce the Frankfurt
telephone book. It was a lot of fun having people from the particular band contesting that land show up in Frankfurt
and participate in a protest outside the
headquarters of the German Post Office,
which for some reason produced the telephone book. Through that work we actually were able to change the rules in
Germany about what kind of paper you
can use to produce products. The
Financial Post, now the National Post,
ran a headline saying “Greenpeace’s $5
billion threat to Canada”. In fact, it wasn’t Greenpeace’s $5 billion threat; it was
the fact that we were able to move the
experience of one group to another group
of people whose consumption was causing them harm. This idea of moving
knowledge, experience and wisdom is
what we should be struggling with as we
try to prevent the movement of resources
and money.
This point of movement or mobility
generally, is worth one more comment.
As we talk about migrations of peoples,
it’s very important to bear in mind that
the world should be to the greatest
extent possible, barrier free. But it’s
interesting to think about mid-range
mobility; this idea, particularly in North
America, that endless mobility is a
human right, that you should be able to
travel all the time, get in your SUV, and
get out on the open highway. This has
got us into a very bizarre trap. People
who live in York Region and work in
downtown Toronto typically spend more
time commuting with their automobile
in traffic than they do with their children. Your best friend is your car.
Another interesting consequence,
which is the single greatest threat to our
globe right now, is the changing of our
climate. If the inter-governmental panel
on climate change, which is a collection
of the world’s scientists who look at this
stuff are correct, some hundreds of millions of people around the world risk
essentially being wiped out as their areas
burn in forest fires, dry out in droughts or
get flooded. And the principal emission
of those climate change gases is transportation; energy consumption for home
heating and so on is actually second to
transportation. The caloric value in the
food you eat, the energy value you get
out of the food, is third. There’s less energy in the food than there is in the package that was necessary to wrap around
the food so we can transport it. And
there’s less energy in the package than
there was consumed transporting the
food.
So we’ve managed to construct this
system where making the world safe for
commerce has made is unsafe for all the
rest of us. So I think as we think about
how to scale up from the local to the
global we should actually be thinking the
other way around. We should be thinking about scaling down from the globalized world to the local world, where the
only thing you are moving around the
world is knowledge.
Maureen Fair, St. Christopher
House:
I’m just going to describe some income
security projects that we have been
working on at St. Christopher House and
then use this as a context for some of the
lessons we’ve learned working with our
local community and reaching provincial
and federal governments.
St. Chris is a neighbourhood centre in
downtown west Toronto. We’re a bit of a
microcosm of Toronto with many different immigrant communities and a range
of income groups. It used to be a working
poor neighbourhood; there are now
pockets of gentrification, some pockets of
very low income and then a broad mix of
lower and lower-middle class communities.
We’re a 92-year-old institution and
have always worked in the West End,
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Kits, Perks, Fair
homelessness starting to live very precariously, very close to the edge of losing
their housing and of family breakdown
because of tremendous economic stress
on their households.
We were already involved in a number
of campaigns and activist kinds of movements to draw attention to the issues of
starting in Kensington Market. The St.
Christopher House model was one of, at
the time, middle class and upper income
people moving into Kensington Market
who lived and worked in a house that
was open to the community 24 hours a
day. Very quickly, the workers became
quite radicalized and became extremely
engaged with their local communities
and have now gone on over the years to
become advocates as well as direct service delivery agents for those communities. By the way, despite the name, St.
Chris is not a religious organization.
About eight years ago, the staff at St.
Chris was really disheartened by the way
we were seeing things going on in our
community. The increased demand and
increased complexity of needs of people
coming in through our doors was becoming overwhelming for our frontline staff
and volunteers. We serve all age groups
and we were seeing, increasingly, people
who had never before been at risk of
increased poverty. We felt like we
weren’t getting anywhere with these.
There was a sense that we were so disconnected from the policy world, that
policies were being made increasingly by
people who didn’t consult at all with the
people most affected by these polices.
We’re largely talking about social and
economic policy which always have been
pretty intermeshed. While they might
be in silos in the government, they have
profound impacts on the socio-economic
lives of our community. We also felt that
there was an enormous gap between the
lives of people in our community and
policy-makers and there was no testing
or consulting or evaluating policy ideas
with the folks we saw coming through
the door.
So we started with two policy-makers
working with us for about eight weeks
each; – it was like an artists-in-residence
program. But as is our wont at St. Chris
they both remained very involved with
us. John Stapleton and Richard
Shillington were two policy-makers
who’ve lived and worked with us over
the last few years. It’s been two-way
learning –- it’s helped them appreciate
more the nuances and the complexity
and the diversity of low-income people.
They had rather static views of who lowincome people were. We were able to
give them a much richer context and a
frankly, more troubling, more complicated set of policy things to think about.
Richard Shillington had been working
on poverty issues for over 20 years with
the federal government and with other
think tanks at the national level and he
had never met a poor person. He is very
open about this; he is now an enormous
activist and advocate for low-income
people.
In doing this work, we also learned a
lot more about our sector and social service delivery agencies. I can be very critical about the policy world but it may
also be helpful to reflect a bit about our
own shortcomings or things that the
social sector could be doing to increase
our effectiveness. As an example, after
Shillington and Stapleton were with us,
we decided to broaden the scope of looking at income security issues by engaging
more people in this discussion. So it wasn’t just the policy-maker, all of us at St.
Chris as agency workers, and our community of low income people; that was
just three players. We decided to broaden
it to bring in some business leaders who
we knew through our volunteer work
who were very ideologically different
than our staff and even from our policymakers, but as it turns out, not that ideologically different from many of the people we work with. We do a disservice to
portray all low-income people homogenously as left wing in their ideology and
I think many of you would probably
Scaling Up
Kits, Perks, Fair
appreciate that. That’s very disempowering, obviously, for the low-income community and it’s also not going to be helpful when they try to increase their democratic participation.
So the first project was called Income
Security Strategies for Working-Age
Adults - ISSWAA. We had done some
interviews
with
leading
policy
researchers in Canada about their latest
thinking on income security solutions.
We did a number of workshops and,
helped by Maytree’s Leaders for Change
Program, made connections to a large
range of ethno-specific communities outside of the downtown West Toronto.
These workshops began a dialogue with
some low-income communities about
what possible solutions to income security would look like. Then we brought all
these people - the policy experts, the
business people, the diverse low-income
community members, agency staff together in mixed stakeholder forums.
We asked participants to do an exercise,
with a limited budget of where they
would their money if they were the government. If the government had $500
from each Ontario taxpayer, where
would you put $500 on this range of solutions?
There wasn’t that much conclusion,
other than, again, there is diversity in
low-income people. However policymakers in particular were very influenced by the low-income community
members’ stories. So policy-makers, who
had told us in interviews that minimum
wage increase was the way to go,
changed their opinion and put their
money into an increase in social assistance rates, for example. The value of
the exercise was not so much in a strong
recommendation on one solution. We
got a lot of different solutions fairly
equally valued, but what we did get was
tremendous buy-in from people that by
talking and listening to people who are
unlike themselves, they changed their
mind. There’s expert advice and then
there’s the public’s advice, and it’s actually the mix of ideas that often comes up
with better solutions.
St. Chris has now evolved this work
and broadened the mix even further by
entering into a partnership with the
Toronto City Summit Alliance. The
City Summit Alliance is connected to
most of the major opinion leaders in
Ontario, if not Canada. People who regularly pick up the phone and talk to the
Premier, or are regularly in Ottawa, talking to very senior policy officials; it’s
been an extraordinary resource for us.
We’ve set up a task force of these opinion leaders, many of whom are business
leaders. That’s one of the big lessons for
us; you need connections to those opinion-makers. Even if the project fails, we
have succeeded in getting a number of
very senior corporate leaders, not only to
be sympathetic, but educated and reflective about the issues by immersing themselves in fairly technical, detailed policy
research papers.
We also have a working group on policy research and activists who are hammering out some of the debates before
they go to the task force. With this
group we’re trying to find a common fact
base and the group has a lot of really
serious dilemmas and debates to work
out, and come back to this.
In parallel, we’ve had a community
reference group of low-income community members. We are talking now about
integrating the community reference
group with both the task force and the
working group, instead of running parallel because the gap was starting to show
itself again. The dialogues in each of the
three groups were becoming a little bit
too homogenous and a bit of an insular
perspective. So low-income community
members are going to be integrated into
the working group and task force more
and we also have an agency reference
group which is just getting going to
engage frontline staff. Frontline staff has
different perspectives from low-income
community members and often we’ve
done a disservice to blend them together.
One of the lessons we’ve learned is
that many of us in social service agencies, especially front line staff and up
and coming leaders in agencies, are
absolutely without any knowledge of the
history of policy development. The classic example is the Transitions Report by
the Ontario government from the mid1980s, an almost utopian document
about social assistance and welfare.
Many younger people haven’t read or
looked at it, but a group of people in
their 50s who still dominate policy discussions constantly refer to ‘Transitions’.
To refer to it constantly to people for
whom it means nothing, is not helpful,
so we need to find ways to cover some of
these gaps in knowledge.
It’s very hard to get people interested
in this issue if they think they’re going to
be intimidated by language they don’t
understand or if graphs are going to be
shown. People from our sector will just
leave the room. So we’ve done things
like skits which are very effective, or the
case study kind of approach. These
approaches have all helped reach even
the business community, who don’t
often see the policy issues at first.
More self-critically, how can we challenge ourselves as an agency to keep
doing this work? The excuses are very
compelling; the workload is often crushing at the front line. But we also have to
be very vigilant about gate-keeping;
those of us who are in the middle
between low-income community members and government or policy-makers
need to be very careful that we don’t
turn into gate-keepers about information, that we don’t start selecting out
what you need to hear as a low-income
community member. It’s a fairly significant problem in our sector. It’s often a
workload issue and it’s often a managing
the chaos of frontline lives.
I think the other major lesson we’ve
learned is from John Stapleton about
appreciating ‘second-hand smoke’ stories. We’ve got to find the ways for middle-income people to understand why
it’s a problem for people to be living in
poverty. So we call that the second-hand
smoke issue. It is very moving when people hear stories directly from the people
most affected; it really has enormous
impact. It’s better, though, when they
hear the stories face to face in meetings
of mixed groups. The further the story is
Scaling Up
removed from the actual face-to-face
interaction the less impact it has. So the
relationship building that happens when
people are actually physically together
in a room or a meeting, we have found
almost unbeatable. We can’t find anything better than that to elicit sympathy,
awareness and motivation for some
change in thinking.
We still recognize the need for our
sector, as agencies and activists, to work
on solidarity. We are often exclusionary
of others, because we’re trying to get our
own facts in order and build our own
positions before we expose ourselves to
others who have very different opinions.
That isn’t the approach we have been
taking with income security. We’re using
this mixing approach and it’s one that
we feel is leading us to more practical
immediate solutions.
As I reflect back I would say two
things. The mixing of ideologies has
been probably the most difficult for me
personally, if not for other people
involved in the process. And secondly, I
have had to learn to stop taking offence
at people’s choice of language in meetings because behind what they were saying was an extremely progressive idea.
They were trying to move forward on a
solution. They didn’t have the most sensitive language to talk about people who
are involved. That’s been a huge lesson.
This all boils down to — rather simplistically — human relationships and good
manners; listening to people, as simplistic as that is, has been difficult sometimes. We have found, though, there is a
core of goodness in people across all sorts
of sectors and we’ve been able to tap
into that with some success.
So there is still lots more to evolve out
of our MISWAA project. We’re gearing
up for a kind of report in June and we’ll
really know how successful we will have
been if we can get the task force of opinion leaders, which includes now, lowincome people to come up with some
solutions that everybody can live with.
Even if it means, as it will, somebody is
bearing more costs than they used to.
Kits, Perks, Fair
Note: The MISWAA Task Force published
its report, Time for a Fair Deal, in May,
2006. (see the Resources section on page
47)
Harry Kits is the Executive Director of
Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ). CPJ is a
national, non-partisan organization of
citizens which promotes a public justice
vision for Canada by conducting
research, citizen education and advocacy
on a variety of issues. Most recently CPJ
has been active with the issues of refugees
in limbo, in partnership with The Maytree
Foundation, Campaign 2000 and the
Campaign Against Child Poverty and
housing, child care and income security
issues.
www.cpj.ca
Gord Perks is Senior Campaigner of the
Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA).
Formed in 1988, TEA is a nonprofit, citizen-based organization which campaigns
locally to find solutions to Toronto’s
urban environmental problems. Innovative
and
effective,
local
victories include banning lawn and garden pesticides, Toronto’s green bin program, improving transit service and
developing the city’s original Smog Action
Plan. TEA focuses on five major campaign
areas of research, education and action:
Smog and Climate Change, Public Transit,
Toxics and Urban Pesticides, Waste Reduction and Clean Water.
www.torontoenvironment.org
Maureen Fair is Director of Community
Response and Advocacy at St. Christopher
House, a non-profit social service agency
in the west downtown area of Toronto.
Serving less advantaged individuals and
families since 1912, St. Chris offers a
broad range of community-based social
service programs, serving over 8,000 community residents a year. In partnership
with The Toronto City Summit Alliance
(TCSA), St. Chris is convening a multistakeholder task force to generate ideas
and drive to practical improvements to
the economic security of lower-income
adults. The Task Force on Modernizing
Income Security for Working Age Adults
has been working since fall of 2004 and
was officially launched in February 2005.
It released its recommendations in 2006.
www.torontoalliance.ca/tcsa_initiatives/
income_security
www.stchrishouse.org
Building the Commons:
Strengthening Local Institutions
Josephine Bryant, Rob Howarth, Michael Rachlis
Aside from the provision of local services,
local institutions also provide broader
opportunities for the development of community capacity and the building of civic
engagement. The following three presentations from the Building Strong Communities conference discuss how their institutions - the public library, the local
neighbourhood centre and the local
health centre - strengthen the public
realm.
Josephine Bryant, Toronto Public
Library
he Toronto Public Library experienced a cataclysmic change in
1998 with the amalgamation of
the city of Toronto. We responded to
that change and recreated the library system, building an institution that is
responsive and reflective of the city in
which we are now a major institutional
player.
In 1883 the province of Ontario proclaimed the first Public Libraries Act and
that Act has served extremely well in the
development of public libraries. It has
saved the library system from major
waves of political interference and it has
protected the library from the user fee
dilemma. We’ve been able to grow and
thrive. While the public library system
has been under attack at many times
throughout our 120-year history, it has
been able to grow and thrive and we
have much to be proud of in this
province. Today, we are the second
busiest library system in the world, the
first in North America. We have the
largest branch system of any public
library in the world with 99 branches.
In 1998, we had the challenge of amalgamating seven library systems that
served the then Metropolitan Toronto.
Amalgamation demanded from the institutions a profound and radical rethink of
everything that we did. Initially, we had
to concentrate on internal reorganization and restructuring however we didn’t
T
Moderator Lance Evoy, Michael Rachlis
want to get bogged down in that exercise. In order to move beyond that, we
engaged in a strategic planning process nothing new, nothing radical -but it
enabled us to look forward and think
about what it meant to be the Toronto
Public Library in this city in 1998. One
lesson that we did learn throughout this
period was that the creation of the whole
was not simply the sum of its parts. It was
a new institution with a new flavour and
culture and we had to rethink how we
responded to all the communities in
Toronto. We had to weigh the balance of
services that were delivered in different
parts and try and figure out what would
work across the city, and what worked
well in certain communities but was not
transportable. We had to start from
ground zero and essentially rebuild every
policy and every institutional practice.
The first strategic planning process
was started in 1999/2000 with the theme,
“Creating the Future, Treasuring the
Past”(1) which captured some of the
dilemma that we found ourselves in. We
were very concerned that our communities not think that we were going to
abandon some of our past practices and
services but at the same time, we wanted
them to look to the future and think
about what was going to be important for
the library system to serve this city.
We had four major focuses in that first
plan: respecting the role and the importance of the library as a community cornerstone, as a public place that represents good design and good community
services. As the public library was often
left as the only public place in some com-
Building the Commons
munities, this took on importance in the
communities of Toronto.
We also placed a very strong importance on children’s services and programming in keeping with some of the current
themes that our city was announcing.
We took a long and hard look at what
the various predecessor systems, as we
call them, were doing. And we re-jigged
our services to reflect the community as
we know it now.
We also looked at how our collection
of books and all the services and materi-
Bryant, Howarth, Rachlis
competing interests that we have to deal
with. The process turned out to be quite
effective in terms of not only educating
our current partners but also engaging
new partnerships for the library system.
The theme for the next four years of
the strategic plan is to focus on, once
again, four key areas(2). These areas came
out of the community consultation and,
of course, given the nature of our business, a lot of research, of what was happening within the city, and a very strong
desire to be part of the rebuilding of the
We find ourselves focusing on the library as an institution that
can provide information, access to job training and skills,
accreditation, Internet access and language learning skills. All
this in conjunction with our traditional role treasuring the past,
with a focus on books and culture.
als that we provide, would reflect the
diverse communities we served. How
could we use the various systems which
had developed these collections in a
more effective way?
And then, lastly, looking to the future,
we wanted to strengthen and build our
virtual presence within the City of
Toronto.
So, that was our first strategic move in
trying to vision a “new library for a new
city for a new century”. This served us
extremely well in the early days to mobilize staff and to create some community
understanding of what we were trying to
do. Our process wasn’t as good as we
would have liked. We were still grappling
with to reach out and understand what
the various communities wanted and
needed from a public library system in
terms of participation and process. With
our second strategic plan which we just
launched last year, we have been much
more effective in focussing on the
process and the engagement of various
communities and groups across the city.
There was a special emphasis on meeting
with stakeholder groups in all parts of the
city, so that they could hear from each
other. They could also hear about our
challenges and get some sense of the
City of Toronto. In our case, through our
community branches, through our district branches, and through our research
facilities, we wanted the library to be part
of the city rebuilding and to be a solution
provider for the problems that face the
city.
So, going forward, we have plans that
will focus on low income neighbourhoods and our branches that serve those
neighbourhoods; particularly what we
can to improve the literacy issues within
those communities, whether we are talking about children, young adults, seniors,
or the general population and what we
can do to improve our service to the
newcomer community. When you look
back, from our very beginning we have
been serving the newcomer community
through collections in other languages.
But today, what we find ourselves doing
more, is not just focusing on our language
collections, but how the immigrant community can use the library as an institution that can provide information, access
to job training and skills, accreditation,
Internet access and language learning
skills. It’s a re-think of how we’re going
to do that, often in partnerships with
other organizations; all this in conjunction with our traditional role treasuring
the past, with a focus on books and culture. There’s still a huge demand in our
community for the book, for the pleasure
of reading, for the joy of reading, for
introducing literature to children, and to
playing a major cultural role within the
city.
Rob Howarth, Toronto Neighbourhood
Centres
I’m going to explore the contributions
neighbourhood centres make as one
example of ‘building the commons’; some
of the challenges they face in terms of
doing that work; and thirdly, some
British government policy work that I
think offers some promising next steps
for us in Canada.
Neighbourhood centres are very
diverse, non-profit, social service organizations offering a range of programs and
services. While they tend to focus on
social services, they spill over into recreation, health, arts, local economic development and the employment sector.
There is no typical grouping of programs
but centres offer after-school, literacy,
English-as-a-second-Language, youth,
senior, employment, immigrant/settlement and conflict resolution programs.
Some neighbourhood centres are integrated with community health centres;
some are linked with a school in the
same building; some have pools and
gyms. Some of them manage affordable
housing and supportive housing sites.
Toronto Neighbourhood Centres, which
I work with, links 30 of these centres
across the City of Toronto, but if you
looked at the number of organizations in
the city that see themselves as multi-service and focus on a particular neighbourhood, there are maybe 50 or more.
I’m going to tell the story of one
neighbourhood centre which is also a
health centre - Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood Centre. This centre works
with a considerable number of refugee
and immigrant families in the community without legal status. As you may know,
there are now second-generation families
with children born in Canada who don’t
have legal status. Without this documentation, they can’t legally access health
care; it is difficult at times to access public education and obviously, there is a
fear of reprisals in the work place - a very
vulnerable group of people open to
exploitation.
Board members at Davenport-Perth
identified a need to work with these
community members in a more open way
and explored what could be done in
terms of access to services. This commitment played out on a number of levels in
the organization. In a youth program
after school, staff recognized that some of
the youth were taunting others and using
the threat of disclosure of legal status as a
bullying technique. Staff was able to
intervene and use the opportunity to
help youth to support one another and
work together on the issue, or at the very
least, not undermine one another.
The agency did an arts project over
three years that culminated in a community play that was presented over the
course of a week involving 200 members
of the community. The play was built up
from stories of immigrants in the community and wove into this a story of a girl
afraid to take books out of the library
because her parents did not have legal
status; she didn’t have documentation to
get a library card. The librarian was a
very nice character in the play who
encouraged the girl to come and read as
much as she wanted!
The organization also, through its
non-profit charitable status, was able to
apply for money from foundations, to
offer health services for community
members without documentation. That’s
a critical piece because it was something
they couldn’t do with government funding. They joined together with other
organizations across the city to articulate
the need for some kind of regularization
program to deal with this reality in
Toronto. The Status Campaign involved
community education and political lobbying.
Generalizing from this one story,
neighbourhood centres as local institutions have three important elements that
make them work. One is their role as
public meeting places and a crossroads
that welcome all members of the com-
munity, across a diversity of ages and cultures, religions and circumstances.
Secondly, they combine the delivery
of services and community development.
They create a neighbourhood anchor or
‘hub’ that offers services which then
enables civic engagement, leadership
development, community discussions,
and advocacy.
Thirdly, they offer an opportunity for
local resident control and decision-making about what activities are needed in
the community and how they should be
implemented. This is an important locus
for local democracy and it’s something
that has significantly diminished in
Toronto since amalgamation.
Why does this matter? Critical to
building the commons, especially in
Toronto, is building an understanding
across differences, something that I feel is
learned and experienced and modelled in
our communities. That sense of understanding and linking and connecting
across peoples doesn’t magically happen
by itself. Local institutions are part of
ing of neighbours and the connections
being made in programs every day, to a
point where it can make a difference
beyond the program level, to have
impact on policy change, or lead a neighbourhood-wide discussion, or to engage
in broader lobbying, is not happening.
The capacity for this has withered. As
well, there hasn’t been any expansion of
these neighbourhood hubs as infrastructure across the City of Toronto. So, we’re
faced with the growing complexity of
Toronto and growing fault lines across
racial, class and gender divides, and we
haven’t had the resources to start up
these hubs in many areas of the city for a
long time.
In terms of moving forward, we’re up
against a bit of a wall. Most governments
now no longer fund, and can’t value or
recognize the importance of anything but
the delivery of programs or services. So,
they know that they want to leverage the
ability of non-profit organizations to get
to hard-to-reach groups, and they know
that they want their local responsiveness
Critical to building the commons, especially in Toronto, is building an understanding across differences. Local institutions are
part of what builds bridges between neighbours, cultures, generations, classes, sexual orientation, abilities and circumstance.
what builds bridges between neighbours,
cultures, generations, classes, sexual orientation, abilities and circumstance.
The downside of the picture I’m painting is that there are very significant constraints for these organizations. The basic
problem is a move from core funding to
short-term funding. Governments are
currently much more focussed on funding services and programs. Nobody really
wants to fund executive directors, volunteer coordinators, board development
and financial management. And no one
really directly funds community development. I’m talking about the Toronto
experience right now, because I think
there are some differences across the
country.
The result is that to ramp up this link-
and sensitivity and low cost, relative to
delivering it themselves, but there is no
vision of what else the governments are
trying to achieve when they contract
with these non-profits. Over time that’s
going to have a very negative effect
because these organizations lose the
capacity and vision of doing a broader
mandate and become just a service deliverer.
In closing I want to contrast a recent
British approach where they took all of
their programs at the national and local
levels and reviewed what these government departments were doing in terms of
impact in the community. The review
revealed that governments wanted to
deliver in communities but no one was
intentionally funding this work. So, in
Michael Rachlis, Health Consultant
I am talking about the lead situation
in my community of south Riverdale
which is an interesting story of community capacity building where the health
sector played a major role. Up until
about ten years ago, Canada’s largest secondary smelter of lead was located in
south Riverdale on Eastern Avenue. It
took lead that was already manufactured,
typically into car batteries, broke it down
and melted it. From what we know now,
the lead levels in kids in south Riverdale
in the ‘50s and ‘60s, would have been
high enough to have an average decline
of 10 to15 IQ points for the whole community. There would also have been
hundreds of kids that would have ended
up in jail and had other problems
because of the interaction of their poisoned lead toxicity with other challenges
in that working-class community.
While concern developed during this
period, the community found few
resources for their struggle, until the
early 1970s when the Toronto Public
Health Department started to support
them. And this resulted in some widespread testing in 1974, that revealed that
even though the levels were probably
response, they’ve now developed policies
that advocate for the need for community anchor organizations in each neighbourhood and also ensure that these
organizations are funded to carry out
community development initiatives.
They also have a whole set of objectives
about why they want to do community
development, what outcomes they hope
to achieve in terms of civic engagement,
social cohesion, and capacity for selfhelp.
It might make sense to encourage
some of our Canadian departments that
are looking to make a difference in communities, to reflect on why they give
money to non-profits? What are they trying to do achieve? Is there something
more they’re trying to get out of their
programs? This might be a way to invite
them into some discussion about the
unarticulated pieces such as community
engagement.
better then than they had been in the
‘50s or ‘60s, most of the kids in Riverdale
were above what was considered the
acceptable limits. At least a handful were
so bad that they were brought in to the
Hospital for Sick Children for immediate
treatment.
There was a group formed in the community to deal with the lead issue. Aside
from the Public Health Department,
they didn’t have much support. They
approached the few local doctors and
were turned down. Coincidentally, one
of the local doctors who’d turned them
down was a company physician for a
local lead smelter in the west end of
Toronto and ended up later being fined
under the Occupational Health & Safety
Act because he had not been telling
workers in the plant that they were lead
poisoned. This community group worked
with several other groups in the community including one working on housing
and a group that had formed to bring
physicians into the community. By the
mid-‘70s, there were 32,000 people or
35,000 people living south of Gerrard in
the south Riverdale area, but there were
only two family physicians. These three
groups came together to support the
development of a health centre which
was opened in 1976 - the South
Riverdale Community Health Centre. I
was one of the three original staff that
was hired.
Once the centre was established, there
was now an institution to support the
community and its work. The Lead Committee had a place to meet and they had
paid staff to help them. During the late
‘70s, and then into the ‘80s, first of all,
there was pressure on the Ministry of the
Environment; the standards that were in
existence were finally being enforced.
Typically, the Ministry had just been giving warnings to the lead company and
nothing happened.
After a particularly bad breakdown of
pollution control equipment and a large
amount of lead was spilled, the Ministry
did start to enforce their orders. Gradually over the next ten years or so, the com-
pany was required to purchase new
equipment. Eventually, the smelter was
shut down. It just doesn’t make sense to
have a lead smelter in a densely populated urban community. However there
was still the residual left, and there were
at least 1,000 homes that had seriously
contaminated soil. Kids would be playing
outside (typically 2- to 3-year olds that
had the highest lead levels with very
rapidly developing brains), they would
get lead on their hands and through
hand-to-mouth action, they got particularly high lead levels in their bodies. So,
ultimately, soil was removed from almost
1,000 properties in the south Riverdale
community.
During this time, the centre, acting
with and for the community, had been
given resources to participate in a Royal
Society of Canada report on Lead in the
Environment and had been able to tell
its story. In fact, after I left the health
centre as a physician, I was hired during
my residency in community medicine, to
be a consultant to the commission and
prepared a number of reports. I also had a
budget with which I could hire some of
the leading experts in the country on this
issue.
The results of the Royal Society’s
report (3) not only led to removal of soil,
but influenced the whole debate on lead
in the environment in Canada and
allowed the community to really participate in the highest levels of decisionmaking. In fact, I ended up being invited down to an Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) forum in North Carolina,
where I presented the evaluation protocol that we had developed for lead
removal. Although it was never implemented in Ontario, it was adopted by the
EPA and eventually studied in a program
in Boston. So, it had a big impact.
The 21 Community Health Centres in
Toronto provide health services and are
funded through the Ministry of Health.
They have somewhat different governance structures, but typically they have
boards made up of people who live in
their community. In the South Riverdale
Centre you have to live within the community to be on the board and half of the
members have to be users. So it’s also
user controlled, although not all centres
are. Like any sector, there are the better
ones, and not so better ones but they’re
vibrant community organizations. One
of them is part of a neighbourhood centre, the Davenport-Perth Centre which
Rob Howarth referred to. Typically, they
have 200 to 300 volunteers who are associated with each of them. And to emphasize what other speakers have said, they
don’t just provide services, they see
themselves engaged in community development and community capacity building. They also offer local control for
what, for these communities, would be
fairly substantial resources.
This made a tangible difference in the
Rexdale Community Health Centre a
couple of years ago where they had long
waits for care and the staff were saying to
the board that they thought maybe that
they should close the practice. The board
said, “no” and they ended up hearing
about a program that the Lawrence
Heights Community Health Centre was
developing called Advanced Access.
This has led to both Lawrence Heights
and Rexdale Community Health Centres
having same-day access to services – you
phone them in the morning, and you are
able to be seen in the afternoon. Most
people with private family doctors would
not be so fortunate.
So this brings us to a series of questions. How different would Toronto look
if this were the mainstream? We should,
first of all, celebrate what we have here.
In Quebec, as many people know, there
was a long history of developing their
communities’ health and social services
sector (CLSC). These centres had their
boards disestablished last year, as part of
the health reforms in Quebec. They still
play a major role within the public
health system in Quebec, and they offer
a platform for delivery of services, but
they are no longer community organizations.
The 21 community health centres in
Toronto, the largest number of community health centres of any city in the
country, are a unique network and
unique opportunity. How different would
the city look if, in the health care reform
in the next few years, we ended up with
42 or 63 of them, instead of simply renovating the private practice sector?
Which, by the way, I do think needs
doing. But what would happen if we had
these kinds of anchors in our communities for health services? Could the Toronto Department for Public Health work
more effectively with these organizations
and improve its work? The Toronto Public Health Department is facing serious
problems these days; the harmonization
agenda (from amalgamation) has been
really hard on them. They’re also being
forced, it appears, through a variety of
pressures to back off from communities.
They’re developing more specialized staff
who are going to do more travelling
between communities and set up a more
generalist approach. This has implications for the community.
I still think that there’s an opportunity
in the city, if people really want to think
outside the box, to look at some zerobased budgeting for the city’s health
resources. By Canadian standards, community health centres are progressive,
dynamic organizations. But I think we
really could do a lot better. My contribution to this discussion is to get people to
try to think of the health sector as helping with community capacity building. I
think that we’ve got a very interesting
model that we could build on.
Footnotes:
1. Toronto Public Library Strategic Plan,
2000-3. Available at: www.tpl.on.ca.
2. Urban Stories: The Next Chapter. Toronto
Public Library Strategic Plan 2004-2007.
Available at: www.tpl.on.ca.
3. The Lead in the Canadian Environment: Science and Regulation (Final Report) / Le Plomb
dans l'environnement au Canada: science et
réglementation (Rapport final), F.K. Hare (ed.),
1986, 374 p. Available from Environment
Canada.
Josephine Bryant is City Librarian at
Toronto Public Library, Canada’s largest
public library system and the fifth largest
system in North America. Josephine
received her Bachelor of Library Science
in 1970, and her Masters in 1974, from
the University of Toronto. She held a variety of positions in corporate and public
libraries before joining the North York
Public Library in 1983. She achieved the
position of Chief Executive Officer at
North York Public Library in 1988 and
was appointed City Librarian for the new
Toronto Public Library in 1998. Organizational transformation and innovation
have been a mainstay of Josephine’s leadership style, and has played a major role
in the consolidation of the seven former
library systems into one. Josephine is
active in the library profession through
library associations and as a speaker. She
is the recipient of the 1999 Arbour Award
for outstanding voluntary service to the
University of Toronto, and the 2002 Alumni Jubilee Award for distinguished contribution to the profession presented by the
University of Toronto, Faculty of Information Studies Alumni Association.
www.tpl.toronto.on.ca
Rob Howarth has been active in the nonprofit social service field in Toronto for the
past twenty years. For the past six years he
has worked as the part-time Coordinator
of the Toronto Neighbourhood Centre, an
association of multi-service neighbourhood centres located across Toronto.
Through this work and a range of other
community research, facilitation and
mobilization activities, Rob has been
involved in efforts to articulate the possibilities and challenges faced by Toronto's
nonprofit community sector, and advocate for related reforms. Rob recently completed research and writing for the web
site "Building Inclusive Communities"
(http://inclusion.ifsnetwork.org), and
contributed to the final report of the Community-City Work Group on Stable Core
Funding "Stability and Equity: A plan of
action to support the community development and capacity building functions of
Toronto’s nonprofit community services
sector".
www.neighbourhoodcentres.ca
Dr. Michael Rachlis was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1951 and graduated
from the University of Manitoba medical
school in 1975. He interned at McMaster
University and practiced family medicine
from 1976 to 1984 at the South Riverdale
Community Health Centre in Toronto. He
completed a residency in Community
Medicine at McMaster University from
1984 to 1988. He currently practices as a
private consultant in health policy analysis. Michael has consulted to the federal
government, all ten provincial governments, and two royal commissions. He
also holds an associate professor appointment with the University of Toronto
Department of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation. He has lectured
widely on health care issues and is a frequent media commentator on health policy issues. Michael is the co-author, with
Carol Kushner, of two national bestsellers
about Canada's health care system.
HarperCollins published his third book,
Prescription for Excellence: How Innovation is Saving Canada's Health Care System, in paperback March 2005.
www.michaelrachlis.com
Community Collaborations
How and Why They Work
Paul Born
A presentation by Paul Born, President,
Tamarack: - An Institute for Community
Engagement, at the Building Strong Communities conference in April 2005.
Paul Born
he focus of the Tamarack
Institute is helping communities
work together more effectively.
One of the first things that we've come
to understand from all the years that
we've tried to work together in a community is that it's not very easy. When it
is easy, we're not getting a whole lot
done! When it's not easy and we're getting something done, then we say, well,
why is this so hard? We’ve built the
Tamarack Institute around this question.
The major signature feature of our
work is a program called Vibrant
Communities which operates in 16
cities. Six of those cities have now
formed community-wide collaborations
and have launched fairly significant initiatives on poverty reduction. In each of
the 16 cities there is an organized group
of people called the Pan-Canadian
Learning Community. These are the people who are actually trying to understand
more of the themes around poverty and
whether we can change the culture in a
community from poverty alleviation to
poverty reduction. It's somewhat of a
nuance, but we're fond of saying we want
less poor and not ‘better poor’. We look
at structural and systemic policy changes
and at some very concrete projects such
as helping not-for-profit community
organizations retool themselves.
Vibrant Communities operates in six
cities as full-blown projects. Our
methodology is to bring together business, government, the voluntary sector
and people affected by poverty. These
four sectors have equal representation on
a leadership roundtable and they are the
T
Paul Born
ones who really govern and structure
each partnership. Their work is to reach
out into the community to people who
are like-minded and bring about a movement for change. It’s really about bringing people together, introducing new
thinking, enabling action, investing in
projects and trying to build a snowball
effect in a community. Together, with our
partners and other sponsors, we invest
about half a million dollars in each city.
We fund the infrastructure and the staff
team that does the collaboration work at
the local level.
We've been doing a lot of work with
the Aspen Institute, particularly Anne
Kubisch and the Comprehensive
Community Initiatives Roundtable, try-
ing to understand the American experience. That's led us to the British experience and ultimately we have our own
experiences here in Canada where we
focus most of our attention. The strategic
questions – What is collaboration? What
makes it work? What's the added benefit?
– have not been studied as extensively in
Canada as they have in the US and the
answers are not conclusive.
First of all, there is the basic question:
is there a definition of collaboration that
we are happy with? We particularly like
one from the Amherst Wilder
Foundation: “a mutually beneficial and
well-defined relationship, entered into
by people and organizations to achieve
common goals.” Interestingly enough,
Paul Born
the Foundation took it a step further and
said that the relationship includes a commitment to a definition of mutual relationships and goals, a jointly developed
structure for shared responsibility, mutual authority and accountability for success, and sharing of resources and
rewards.
Many of us may have been involved in
a partnership; it may have been multidynamic; it may have been looking at
things systemically; but several years ago
most of us weren't calling it collaboration. There is a culture that has emerged
over the last three to five years around
collaboration and a lot of writing is being
done trying to understand it better. What
we've come to understand is that the
basic issue is: fractured problems, fractured resources, fractured responses, and
Brenda
Zimmerman
of
York
University is really helpful with an
understanding of complexity (see
Diagram 1). It's the chicken and egg
thing: the more we start working together, the more we realize things are interrelated and we have to start working
together. The basic theory is that when
clarity and agreement are close together
– in other words, lots of people are clear
and they agree – it’s fairly simple. Get
out the instructions because it's clear on
what needs to be done, what the next
steps are and what the agreement is.
But when clarity is not achieved – we
may have agreement on an issue, but
we're not clear how to move forward – it
can become more complicated. We often
work on issues where we either don't
have agreement on what should be done
Diagram 1: Learning to Work in the Complex
fractured solutions. You've got different
funders who aren't working together,
you've got all of these different nonprofit organizations providing different services in a particular area and at the bottom you have the families in the community. One can just see someone becoming
unemployed, walking into the system
and saying, “Oh, my God, I hope these
people are talking to each other.” And
what's our response? “No, we're not.
Here are ten intake forms. Line up.” And
guess what? The worse your story, the
better the service.
or we're not clear on what we should do.
It’s these kinds of issues which are complex, where you have a lot of people who
don't always agree dealing with fuzzy,
interrelated root causes. Peter Senge has
written a lot about systems thinking in
an organizational setting. Once you get
as close to the issue as possible, you have
to eliminate as many layers inside of an
organization as possible so that everybody's feeling the issue, and then you
have to respond in a multi-dynamic way
and learn to work together and collaborate. In a sense, our understanding and
our ability to serve the needs of our
clients is driving us to work together in
better ways. The promise of collaboration is a greater diversity of skills, knowledge and resources, expanded networks
and greater clout and credibility.
Features of collaborations are: broad
and diverse membership; ‘reform’ oriented toward a systems impact (as opposed
to being a technical approach around
one issue or one idea); multiple strategies
and tools; organic and evolving; and, an
informal or a formal support organization
which is driving the collaboration. The
Toronto Region Immigrant Employment
Council (TRIEC) is a great example
where the collaboration understands that
it needs a staff to actually mobilize the
work and drive it toward impact.
What are some of the patterns around
why collaborations get started in the first
place? In Dufferin County, a group that is
looking at health and well-being started
as a loose connection of folks meeting
just to get to know each other and talk,
and 15 years later they decided that there
has to be more to it. They called a community meeting, created a community
vision, and a collaboration was formed.
Sometimes it's just an explosion of frustration – working together to get rid of a
problem as soon as possible. Sometimes
it's induced or mandated from the outside. The Urban Aboriginal Strategy is a
very interesting example. You want
money? Collaborate. Sometimes it's a
moment of inspiration, and often these
collaborations form around a [charismatic] person who can spearhead it and
bring people together.
We're finding four key areas in which
collaborations can make a difference.
First, in raising public awareness around
a particular issue; and secondly, organizing a strategic focus around information
sharing, networking, research and community planning. Having a community
plan is a hugely important part of what
needs to happen in a collaboration in
terms of enabling all the elements of the
system to understand what needs to be
done. It's these first two that we find
most often in a collaboration.
The third thing which we find most
often in the US, but not in Canada, is
that collaboration is about supporting
local action. This is how Vibrant
Communities is structured. It's trying to
get change at the local level through lobbying and advocacy. We try to improve
access to funding for the groups that are
involved. What we're saying is, look,
we've aligned ourselves, we have a new
community vision, now what we're asking for is that you need to invest more
into this. One of the key things that
we're finding early on in Vibrant
Paul Born
results more quickly. So as we see new
innovation emerging, there's a group of
people to enable the idea.
The fourth way that collaborations
can make a difference, and the one that
I'm quite fond of, is this whole notion of
building a movement for change. We see
that as people begin to collaborate, as
more and more people begin to buy into
an issue, and bring new ideas into the
system, the purpose grows. Suddenly you
need a newsletter to be communicating
with everybody and more and more peo-
Diagram 2: How Collaborations “Add Value”
Communities is that we provide, first of
all, matching funding. No community
has yet had any problem getting their
matching funding, be it Saint John,
Surrey or Calgary. In fact, they're going
way beyond that, and often, once groups
have an aligned vision, are able to raise
millions of dollars for their work.
The marketing aspect of course is
heightening awareness of an issue at the
local level. As members of the collaboration have ideas, our staff work with those
groups. So, let's say your organization has
an idea to reduce poverty. Our organization would be the coordinating organization. We would have the technical assistance and expertise to help you make
your idea a reality. We look for pockets
of opportunity and we have a team of
consultants to help get the idea off the
ground, get funding, get it going and get
ple become active in the idea. The
momentum builds, and as Malcolm
Gladwell points out in his book, The
Tipping Point, things change, and we find
this happening in collaborative processes
quite often. As partnerships expand and
as people undertake the functions I have
just described, changes happen with a
range of outcomes for individuals, organizations and communities (see diagram
2). We have now designed a new evaluation framework that we've rolled out
into the 16 Vibrant Communities and
into the five Actions for Neighbourhood
Change communities trying to build on
capturing these different ideas and
processes.
What makes collaborations successful? When we invest in a collaboration,
first of all, we're looking for a good idea
which is consistent with the way we
hope the world will change with a strategy that is plausible. Then we look for
some additional factors. What's the environment that the collaboration is taking
in? So, for instance, it took us almost
three years to invest second stage funding into Surrey, BC, because Surrey has a
city council that declared themselves the
first Reform city council in Canada. We
were very cautious about that environment. In Edmonton, we've been very
strategic about broadening the collaboration to people who are recognizable in
the community. You have to find some
‘unusual suspects’ – like the head of the
Chamber of Commerce – if you're going
to deal with poverty.
A second factor is the question of
whether these groups can work together,
and whether there's a favourable social
and political climate. That helps a lot in
a collaborative process. It's very difficult
to be under attack all the time.
Membership is also another thing we
take stock of. Is there a mutual understanding, respect and trust among members? Is there a good cross-section of
members? We find that when collaborations are people from the same sector
who essentially think alike, we can predict that there are going to be problems
because there comes a point when there's
a lack of diversity and too much selfinterest. Then there’s a perception of
winning and losing – which agency won
or lost versus did we move the issue forward – when money starts to be talked
about. Members perceive collaboration
to be in their self-interest.
Another factor is the ability to compromise where members share a stake in
the process and outcomes. There are
multiple levels of decision-making, flexibility, clear roles and guidelines, and
adaptability.
Communication needs to be open and
frequent with both informal and formal
links. Successful collaborations have a
unique purpose. So when we come up
with an idea – we want to reduce poverty – it's harder to get people focused and
motivated than when we say we want to
have the lowest level of poverty in
Paul Born
Canada. So we work with people to
change the way they think about their
purpose. In Victoria they have what's
called the Quality of Life Challenge.
What's so interesting about Victoria is
that this actually resonates there. Almost
anywhere else in the country it wouldn't,
but when I helped them launch their initiative, I got front-page coverage by calling them ‘arrogant’. I said that in
Victoria they actually believe that they
have the best quality of life in the world.
Successful collaborations need sufficient resources and skilled convenors. As
a final thought on this, Mark Weber,
who is currently at the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto,
and has studied the role of the individual
in collaboration, asked the question: If
there's one person who consistently
wants to partner and collaborate within a
system, is that enough for the system to
become more collaborative? And right
now, from his studies, he's got clear evidence that it just takes that one person to
continually want it to happen. If there's
someone who is constantly looking for
openness, bringing sides together and
constantly trying to find common
ground, it's enough to move people forward, whereas if that person is not there
the chances for collaboration are almost
impossible.
The Stages of Collaboration
When we begin to look at successful
collaboration, we see that there are
stages which help us to better understand
what work can be done or needs to be
done in each stage. What we know is
that stages aren't just linear, they're not
even circular. There is a ‘getting started’
stage, where an idea is just brewing. The
kind of intervention that we would bring
into a stage like this is different. Another
stage is ‘exploring local interests’. It's
that point where the idea is emerging
and you start to test it with people – the
point where the actual idea becomes collaboration. We've been putting in place
some very deliberate processes to get to
this stage quicker, and so that you understand that you're in it and you get
through it.
At this stage four areas build conditions for success. Often, when we're
looking at collaborations, they are
around formalizing partnerships because
so much of a collaboration starts with
individuals. One of the key things we
need to do at some point is to move from
individual to organization, and organizational commitment.
The second condition is that there's
some form of community planning
around the issue. Then we look at the
leadership structure which emerges out
of the plan. It's not necessarily the people who got you to the plan, it's now the
people needed to implement the plan.
And then there's the role of money.
Then we often talk about action
around learning and change. We define
the action stage as people coming out
with their strategic directions or strategic
thrusts, with a number of actions in
place, but most often people don't follow
those by rote. It's an organic process, and
an effective collaboration is one that
understands that and is continually
reflecting, learning and thinking. It's
almost like an action research process.
The final stage is renewal and winddown. We've been working with Frances
Wesley at the University of Wisconsin,
using the framework of an environmental theory around the evolution of an
ecosystem, called the Panarchy Theory.
Essentially, what we're beginning to do is
to map out the stages in a collaboration,
the work that we're seeing in those
stages, and then the themes within these
stages. To understand the patterns helps
us to be more deliberate about how we
might be able to support a successful collaboration.
We also find what really helps people
is to understand that it's not just about
thinking like an organization, but it's
also about thinking like a movement. It's
really the ability of a group of people to
do both of those at the same time that
makes for a successful collaboration. It is
about systemic change, big ideas and big
processes, but it’s also important to be
structured and organized in order to get
to those big changes. And without having some ‘quick wins’, as Anne Kubish
calls them, credibility and momentum
are lost very quickly.
Paul Born is the President of Tamarack
and has over 20 years of experience and
training in community building. This
includes 12 years as Executive Director of
the
Communities
Opportunities
Development
Association
(now
Lutherwood-CODA), one of Canada’s
most successful community economic
development organizations. Paul has
founded and led innovative local and
national organizations that have been
recognized with national and international awards in community development, including Vibrant Communities,
Opportunities 2000, Foundation for Rural
Living and the Canadian Community
Economic Development Network. Paul
completed a Masters degree in leadership
from Royal Roads University in British
Columbia, with a thesis entitled
“Leaderful Communities.” Paul is well
known for the many entertaining and
inspirational talks and seminars he provides to groups throughout Canada
Tamarack: An Institute for Social
Engagement is a charitable organization
dedicated to helping citizens build caring,
prosperous and healthy communities.
Through its Learning Centre, Tamarack
works with its partners to build on their
experience and develop practical tools,
resources and learning techniques that
can strengthen local efforts to address
community issues. Tamarack is currently
involved in two major collaborative community change initiatives across Canada:
Vibrant Communities and Action for
Neighbourhood Change.
www.tamarackcommunity.ca
www.anccommunity.ca
Building a Better Foundation
Cynthia Reyes, Kay Blair
Cynthia Reyes, Principal, DiversiPro
Inc.
here’s a sign on the entrance to
Winchester Cathedral that actually refers to the relationship with
God, but speaks a lot about diversity and
inclusion as well. It says simply, “You’re
entering a conversation that began long
before you were born and will continue
long after you are dead.”
When I think about the whole history
of the world and social movements I realize that, in fact, issues of diversity and
inclusion and power have always been
there. It’s just that in Canada we seem to
have discovered it more recently.
My company, DiversiPro, runs the
Innoversity Creative Summit, an annual
event that brings together people from
various media organizations in one place.
As a result of this and our work as consultants, we’ve learned an awful lot about
inclusive practices in organizations. Each
year at Innoversity there are seven or
eight case studies from around the world
of organizations that are high functioning and have a good handle on diversity
and innovation. So, it’s not just doing it
and doing it well, but finding the innovation that comes from diversity. We
believe that diversity clearly leads to creativity and under the right conditions
creativity leads to innovation. One of
the organizations that we worked with
was a television network that had to go
to the CRTC with a diversity strategy.
They not only got their license renewal,
but that plan was so successful that it
became the basis for good practice in the
industry and for license conditions from
the CRTC in regulating the industry.
It is useful to define diversity before we
go much farther. I like Texas
Instruments’ definition which says,
“Diversity is all the ways in which we differ.” It includes the obvious differences,
such as race, gender, age, disability but
also more subtle differences such as edu-
T
Cynthia Reyes
cation, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, word styles and thoughts or ideas.
We work with organizations that have
identified particular groups or cultures, or
even generations, that are under-represented in their workplace or among their
audiences or customers, and we also work
with them on a more narrow definition,
depending on their need at the time.
What we are all aiming for is a culturally
competent organization; it understands
that there are many different cultures in
the workplace, in the marketplace and in
the community. Our job as leaders is to
find a way to manage that with confidence. This is, of course, terrifying news
to some managers because they look at a
city like Toronto or Vancouver or even
Montreal or Calgary or Winnipeg or
Ottawa and they say, “Oh, my God, the
whole world is here.”
Competency is not having a catalogue
of differences that you march around
with and you use depending on the occasion. Competency is having attitudes,
skills, knowledge, values and the confidence to actually work with whatever situation you find yourself in. I coach CEOs
and senior executives and I respect that if
you’re a senior manager you know a lot
and you’re also very lonely. The senior
manager quite often is the last person to
ask someone else – a member of their
peer group or someone down the ladder –
to explain something that they don’t
understand. Quite often the image of the
senior manager is of someone who should
know everything and should be confident. I get called to help them design
their diversity strategy and answer ques-
Reyes, Blair
tions such as, “I don’t quite know the difference between an East Indian and a
South Asian.” Or, “When do you say
black and when do you say African
Canadian?” And my brilliant answer is,
“It depends.”
My job is not necessarily to answer
that specific question; in fact, the answer
does depend. What I help my clients to
do is to learn first of all that the answer is
not carved in stone and also not to be
afraid to ask questions. The key is to realize that we’re all on this pursuit of learning and that one of the main ways to
answer the question is to ask. Five years
ago in this country, one assumed that
when we talked about matters of diversity and inclusion we were talking about
outsiders who were primarily minorities
of one kind or another – immigrants,
people of colour, old people, maybe very
young people, aboriginal people, people
with disabilities – and the people on the
inside that we had to convince and educate were all white Canadian-born people. There was this struggle that we
seemed, at least in theory, to be locked
in. While we should never ignore matters
of privilege, I want to suggest to you that
society is changing. The issue for all of us
as leaders, whether we’re white or ablebodied or Canadian born, is to learn how
to become culturally competent.
Number one, we have to learn to live
with each other. Number two, we have
to learn to get the best out of each other.
And number three, don’t assume that
white people are racist and non-white
people are totally tolerant and open. The
challenge for us in this country will be
managing diversity with competence and
with confidence. No matter who you are,
where you’re born, no matter what your
colour or gender, that will be the challenge for all of us.
So from the research that I’ve done
and from my own experience there are a
number of things I always recommend
that companies do.
The first thing that any leader should
do before embarking on a diversity vision
or strategy, is to ask yourself , “Why are
you doing this?” I have learned in the last
seven years of researching companies
who undertake diversity strategies and
plans that there are essentially three different reasons why companies undertake
these.
Number one, appeasement.
Appeasement of a regulator, appeasement of a minority group, appeasement
of a senior manager’s conscience,
appeasement of protestors. Number two,
business. Maybe you’ve got an agency in
an area of town that is serving a population that has a lot of Chinese people. You
want to make sure that you survive so
you go and get somebody who speaks
Mandarin or Cantonese or both. In a
very small way that is the business case
for diversity and there are lots of companies who undertake diversity, because
there’s money to be made. The third reason for undertaking diversity strategies is
that somebody in the organization’s leadership sees diversity as a core value
because of something they’ve read or
something
they’ve
experienced.
Perhaps, they know it even if they can’t
fully articulate why, that diversity is
going to be the key to their survival in
this country in the present and in years
to come. So I give my clients a quiz and
say, “Fill in either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to these
three reasons.”
People automatically assume that
appeasement is negative, but in fact compliance under pressure can be a great
place to start. Valerie Morrissette, who
was a senior executive with the Weather
Network, found that through compliance she was able to evolve the network’s
approach to diversity to the extent that
they have won just about all the big
awards for diversity and equity in this
country. They were a very small company which got into diversity through compliance, but in the process of answering
some of the above questions in the first
audit realized that they were missing the
boat in a whole bunch of areas. This led
them to undertaking activities which
helped them become a better television
broadcaster to all their viewers.
Secondly, help your teams at all levels
to become more culturally competent.
That means learning, going to conferences, doing workshops, subscribing to
certain newsletters. We all are to some
extent culturally incompetent. So if
you’re going to survive and if you’re
going to be confident, then you have to
do something to change that. So back to
the Weather Network, one of the things
that Valerie did was to bring in a team of
trainers including people from the
Canadian Hearing Society, who put her
team through an exercise which was
something as simple as putting in
earplugs. And then said, “Turn on the
television and watch your show.” What
they understood was that if you can’t
hear properly, you need to see what’s
going on and a lot of information was
missing on the screen. The result of that
experiential learning led the Weather
Network to change the way they do
weather.
The third thing that I recommend for
organizations is to recognize that what
happens in one part of your organization
effects another. The Ford Motor
Company in the United States in the
1970s realized that there was a market for
autos among people of colour. They also
realized that their purchasing and contracting contracts were going exclusively
to small auto parts manufacturers and
other suppliers owned and operated by
whites. And so Ford had a problem
because they recognized that if that news
got out, it could effect what they were
trying to do with sales so they started the
minority supplier programme. Ford is not
the only company that does this. In fact,
in the States more and more companies
have a minority supplier programme to
ensure that their contracts are going to a
diverse group of suppliers and business
people. What they found was that there
had been a time when there were auto
makers that were people of colour but
they had dropped off because they
weren’t getting any business from any of
the big automobile makers. So there’s an
example of recognizing that what happens on one side of the organization can
come back and bite you on the other
side.
Fourthly, start diversity at the top, not
the bottom. Why is this important? We
all know that there are a lot of immigrants with a lot of expertise doing front-
line work or entry level work. I’m not
saying you shouldn’t have diversity there,
it’s absolutely a must, but start at the top.
Start at the board of directors where policy is set. Then move down to the next
level, the CEO and the senior executives
who must carry out those policies, who
must translate them into strategies and
action plans and who must be accountable. If you only have diversity at the
ground level or at the entry level, the
chances of you, as a leader, getting the
kind of insights, the kind of cultural
intelligence, the kind of complex information that you need to know, are not
good. It does not allow in those outside
opinions of the very people you want to
buy your cars or services or whatever.
There are a number of organizations in
Canada who are moving to diversify
their boards by inviting women and
minorities of various kinds to be board
members.
Tap into the knowledge of your
employees. I think a lot of us know the
famous story of American Airlines who
made millions of dollars by identifying
two people with contacts in the gay and
lesbian vacation community, and assigning them to set up a practice to market
and sell to gay and lesbian travellers.
They went from making almost no
money to making millions of dollars in
two years. Recognize that you have
resources within your company you can
use to help you understand and to build
relationships with under-represented
communities.
Finally, always test your assumptions.
If your typical focus group is made up of a
bunch of people who are a certain age
–white, Canadian-born – then think
again. That is what many focus groups
have looked like in this country for a
long time. Get closer to the communities
you wish to serve. It might sound like a
tall order, but to quote that Southern
Baptist minister, “If you always do what
you’ve always done, you’re always going
to get what you’ve always got.”
Reyes, Blair
Kay Blair, Executive Director, Micro
Skills
At Micro Skills, we engage in a
process to ensure that we have a living
and breathing inclusive organization.
The organization started about twenty
years ago, primarily to address the labour
market inequities that immigrant women
experience in terms of their under-representation in meaningful kinds of jobs.
We now have a staff of forty-seven and
more than fifty per cent of our staff come
from the men and women that we train.
So, at the basis of our organization, the
individuals that we’re working with to
try and find meaningful employment are
the very individuals that we employ to
provide services to the broader community.
As a leader, I operate on the premise
that organizations today have to be like a
functional family and have a responsibility to be concerned with every person in
the organization. So in order to achieve
any kind of outcomes we have to first
ensure that we allocate resources for
ongoing staff development; not only
going off to courses, but mentoring,
coaching and supporting of each and
every single person in the organization.
Five years ago we started an organizational transformation process by realizing
that funding is something that we have
no control over. However, we do have
control over the people that access our
services and the people in the organization who deliver those services. In order
to ensure that we had a group of competent individuals who were able to reach
out to our target groups, we first had to
ensure that the organization could support staff in all aspects of their lives. We
needed to identify what we wanted to
achieve as an organization and how we
could bring people along with us. The
entire staff looked the organization: its
core competencies, its board of directors,
and the training and employment development initiatives we were offering individuals in our community. And we crafted what we call a signature line: “we’re
here as facilitators to enhance people’s
lives.”
We didn’t stop there. We needed to
determine how to communicate this as
an organization to our board of directors,
our senior management, our frontline
staff, our service users and to all who do
business with Micro Skills. At the end of
the process we felt that for Micro Skills
to move forward, each and every staff
person had a responsibility to determine
the kind of workplace that they were in
and a responsibility to achieve the organization’s outcomes.
We restructured the entire organization; we no longer have coordinators, we
have a senior management team, and
self-managed and self-directed teams.
The teams empower themselves, set out
their actual activities, evaluate themselves and produce the results that we
need to have as an organization. There’s
no management at the top that directs
processes on a day-to-day basis; staff
themselves are the ones bringing the
ideas forward and sustaining the activities that we’re involved in.
I wouldn’t say that this goes without
challenge because, as a diverse organization, we are faced with issues where, for
example, somebody has a particular religious practice so they have to be off
work and on that one day we have to
produce a report. Because we have a
team structure, the staff is able to function and support each other; the environment is one we’re all in together. We
no longer look at what are some of the
obstacles or challenges. We look at what
it is that we’re best at as an organization.
How can we as an organization continue
to do the best things we do and to make
them better? Ingrained in the organization is that each and every one of us are
there to contribute our best. We operate
in a position of being really positive that
each staff person at Micro Skills is there
because they care about the organization,
they care about the work they do, and
they care about the people that they
serve. Having this kind of mindset makes
it possible for staff to be committed to
the work they do and have the willingness to go beyond the call of duty.
Reyes, Blair
Kay Blair
What it is that really makes our place
work? I don’t even take time out each
day to say we’re a diverse organization or
an inclusive organization because it’s
now the policy that guides us; it’s a
behaviour for every person in the organization. It is not possible for it to come
only from the top down, it also has to
come from the bottom up and it has to
get to a space where we can all actually
say, “This is who we are, this is why we’re
here and this is what we want to accomplish.” Every person that you work with
has something to contribute no matter
how small or how large it is. It is the people in your organization that will implement your strategies. So if your people
are not empowered to take control of
their work environment, you’re not
going to have an inclusive organization.
Diversity is not about having particu-
lar people represented in the organization, but having the people in the organization in meaningful roles, carrying out
responsibilities, and experiencing community at work in their workplace environment.
When I began at Micro Skills in 1988,
there were four white women and myself,
as the executive director. We were funded at the time by the Board of Education
and they were all white English as a
Second Language (ESL) instructors. We
had a client group of women of colour,
mostly Somalian women, and one of the
ESL instructors brought in a picture to
show the women how they needed to be
dressed in Canada. She also brought in a
container of deodorant, explaining that
they needed to use deodorant. Well, I
thought this was inappropriate and I
asked her to leave. The Board of
Education felt that I did not have the
authority to dismiss one of their instructors and they pulled all the ESL instructors. At that time we had an integrated
Micro Skills training programme so a
component was ESL training and a component was microfiche training to transform paper into film and then be able to
work in the service bureau. So I was left
with forty women and no trainer. I went
out and talked to a number of friends to
ask them to volunteer. We not only had
programmes throughout the day, but people who were not able to come on site
during the day were coming at night and
helping us.
Five months later the Board realized
that we had not closed. They said to me,
“I will give you one instructor for a
month just to see whether this person
will be treated well.” But I said, “No, we
can continue like this.” And I share the
experience with you to say that Micro
Skills is not driven by the availability of
funding, it is driven by a vision based on
a mission of service. I will say no to funders if I think they are not fundamentally reflecting and representing who we are
at the organization. I will say no to individuals in our organization who are
behaving in ways that are not conducive
to a healthy work environment. We continued without the board’s funding and
we were still an organization.
We continue to chart our own course
to do the kinds of things that we think
are sustainable and fit within the organization’s vision mission. Some organizations can’t do that because they rely on
the availability of funding to get work
done. But I think you have to be prepared at all times to stay true to your core
values and let these guide you. At Micro
Skills all of the staff are aware of what
the values of the organization are; we live
it, we breathe it. At any given time you
can talk to any staff person at Micro
Skills and they’re going to give you the
same kind of information. We’re not a
cult, but we’re an organization that really believes in its people.
Each year we review our handbook
which talks about the organization, a
brief history of who we are, how we have
evolved as an organization, our mission
and our vision. The vision sets out criteria on implementation. For example, it
speaks about how Micro Skills will lead
the way in the quality of services to its
clients and to its staff. We hold sessions
among ourselves to say, “Well, what does
this mean? What does that look like?” At
every stage in what we do learning happens because people need to understand
and be aware of these criteria and not
just as a written document.
What we have seen with this approach
is a great reduction in the number of
issues that come up in the organization
because there’s more time spent talking
about what we do. As human beings all
of us are hungry for conversation. You
can’t do good work without having conversation. Every Thursday afternoon different teams get together; each person
can see all the products of the organization, they know who’s involved in what,
and where things are happening in the
organization. So the resources are in
place on an ongoing basis to support
staff.
Outside of the in-house training, the
mentoring, and the support and guiding
of each other, each year we take a day off
and go to a training centre and we look
at all the things that we’ve accomplished
and the areas that we still need to build
on. We walk out feeling completely reenergized and recommitted; again, taking
time as an organization to align our
vision so that each person is confident
and comfortable in what we do on an
ongoing basis.
We’re very clear about the fact that it’s
not the business models that achieve an
inclusive organization and the productivity that we need. In fact there’s a recognition that workers today do not need
people to boss them or to push them
around. What they need are real leaders
who inspire them, who motivate them
and provide working conditions that
help them excel. So you can only engage
a representative workforce by creating a
healthy work space where people are able
to be their best, and where they know
they have a role and a responsibility to
ensure that the organization can achieve
Reyes, Blair
the outcomes that it set for itself. Not
only are they there to provide the service, but they have a responsibility to be
able to shape the organization and ensure
that it remains sustainable and responds
to the needs of its people.
This process has to include the board
of directors, all your volunteers, the
delivery teams and all the people that do
business with your organization. As we
go through the development of our staff,
the same thing happens at our board
level. The board of directors needs to be
able to speak about the organization and
they have to be prepared to engage the
same principles that we work with as
employees. With the process of aligning
the vision, you have to be prepared to
propel all the people involved in the
organization to the stage where they
understand the same kind of thinking
and the same kind of behaviours.
We were able to hire the majority of
our staff and our training group from our
volunteers because the same practices
that we employ for ourselves are the same
kinds of practices that we take into the
delivery of our services. We’re preparing
adult learners to function and to seek
employment in Canadian society so the
standards are the same. We need to find
ways to impart to our client base certain
principles and types of behaviour so that
they’re in an environment where something different is happening. They can
recognize those differences and they can
speak out. They are empowered, they
have information, and they recognize
inappropriate behaviour. They know
what it is to be in an environment that is
poisoned and they know how to speak
out against it.
We’ve embraced a process which we
call ‘The Appreciative Inquiry.’ It is not
something that we have established ourselves but it’s a process that’s used in most
developing countries and in First
Nations communities. It’s really about
ways to truly engage people: the art of
telling stories, the art of having shared
conversation, experiencing value in people, looking to bring out the best in peo-
Reyes, Blair
ple. Human beings are very fragile so
you’ve got to be able to create an environment that is going to help a person to
believe in themselves, to be able to challenge themselves, but at the same time to
be supported. If a failure happens, well, a
lesson has been learned. What we try to
do is acknowledge that even though
something has gone wrong, there’s a
learning experience for all of us. This
enables us to build on those kinds of
experiences.
The Thursday afternoon sessions that
I talked about go a long way with this.
We might be taking time out of work, but
in the end we learn so much about each
other and we gain new information.
We’re able to take those experiences
back into our service, which helps to sustain us because in the not-for-profit sector there are no real monetary gains per
se in the work! What motivates and sustains us is the quality of work that we do,
the satisfaction that we get from seeing
someone who walked in totally bungled
up and after three or four months of
intervention there have been changes in
that person’s life.
We have to find ways to take care of
ourselves in the work environment and
find ways to appreciate and value each
other. We have to recognize that in an
organization where there are thirty-seven
different languages spoken, we have a
very rich environment. So there’s lots to
celebrate, there’s lots to recognize, there’s
lots to appreciate.
Our translation services and resources
are in house. We provide services in
English, but if a client requires service in
their first language, the resources are
within the organization. We know the
different languages that our staff speak,
so we can pull them in at any given time
to support our need. Across the entire
organization again you’re finding that
staff members, regardless of what community they are from are able to help the
organization sustain what we do. We live
by a set of core values, each and every
one of us in the organization. Again,
they’re not mandated behaviours, but
they’re behaviours of our practice across
the entire organization.
We also have within our client population what we call a participants’ committee. Clients have a similar structure
to the structure of the staff and the board
even though the clients continue to
change. Because the practices are within
the organization, client groups are then
able to pick up the same kind of practices
that we have. What governs us within
our core services is strength and the context of accountability. We’re accountable
to self, we’re accountable to our clients,
and we’re accountable to the broader
community. Our behaviours and our
practices within the organization must at
all times reflect those kinds of behaviour.
Most importantly Micro Skills operates within a naturalistic environment.
From an operational perspective what
guides me and helps my work is the fact
that the organization is managed in a
team environment. I don’t do performance appraisals, the team does that
themselves. We’ve developed a peer
evaluation process where teams work
together, and determine through their
annual work plan what particular activities they need to carry out. They evaluate
themselves on an annual basis through a
process called evidence-based evaluation. I am not able to tell you what fortyseven individuals in the organization are
doing at any given time. I know that I
get the results on an ongoing basis, but
they’re the ones that are working together to develop the processes, evaluate
themselves, and provide me with evidence and then I’m able to just sign off
on that.
Think about your own organization for
a minute. What is it in your organization
that you feel most proud about? What is
it that you contribute to your organization that gives life, that ignites you, and
that make you feel really proud?
at-risk young women. Under her leadership, MicroSkills has launched a number
of entrepreneurial and innovative programs, notably the establishment of the
first Women's Enterprise & Resource
Centre and the Women's Technology
Institute in Ontario, both of which focus
on immigrant and racialized women. Kay
has served two terms as President of the
Ontario Council of Agencies Serving
Immigrants (OCASI) and acts as a consultant to government and community
groups on issues of access, equity, and
organizational and community development. In recognition of her contribution
to the community, Kay has received many
awards, including the Women of Colour
Community Award, the Innovations
Canada Entrepreneur of the Year Award
(2003), and the Canada’s Most Powerful
Women: Top 100 Award - Trailblazer
(2004).
www.microskills.ca
Cynthia Reyes is Vice President of the
management consulting firm DiversiPro,
and co-founder of the Innoversity
Creative Summit, a not-for profit organization. DiversiPro helps Canadian organizations to succeed in a culturally
diverse environment which results in
organizations that are culturally competent, and confident with diversity.
Innoversity's mission is to open doors for
immigrants and minorities who seek
opportunities in the media industry.
Innoversity puts media executives and talented individuals face-to-face in a positive
environment where talent is spotted, best
practices are highlighted and important
connections are made. Cynthia is a former television executive with the CBC, former president of the Black Business and
Professional Association and Secretary
General of INPUT, the international television board. She has won many awards
for her career achievements and voluntary contributions in Canada and internationally. www.diversipro.com
Kay Blair has been Executive Director of
Community MicroSkills Development
Centre since 1988. MicroSkills is a community-based organization which provides settlement, training, employment
and self-employment services to immigrants and members of racialized communities, with emphasis on the needs of
low-income women and, more recently,
Telling Your Story
Mobilizing Communities Through Creativity and
Innovation
Suzanne Gibson
T
his is a story about creativity and
innovation, specifically around
the seeding of a new charitable
organization called Raising the Roof
which I was involved in. Telling this
story may help you think of creative ways
to tell your own story, to brand your
issue, and to make your own cause more
compelling to the community.
In 1996 I'd been consulting full-time
for about five or six years, and a woman
by the name of Susan Woods gave me a
call. She was on the board of the
Canadian Non-Profit Housing Foundation, a group I had never heard of, and
she explained that part of their goal was
to figure out how to fundraise nationally
for homelessness. The Foundation had a
little bit of money and they wanted to do
a feasibility study. Would I be willing to
do it? I contacted a colleague and the two
of us started to figure out how to raise
money for homelessness. At this point
and even to this day, aside from Raising
the Roof, there are no national charities
that actually address the issue of homelessness.
In the feasibility process we identified
about 50 people who were leaders in the
sector and might give us ideas on how to
proceed – housing and homelessness
experts, community members, government officials, foundation staff, fundraising specialists, and marketing folks. We
started to ask all these folks our questions
– what's the goal, how much can you
raise, how should you position yourself? –
and at the end it was very clear that there
were some challenges. The first was:
what is a national organization going to
do on an issue that's local? We also heard
loud and clear, nobody cares about
homelessness, nobody cares about housing. In those days homelessness was not
in the media every other day, the radio
wasn't talking about it and the newspapers weren't writing about it.
Suzanne Gibson
We were also challenged with the
question of what added value a national
body could provide to this issue. What
became clear to us is that there were
three things that we could do. The first
was that we could provide public education and create a whole synergy around
the topic to get Canadians to care. Public
education, media, communications:
these would be added-value components.
The second thing was to fundraise and
help local groups because most shelters
and small organizations in the community don't have cash. And the third thing
was to become, not a clearinghouse in
the traditional sense, but a conduit for a
national strategy to share best practices,
and to link groups in Halifax to groups in
Vancouver.
Those were three useful and compelling functions for the organization.
But my colleague and I said, “How do we
actually raise money for this?” In traditional style, we looked at what others
Telling Your Story
Suzanne Gibson
have done elsewhere. In the United
Kingdom we found a group called Comic
Relief, well-known comedians who put
on comedy shows for charity. Part of
their funding goes to housing and homelessness organizations in the UK and
internationally. The other thing people
know about Comic Relief is that they
have the Red Nose. On Red Nose Day
you purchase this nose and you're
allowed to act like a buffoon and do zany
things while you have this nose on. This
particular charity is one of the biggest in
the UK; somewhere in the order of 56
per cent of people in the United
Kingdom have participated in a Comic
Relief event.
My colleague and I thought this was a
really interesting model because it galvanized this huge synergy and involvement
across the community. And corporations
gave vast amounts of money to it. We
also looked at Comic Relief in the
United States, which is based on a similar model. They don't have the red nose;
they have a tele-event with people like
Whoopi Goldberg and it raises quite a bit
of money.
We also looked at The Enterprise
Foundation, a big foundation in the
United States which has a phenomenal
campaign involving large corporations
which raises tons of cash. We also looked
at the Better Homes Foundation, an
interesting model where they raise
money for housing and homelessness
through the Better Homes and Gardens
magazine. At that time it generated over
a million dollars a year.
We tried to hand-pluck out the interesting and exciting elements of these
models that would fit within the
Canadian context, and we started to create a concept for a new organization. But
when we looked closely, we recognized
that what we really wanted was a comedy approach. At that point we started to
do consultation calls with comedians in
Canada asking them what they thought
of the idea. It was interesting, by the
way, that when we tested the idea of
comedy both with comedians, with people out on the street, and with people
doing service for homelessness, we heard
loud and clear, particularly from the folks
who were living out on the street, that
laughter was the one thing that sustained
them when they were close to dying from
frost and starvation.
They really
embraced the concept of comedy.
We wanted high energy. We wanted to
galvanize the sense of momentum in the
community where people felt like they
could hook onto something. We saw this
with the Red Nose concept, where the
media is blasted with hundreds of thousands of British doing crazy things. We
also saw the celebrity aspect as key.
Where are the best comics in the world?
Canada.
Another key element was corporate
involvement and we also wanted an icon
– not the Red Nose concept but something else. We wanted a magazine component, which we did eventually implement over time, and we thought we
wanted a telethon although they're very
expensive. It required more research as in
Canada they tend to lose money. A final
element was that we wanted to blast the
community with local community
events, tons of exciting media, and lots
of synergy to animate our cause.
These were the general parameters of
what we wanted to do. We came back to
the board and we proposed this huge
concept with a nation-wide presence.
Keep in mind that at this point, of the
$35,000, the board now had $15,000 to
invest. The board looked at the idea and
said, "Let's do it. Let's go big or go
home." So we started to put things
together piecemeal and I agreed to be a
part-time executive director.
We started off with a pilot project to
test these concepts in a small containable way. Does it work? We identified
five local community groups and decided
that all the monies that we raised
through our demonstration project
would go back to them. They included
groups like Sistering and Homes First
and HouseLink. For one full week in the
month of February, in the darkest hours
of Canadian winter when we all probably
think about homelessness, we decided to
run a one-week campaign that would be
chock-a-block full of activities that
might generate and synergize energy.
The first thing we recognized was that
we needed ‘seed’ funders. How far is
$15,000 going to get you? We started by
pulling in as many "advisors" as we could:
all of Canada's finest housing and homelessness experts endorsing our cause,
either by being on the board or on an
advisory committee (David Hulchanski,
an academic who is at U of T and Derek
Ballantyne, a leader in the housing sector) so that we were seen to have credibility in our area of expertise. Then we
started to outreach; Alan Broadbent at
Maytree Foundation came on board,
other philanthropists, corporate folks,
and the president of Global Television
came on board. We just worked our networks to build this sense of people that
were important. We submitted a grant
application to the Atkinson Foundation
and appealed to individual donors and
we managed to get enough money to run
that first year. That was our first key
strategy.
We also got creative types on that
advisory group as well, including Gordon
Pinsent. We asked them for their advice,
and asked them to give us their creative
input. One of the adages of fundraising
and mobilization is that you want people
to get behind your cause and have personal involvement. If you ask someone
for advice, you get money; if you ask for
money, you get advice. It's just a general
rule. So we started to get all kinds of creative ideas from businesspeople. For
example, the Global Television president
gave us creative ideas on how to access
other TV leaders and CEOs. Gordon
Pinsent gave us ideas on how to access
other comics.
We started to get money. Now the
problem was, we were nameless. The
Canadian
Non-Profit
Housing
Foundation doesn't really ring off your
tongue, does it? We realized we needed to
change our name. Through the support
of a colleague, we engaged Donald
Murphy, a phenomenal genius who used
to own Vickers & Benson and is one of
Canada's top advertisers. Donald had just
retired, and was looking for something to
do. He saw in this group a desire to grow
Telling Your Story
and to be flexible; creative people love
that kind of fertile ground where they
feel they can throw out an idea and it's
going to be taken up. He originally came
up with the name, Raising the Roof, as a
special event name. We had asked him to
come to a board meeting to facilitate a
discussion on our name, and he had said
to me, "I want to meet you before the
board meeting," and I'd sent him some
information. Instead of telling me how
he was going to facilitate the meeting he
presented all these names, and when he
hit Raising the Roof, I said, "Oh, my
God, that's the name." And he said, "No,
no, that's a special event name." "No, no,
no, Donald, that's the name of the organization."
For me, the name embodied so much roof rising, optimism, making things happen. That was my first experience working with pro bono advertisers and it was
the beginning of my love affair with
them. I've learned a great deal in terms
of how to synergize charities by engaging
their brilliance; they're truly geniuses.
The other thing we gave Donald was the
challenge of the icon concept - the Red
Nose. He came up with a toque. Part of
the thinking of the toque is that it's on
the top of your head, like a roof on your
head. It keeps you warm. Symbolically, it
fits with the whole issue of homelessness
in Canada. You look really goofy with
this hat on so it fits with comedy. Donald
continued to work with us over about
three or four years in a medley of different ways and wove all kinds of creative
things into our communication strategies. It was a godsend to our organization.
I don’t know if we could price his time in
terms of the value he contributed to the
organization.
So, we've got our name, we've got our
toque concept, we have no money. We
went down to ENDS in the Beaches (a
discount store) and talked the owner
into giving us our first toque; not the
most attractive looking thing in the
world but he gave us 2,000 of them. We
talked someone else into doing this terrible dyeing job for free. We stored the
toques in our basements. We had no
resources and no office but we decided to
Suzanne Gibson
launch. On February the 6th we put on a
full week of comedy and there were
posters plastered all over the city; small
comedy events at various places like the
Rivoli, and then a big gala at the end.
With the creation of Toque Tuesday,
mobilizing communities became a key
goal in my mind. During the week I
wanted the media and the public to see
as many people involved in this issue as
possible. If you ask people to wander
around the city wearing toques en masse
– there are pictures of them everywhere –
it creates a visual impact. We had different events with the faith community, we
had youth and homeless youth come out
and talk about their experience, and we
did educational things for the media.
The comedy and entertainment sector
came out for the comedy stuff. We put up
posters about the toque itself to promote
the week and in year two Donald created
the unique Canadian toque, all tongue in
cheek, “recently spotted in Vancouver,
Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, and
…White Rock!”
Now things started to happen. I'll give
you an example of why it's great to
engage advisors in the creative process.
Gordon Pinsent said, "Wouldn't it be
hilarious if on Toque Tuesday we got a
streetcar in Toronto and at the front of
the streetcar was a comic with a microphone doing jokes with the toque on, up
and down Queen Street?" We contacted
the TTC, and they allowed us to access
somewhere in the order of 10 to 12 platforms where our volunteers came out to
sell toques and the TTC got their staff to
wear the toques on Toque Tuesday. The
beauty here is that the TTC benefited,
because we did a whole bunch of media
to get coverage for their community
involvement and participation.
We also got about a hundred Ryerson
students to come out and participate in
the Dundas/Yonge area. CFRB's community van was downtown and they were
on the radio all morning blitzing Toque
Tuesday. We received a $35,000 matching grant from the Toronto Community
Foundation. Part of the strategy there
was that any major gift to the radio station on the day of Toque Tuesday would
be matched by the Foundation.
Building on the toque icon, I learned
something very valuable: when you have
something physical to look at, it has
impact. It doesn't work for all causes, but
it can result in a really good media kit.
Usually people will fax out a press release
or send it out in a little black container.
Our first year media kit was a big bag
made out of an earthy kind of paper, and
on the front, along with our logo, was a
big sign, “Buddy, can you spare some
time?”. We heard later from a number of
the journalists that they thought it was
quite clever and a little different. It
played on the theme of homelessness and
inside the bag was the toque and all kinds
of donations from Starbucks and other
groups. The media kit came to life; it animated and captured people's imagination. They looked inside; they started to
read the statistics and the information.
It generated a lot of coverage and it created a sense of energy.
We had a very highly energized event
and we netted over $90,000. Given the
fact that we started in September and
launched in February with $15,000, I
thought, Hallelujah. We also generated
about $225,000 of media in kind through
the process.
On our off season, we tried to keep up
our creative process. We put our annual
report inside a paper bag – again, this fits
our cause – with the title, “Solutions for
homelessness in Canada. It's in the bag.
It's easy: just take out the 1997 Raising the
Roof Annual Report inside and fill this
bag with non-perishable food, then take
it to the local fire station or bank or food
bank." How's that for an annual report
that keeps on working to help the homeless? There's an action element which is
tied back to the issue. It feels good. It
doesn't feel too expensive and it's another step towards trying to solve a social
problem. We also came up with a
newsletter called “The Street Goods”.
Again, it was done in brown paper; it was
very animated with lots of stories.
After that first year, the president of
Global TV, who was our advisor, got
excited by what he saw. Success begets
success and creativity begets creativity.
Telling Your Story
Suzanne Gibson
He said he wanted to give us over half a
million dollars free PSA time nationwide, that would run three to four PSAs
a day for three weeks in February. We
created an ad with a shot of one celebrity or prominent Canadian after another
shoving a toque on their head, all to the
sound of William Tell Overture. It was
shot in a way where you thought you
knew who the person was. The next time
you'd watch extra hard to see who it was.
That publicity opened our door to corporate donors who want to see media connections and options for getting their
name out. The Royal Bank then brought
a $250,000 sponsorship because we could
show our return on investment right
away in terms of this TV time. With
RBC, we started moving to Halifax and
Vancouver and Calgary. RBC gave us
tons of gifts in kind in support and wrote
us up in their financial pages which go
out to 86,000 of their top financial
investors. Now we're reaching markets
we never reached before, and that's the
power of creativity; you move into new
sectors and places you wouldn't have
thought of. The day RBC came on
board, our big launch was to have their
400 traders wearing the toque on the
trade floors as they were working - the
media had a blast with that one.
In year two Toque Tuesday fell on
Groundhog Day. We couldn't help ourselves; we announced that Wiarton
Willie was one of our toque spokespeople
for that year, and at the same time, on
the opposite side of the paper, Ray
MacKay from RBC was there too. Now,
the power of the Wiarton Willie thing
was, that was the year that Wiarton
Willie died. And you know that you're
getting somewhere when the media starts
to write about the creative stuff you're
doing, and what they were saying was,
tongue in cheek, is anyone questioning
the role of RBC Dominion Securities in
the disappearance of Wiarton Willie? He
was last sighted as a toque spokesperson
along with RBC spokesperson Ray
MacKay.
We took the magazine concept and we
played with that as well. Homes
Publishing publishes 250,000 copies a
month of a free newspaper and they
called to say that they had seen RBC
involved and would like to be a sponsor.
You create this sense of success that other
people want to join. So you know there
are a hundred different creative ideas out
there. There are many unusual approaches that animate a cause, bring it to life,
and mobilize people. When you get
down to it, nobody's buying something
from you; you are creating a life force
behind your organization.
Linking people into the experience is
also very powerful. For example, in
London, England, very wealthy people
came out to this very expensive gala on
homelessness dressed to the hilt. As you
walked through the door there were people out panhandling, like there are everywhere in London. And these folks would
come up and say, "Would you give me
money?". People had their reaction,
whatever it was and went into the gala.
The very beginning of the event started
up with this big huge video screen and
the first face up was one of the panhandlers saying, "Hi. You walked by me
tonight. It must have felt really strange
when I asked you for money, especially as
you're coming to an event on homelessness. Let me tell you what it's like being
out on the street." And there was this
sort of visceral reaction; people leaned
forward and said, "Oh, I had a personal
experience of that." Experience is something that animates us; If you want to
mobilize people, they have to find a way
to engage. If you have an issue or cause
that makes some people uncomfortable,
that's something you have to deal with.
Homelessness was not a “sexy issue", but
with the various things that we did people got excited and they had fun. So it's
just trying to figure out how to break
down that discomfort factor.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about
creativity and innovation because it
became a big piece of what allowed me to
stay in that job when I was working 18
hours a day making virtually no money. I
realized that creativity is really about
transcending the traditional; if you see
something that's normal every day and
something is unusual, it stands out. I
learned quickly that creativity is taking
two different things that have never
been combined together and combining
them. So there's a way of building your
brain power to do that - turning things
on their side, looking at them from a different angle, looking from a different perspective. Train yourself to look at the
creative process in slightly different ways
to get you thinking outside the box.
It's not just about combining new
ideas, but new people, new partners, new
groups, new stakeholders. Partnerships
and alliances is the big trend in the nonprofit sector. If you can figure out strategic partnerships that are unusual and different, they will open doors into new
markets. So if you are going to a service
club that no one knows about and
they've never been targeted by a charity
before, they're going to open doors into
their networks and their suppliers.
The other thing I learned about was
using the media. You use creative concepts – you take an appointment notice
that's never been used a certain way and
you apply a different use to it. When I get
written materials, I look at them and I
think of different applications or different ways I could package them. I always
talk about looking for unusual suspects
and unusual strategies. I like the word
"unusual" because it captures something
that people don't usually expect.
I also learned very quickly with volunteer teams of people that if we weren't
having a good time and laughing it wasn't going to hold. With Raising the Roof
our whole theme was laughter. With
laughter, new ideas and possibilities arise.
Fun, creativity and laughter are all intertwined.
I also learned that your cause can’t be
just on paper; you have to bring it to life,
animate it. Animation is the idea of
awakening something so that we feel it
in our hearts, in our minds, in our spirits;
we feel moved by it. David Love who is
at Steven Thomas and Associates talks
about fundraising as a spiritual activity;
he says it's like the stairway to heaven.
You are selling a dream to someone and
you move them step by step. You ask
them to make a gift, you fulfill their gift,
Telling Your Story
you let them know how the contribution
is making a difference, and move them
up to the next step.
In Native American tradition they
have prayer wheels, and depending on
the different Native tradition the prayer
wheels have different things in different
locations. In the northeast it's the dream
of the people. And the Native tradition
says we have to have a dream awake for
the people; we need to feel there's a
dream moving us forward. The most
powerful elements in that part of the
wheel are myth, story, symbol and
metaphor. When I think about meaning
and I think about animating a cause, a
metaphor – a symbol or an image or an
icon – can bring a picture to my mind
faster than anything. Part of presentation style and getting your issue out is
thinking in these ways, thinking of
myths and stories that resonate inside of
us. I now look at every cause I work on as
a movement. It's a different way of thinking about things. Are you trying to build
a movement, a sense of energy?
Best practice research is important.
When I get stuck and I don't know what
to do I look at what others have done
and then try to make some applications.
It's a whole creative technique. What's
the thing I need to combine with something new? And I keep asking, would
that fit, would that fit? It's not rocket science. Anyone can do it. It's about studying and experimenting and playing with
ideas. I learned that you can't expect
people to be creative without creating a
learning organization, a place that allows
you to take risks and supports change.
When you look at the top 50 companies
in Canada to work for, one of the predominant qualities that you'll see cited is
that they are learning cultures that allow
for experimentation. They allow their
staff to take risks and they allow people
to make mistakes. Continual improvement is a core value you have to hold. In
fact, studies show that the best leaders
are people that don't think they know
the answers.
Knowing what doesn't work is as
important, if not more, than what does
work. We are in a culture where we're
Suzanne Gibson
supposed to report on our successes, and
we all try to cover up things that aren't
working. I actually think it's a testament
to your confidence and maturity as an
organization to be able to report on what
doesn't work. It strengthens the charity
sector at large by sharing something so
that no one else will have to go through
it. Innovation is about taking risks.
Taking risks, you're always going to make
some mistakes. At the heart you want to
strengthen your ‘opportunity muscle.’
This is not something you're born with;
it's the skill you build over time. When
you see the same three leaders in a community always coming up with innovative stuff and always leading the pack,
they're sitting there building their entrepreneurial skills, looking at new opportunities, looking at gaps out there, looking
at best practices.
Part of building a creative environment is honouring different thinking
styles of creativity and not pooping on
one style over another. Everyone is creative in different ways. Usually the person that drives you nuts in your workplace has a completely opposite thinking
style to you. For example, the ‘strobe
light thinker’ comes out with radical
ideas out of the blue which are completely nonlinear, but they actually create
phenomenal concepts.
I'm a big believer in brainstorming.
Brainstorming is about creating an environment where you actually ask people
to give ideas. First, bring together a
diverse group of people from all kinds of
different backgrounds because you're
going to get a different mix of things.
Second, have a really good chairperson
who pushes for divergent perspectives.
Third, don't squash an idea when it
comes out. Brainstorming is where
‘seedling ideas’ can be created. Seedling
ideas are precious; they aren’t perfect
ideas, but those that seed a different way
of looking at things. Suddenly you have
now layered four ideas on top of ideas,
and that gets you to the conclusion you
want. You have to treat them like a garden or protect them, and when people
are good at giving them don't let other
people step on them because these are
some of the things that will give you the
best solutions.
I've learned that creativity really does
beget creativity, but you have to create a
culture of nurturing. This is akin to
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
He talks about connectors. We all think,
Tom knows Matilda who knows Maria
who knows someone else. It doesn't
actually work that way. The way it works
is Tom is an accountant. He has 2,000
clients. He knows 3,000 people in the
community. He's a connector. So you're
actually going to those people who have
these huge Rolodexes of networks.
Connectors love to connect people. You
all know them. They'll say, "Do you like
that idea? You know, my friend, she's
working on that. We should get you
together over lunch." You want to get
those folks involved in your charity
because they'll open up doors for you.
The other thing that Gladwell talks
about is the stickiness factor. Can you
create a message that's really compelling,
that really sticks in the heart and captures people? People can't let it go. And
then he talks about the contagiousness
factor which is different. How are you
doing to disperse it out? Is it something
that through messaging can become contagious?
The other thing to keep in mind is
that you can sometimes be too clever.
You get so obsessed with being clever
that you no longer focus on what you're
doing this for; you move off your organization’s mission. It’s important to keep a
balance, and make sure that your creativity is aligned to a business case because
our brains work as much as our hearts
when we become animated by a cause.
All those folks that came out for the
toques also needed to see that we were
accountable, and that we were making
our cost-per-dollar count.
So lastly, my biggest lesson was, money
follows good ideas. People will say to me
when I go to work with them, "We have
no money. We can't do anything." That's
completely wrong. It's the groups that are
leading edge, thoughtful, strategic, and
innovative that funders want to fund. In
this busy marketplace, there's 80,000
Telling Your Story
Suzanne Gibson
organizations out there. So, my question
to you is, "Do you want to be an innovator? Do you want to be leading the pack?
Or do you want to be at the back of the
pack?"
I have three quotes that I'll just leave
you with. “To live a creative life you have
to lose your fear of being wrong.” You
have to be someone who can say, "I don't
have the answers," or, "I made a mistake," or, "I'm wrong." That's a position
of humility which takes maturity and
leadership. Secondly, Albert Einstein
said, "The secret to creativity is knowing
how to hide your source,” and that is why
Donald Murphy will never write a book
on his creative process because I know he
has techniques he's used and he's learned
over time.
And then Walt Disney: "It's kind of
fun to do the impossible." because if you
look at his life he certainly did achieve
quite the impossible. When someone
tells you something is impossible, do not
believe them. If you have a dream and
it's something that is going to make a difference to the community, it's built on a
sound thoughtful approach, and it's animated with life, go for it. You will find it
catches on. So off you go. Go crazy.
Animate the community.
As a consultant to more than 60 nonprofit organizations, Suzanne Gibson supports new and established organizations
to “dream big” and unite around an idea,
strategy or plan to turn those dreams into
reality. Suzanne has worked with local,
provincial, national and international
organizations in many sectors, including
poverty, homelessness, community services, children’s and youth programming,
immigrant and refugee services and
women’s issues. As founding Executive
Director of Raising the Roof, Suzanne led
a team of committed staff and volunteers
in the development of a new charity dedicated to finding long-term solutions to
homelessness. Suzanne is an instructor in
Ryerson
University’s
Fundraising
Certificate Program, and author of
Ryerson’s Fundraising Curricula. She has
also taken a leadership role on six volunteer boards, and speaks extensively on
fund development, leadership and other
issues of importance to the nonprofit sector.
www.suzannegibson.com
Making A Difference:
Participation and Engagement in Civil Society
Anil Patel
Anil Patel, Executive Director of the
Framework Foundation and Graeme
Hussey and Waheeda Rahman, participants in the 2004-5 Leaders for Change
program run by The Maytree Foundation
described the following innovative partnership for community engagement at the
Building Strong Communities conference
on May 24, 2005.
Anil Patel, Executive Director, The
Framework Foundation
he Framework Foundation’s aim
is to get 22- to 35-year-olds into
volunteer involvement by creating a model for active engagement called
the Timeraiser; we’re not looking for
people’s money, we’re looking for their
time. A Timeraiser is essentially a silent
art auction with a twist – rather than bidding money, you bid volunteer time on a
piece of art, and then volunteer with
organizations that we’ve partnered with
throughout Toronto.
At our first
Timeraiser we brought together four hundred 22- to 35-year-olds to pledge volunteer time with up to 40 agencies that
we’ve partnered with, who then bid on
40 pieces of art.
Our experience tells us that 22- to 35year olds want to get involved, but find it
difficult to do so. There are a lot of things
competing for their time, and we’re trying to make it easy. We also understand
some of the capacity issues that volunteer organizations face. We use a framework called “Respecting Perspectives;”
we need to understand volunteerism
from both these perspectives so that our
basic objective of trying to get our peers
involved in volunteer activity can flourish. There’s so much choice for volunteering. As a young person, how can I
leverage all the tools at my disposal and
make them applicable to an organization
that can use them? And if I really start on
this journey of getting involved with volunteerism, where can it potentially take
me?
T
Participants in movement exercise
We hear time and time again that
young people see a need and want to
help, but they want to figure out how and
they want to find something that suits
their interest. What the Foundation tries
to do is help them find what they are
really passionate about, particularly
because with their limited time, they
really want to make sure their contribution is making a difference, and very
importantly, they want to learn new
skills. The major consideration that we
think through is how much time they
have to give and allowing the volunteer
to understand, if they get involved,
where it could possibly lead them. If they
have a great first experience, volunteerism will potentially engage them for
years and years to come. I can’t state how
important this last consideration is.
There are several capacity issues that
nonprofit organizations describe as being
critical to fulfilling their mission. Three
of the top five are all related to volunteer
management, and how organizations of
different sizes manage their volunteers; a
serious consideration for any organization that says volunteers are important.
(The fourth issue is difficulty planning
for the future and the fifth is getting the
funding the organization needs.) This
applies to all organizations, whether they
are in the arts and culture, environment
or social services sectors.
In Canada’s nonprofit and voluntary
sector, almost 80 per cent of organizations have nine or less staff, and over half
of these have no staff. So when you look
at the number of paid staff in all these
Making a Difference
Anil Patel
organizations, it’s very, very small.
Almost 60 per cent of all Canadian volunteers like to volunteer at these small
organizations doing things at the grassroots level. When you look at the ratio of
volunteers per staff member for grassroots
organizations, it’s quite high. The implication is very significant: these organizations also have fewer resources than the
larger ones to engage volunteers.
At Framework our tag line is, “It’s time
for you to get in the picture.” But we
can’t effectively do this without understanding the elements which make up
volunteerism. When we started we spent
a great deal of time understanding these
dynamics. To understand the importance
of greater engagement we need to really
focus on organizational capacity for volunteer management. So part of our mandate is strengthening this capacity in the
boards of organizations of any size across
the city.
Graeme Hussey, Participant, Leaders
for Change
Both Waheeda Rahman and I were
participants in The Maytree Foundation’s Leaders for Change Program in
2005, a program which tries to promote
and develop leadership among community activists. One component of the program is community work and our project
was to work with the Framework Foundation to use their volunteers in a 20hour project which we had to design
with a multi-stakeholder component
using participatory engagement of youth
from the beginning to the end of the project.
We started with our resources and
then identified a need which we all had
in common, rather than saying, “Here
are the needs,” and working backwards to
find the resources. It’s an alternative
approach. So, as a group, we fleshed out
our individual interests and the resources
within our stakeholders and then asked,
how can we use these to create some type
of social change? We wanted to develop
a project that had a defined start and
end, but was not pre-defined and also
had some sustainability.
The project had to be community driven and had to be participatory, particularly with the defined stakeholders, who
were not just involved at the beginning
to define the need, but they were
involved in solving the problems. And in
the end, they had to take ownership of
the project. There had to be a heavy
component of youth engagement as the
Leaders for Change and the Framework
volunteers were all youth. The other
thing was that everybody involved had
to come away with some type of learning.
We took these objectives and tried to
identify a project or organization that we
felt met these criteria. We ran them
through a matrix to decide which best
met the criteria, and we came up with
the Firgrove Recreation Centre which is
on the southwest corner of Jane and
Finch (the northwest area of the city of
Toronto). The centre is located within a
public housing community the Jane and
Finch area that is significantly under-represented even within that community.
The youth who attend this community
centre were really the main stakeholders
that we would work with.
As background, a year and a half earlier the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)
had done an interesting project where
several artists commissioned by the
AGO went out to Firgrove and did a
community mapping exercise with the
community youth who ranged anywhere
from five to the early 20s. They had a
huge aerial picture of the Jane and Finch
area on which the youth went through a
planning exercise mapping the priorities
that they wanted to have happen in their
communities; things that were really,
really important to them. Some of these
included really crazy recreation centres
that had all sorts of indoor swimming
pools and gyms. From a human resource
and financial capacity viewpoint, we
could never realize this in a short,
turnkey project. However a lot of priorities were ‘low hanging fruit;’ things that
were easily identifiable and easily implemented. It was kind of perplexing as to
why they hadn’t happened already.
So when we came on board, the youth
had already begun to identify the needs.
From that point we connected – the
Framework Foundation, our Leaders for
Change group and the Firgrove community. Specifically our stakeholders were
the Framework Foundation’s volunteers
of about 30 to 40 people, the five community leaders in the Leaders for Change
Program and the youth of the Firgrove
community.
Waheeda Rahman, Participant, Leaders
for Change
I’m going to look at the process that
we went through working with the youth
in the Firgrove area. We had seen this list
of different things that the youth wanted
to see in their neighbourhood. There was
a community garden, there was improved
lighting, there was “get rid of some of the
police,” there was all kinds of different
feedback. We took this as an opportunity
to engage them in some further discussions. We coordinated a meeting with a
Toronto Community Housing youth
worker who runs a lot of the programs
and had been part of the AGO program.
We had an open, very fluid discussion
with a variety of youth from the ages of
eight to 21.
We divided them into three groups
because of their age – the younger children, the middle age, and then the older
youth. And then we went through a
visioning exercise, “Write us a list of all
the things that you would like to see
done in your neighbourhood.” We got a
wide spectrum of project ideas and
thoughts. Some of the eight-year-olds
talked about books and a library. The 21year-olds wanted apprenticeship programs that were specific to their neighbourhood. They also wanted to see
somebody from their community actually
win a university or college scholarship.
We compiled these lists and went back
again to the community to demonstrate
that we had heard them. I think this is a
really important step; part of this process
is to show that we actually did hear what
projects were of interest to them. We
asked them to prioritize their list and
name the top five things that they were
interested in seeing happen in their com-
Making a Difference
munity. With the different age groups,
keeping in mind they were eight- to 21year-olds, there was a bit of a difference
in terms of priorities.
We took these priorities, reviewed
them, and as a group along with Framework and Anil, identified the projects
that came out of these priorities and figured out what capacity we had at the
table. Which ones did we think would
be meaningful, and could also fit within
the time constraints that we had? We
were starting this process in September
and hoping to have this completed by
April or May of the next year.
The common thread in all of the feedback was computers. For the 8-year-olds
it was being able to do their homework.
For the 21-year-olds, it was music recording; they wanted to play music, they
wanted to be able to jam, and they wanted to be able to have their own community within the recreation centre. What
this idea evolved into was the revitalization of the community centre that is the
home to these youth; it’s fundamental to
them and they hang out there. In this
neighbourhood, for security reasons, the
pizza company won’t even deliver to the
community centre.
The project started with computers
but evolved into a complete makeover of
the centre so that it could accommodate
these new sources of material that we
were looking to do. Then we decided
that, now that we’ve engaged the youth,
we need to engage more of a multi-stakeholder process, which was meeting with
Toronto Community Housing, which
runs some of the programs. We engaged a
designer to take on this project on a volunteer basis to help us and we tried to get
the youth workers that work at the community centre to be part of this process.
What was absolutely remarkable was
that they were so enthusiastic, and so
engaged that they really helped us in
sourcing materials, such as desks and
chairs, that we, in isolation, would have
had to figure out. So it really became a
real community-driven project that we
were facilitating.
We also wanted to build a connection
between the youth in the Firgrove com-
Anil Patel
munity area and the youth that would
volunteer from Framework. They each
came from different kinds of experiences
and different kinds of backgrounds. We
wanted to facilitate learning on both
those fronts and for it to be reciprocated.
One of the major components of the
process was building in an orientation for
the Framework volunteers at the Firgrove Community Centre. They came to
the community centre to see the actual
space in which they would be participating. We also wanted an opportunity for
the two sets of youth to get to know each
other and to build trust between the two
groups because the makeover is actually
only a one-day event. We also encouraged the Framework volunteers to read
five documents to give them a bit of a
background of the community and some
of the community issues, for example,
one of the documents was the United
Way of Greater Toronto’s report, “Poverty by Postal Code.”
The activity day was a wonderful culmination which included the volunteers
from Framework and the Firgrove youth
who had volunteered to participate in
the transformation of the community
centre. We are hoping to transfer the
ownership over to the youth of Firgrove
so that they can maintain the community centre beyond the life of our specific
project. We also hope that we’ve been
able to allow them the opportunity to
maintain not just the centre but even
build additional programs around the
centre. One of the things that they wanted was a cooking class for boys. So now
that we have revitalized this community
centre, there is that opportunity.
For us the key part of this project was
that the process was ultimately the outcome.
We were really cognizant
throughout this project that we didn’t
want to parachute in to revitalize the
community centre. We wanted to facilitate conversations with multiple groups
and be able to transfer the ownership of
this community centre and the pride of
the community centre to the youth. It
has been a great experience; I think there
is a opportunity to take this youth-led
process and use it in other parts of Toron-
to where youth are under-served.
Anil Patel is the co-founder and Executive
Director of the Framework Foundation,
whose aim is to promote 22- to 35-yearolds as volunteers in a community cause.
Framework hosts their annual Timeraiser
as a silent art auction with a twist.
Instead of bidding dollars, young people
bid hours to voluntary organization like
Journalists for Human Rights, Evergreen
and 40 other agencies.
www.frameworkfoundation.ca
Both Graeme Hussey and Waheeda
Rahman participated in The Maytree
Foundation’s Leaders for Change program in 2005.
www.maytree.com
Graeme Hussey is the General Manager
for Karma Food Co-operative, Toronto's
only consumer-owned grocery store. He is
a former research analyst with Jantzi
Research, Canada's leading social investment research company. Graeme has an
educational background in environmental engineering and international project
management. He is a member of the
Board of Advisors for the Canadian Fair
Trade Network, a new Canadian fair
trade advocacy group. In the past he has
worked as a researcher and an adult educator focusing on environmental and
community economic development issues.
Waheeda Rahman was a senior marketing professional for BMO Financial Group
with over eight years of marketing and
eBusiness management experience and
twenty years of community leadership. In
1986, she was awarded Youth of the Year
by the Mayor of Ottawa for her community service. Waheeda was an Executive
Member of the Board of Governors at
Centennial College and was part of BMO
Financial Group’s Diversity Council.
Currently Waheeda is pursuing a Masters
Degree in Immigration and Settlement
Studies at Ryerson University.
Jane Jacobs
1916-2006
The following are excerpts from a reflection
by architect and urban designer Ken
Greenberg at Jane Jacobs: A Public
Celebration held at Trinity St. Paul’s
Church in Toronto on June 12, 2006.
J
ane moved to Toronto from New
York with her family in 1968 and for
Torontonians she became a remarkably accessible neighbour and friend for
the next four decades. The city was
hanging on a cliff when she arrived;
major demolitions were planned for Old
City Hall, Union Station, and St.
Lawrence Market, along with downtown
neighborhoods like South of St.
Jamestown. The TTC’s streetcars were
slated for removal and the Spadina, the
Cross-town and the Scarborough
expressways were on deck.
On November 1, 1969, she told the
Globe and Mail: “As a relatively recent
transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto
sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too
exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is
the most hopeful and healthy city in
North America, still unmangled, still
with options. Few of us profit from the
mistakes of others, and perhaps Toronto
will prove to share this disability. If so, I
am grateful at least to have enjoyed this
great city before its destruction.”
The remarkable thing was that Jane’s
ideas resonated immediately. Death and
Life in Great American Cities (1961) was
the opener and the dialogue never
stopped as she shifted her attention from
one fascinating problem to another. Her
arguments were built from the ground up,
with in-depth observations of everyday
places. Her appreciation for complex
“self-organizing” survival mechanisms
was coupled with a frustration for institutional wrong-headedness.
She opened our eyes to the magical
interplay in the transactions of daily life.
It was to be found in ‘eyes on the street’
and life on the sidewalk. Mix, density,
diversity: these words and phrases are
now so common.
Jane gave us the confidence to allow
cities to be cities. Her web of ideas provided credibility, inspiration, and guid-
ance for my own and subsequent generations. She was the scientist and we were
the engineers, finding new ways to test
and apply her concepts.
She followed Death and Life with
explorations of the economic underpinnings of cities, and the generation of
wealth in The Economy of Cities (1969)
and Cities and the Wealth of Nations
(1984), of the ethical underpinnings of
commercial and guardian structures in
Systems of Survival (1992), and of the
great synthesis of economic, social and
natural systems in The Nature of
Economies (2000).
And then Dark Age Ahead (2004).
With each iteration, her tapestry of ideas
and concepts became stronger and
denser. Right up to the end Jane continued to focus her unyielding critical attention on the forces and events shaping our
world, ever on the lookout for tell-tale
improvisations that elude a heavy-handed forcing of the facts and may point to
new strategies that can forestall the Dark
Age Ahead.
There is no ‘Jane Jacobs world’ and no
recipe for one. She took us from a preoccupation with analysis and mechanical
models to synthesis, a whole new way of
thinking. She celebrated indeterminacy
accepting that cities are perpetually
unfinished and open-ended. We have
only begun to mine the richness of her
thinking; the power of organized complexity with its endless permutations and
possibilities.
Jane strenuously resisted the temptation to freeze her thinking into cult or
dogma. She was famous for not taking
any crap, de-bunking nonsense, and
relentlessly asking hard questions.
Hardly the sweet little old lady!
It is so hard to say goodbye. The
unique gifts she brought us are of incalculable value – her insatiable curiosity
and generosity of spirit, her unrelenting
gaze and challenge when things didn’t
make sense, and the twinkle in her eye
when they did. We were indeed privileged to have her with us. Now we have
to carry on by ourselves.
Resources
Resources
A selected list of additional resources on
building strong organizations, communities and neighbourhoods. Most of the
websites contain related resources and
bibliographies.
Advocacy and Policy Change
Capacity Building: Linking Community
Experience to Public Policy. Julie Devon
Dodd and Michelle Hebert Boyd.
Halifax: Health Canada, Atlantic
Region: 2000.
www.phacspc.gc.ca/canada/regions/atla
ntic/pdf/capacity_building_e.pdf
Student Loans for Refugees: A Success
Story in Policy Change, Louise Slobodian
and Harry J. Kits.
Ottawa: Caledon
Institute of Social Policy: December
2003. www.caledoninst.org
Time for a Fair Deal, Report of the The
Task Force on Modernizing Income
Security for Working- Age Adults
(MISWAA), Final Report, May 2006.
www.stchrishouse.org
What is Policy? Sherri Torjman. Ottawa:
Caledon Institute of Social Policy: 2005.
Ottawa. www.caledoninst.org
Collaboration
Leadership and the New Science:
Discovering Order in a Chaotic World.
Margaret Wheatley. Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, Inc., 1999
www.margaretwheatley.com
The Community Builder’s Approach to
Theory of Change: A Practical Guide to
Theory Development.
Andrea A.
Anderson.
The Aspen Institute
Roundtable on Community Change.
www.aspeninstitute.org
Participation and Civic Engagement
The Collaboration Challenge: How
Nonprofits and Businesses Succeed
Through Strategic Alliances, James E.
Austin. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000.
Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 2nd
Ed.
Co-Authors: Paul Mattessich,
Marta Murray-Close, Barbara Monsey.
Fieldstone Alliance, 2001.
www.fieldstonealliance.org
2004 Canada Survey of Giving,
Volunteering
and
Participating.
Statistics Canada. June 2006.
givingandvolunteering.ca/reports.asp.
The Nimble Collaboration: Fine-tuning
your Collaboration for Lasting Success.
Karen Ray, Fieldstone Alliance, 2002.
www.fieldstonealliance.org
Community Building
Comprehensive Community Initiatives,
Sherri Torjman and Eric Leviten-Reid,
Caledon Institute of Social Policy,
March 2003. www.caledoninst.org
The Diversity Advantage: A Case for
Canada’s 21st Century Economy. RBC
Financial Group. Presented at the 10th
International Metropolis Conference:
Toronto. October 20, 2005.
www.rbc.com
Asset-based, Resident-led Neighbour-hood
Development. The Caledon Institute of
Social Policy. Eric Leviten-Reid, July
2006. For a more detailed list of publications
on
the
Action
for
Neighbourhood Change initiative see
www.anccommunity.ca
Cities and Communities that Work:
Innovative Practices, Enabling Policies.
Discussion Paper F/32. Neil Bradford.
Canadian Policy Research Network:
June 2003.
Culturally
Diverse
Youth
and
Volunteerism: How to recruit, train and
retain culturally diverse youth volunteers,
Calgary Immigrant Aid Society, 2005.
www.volunteer.ca/volunteer/pdf/CSCCDYV.pdf.
Building an Inclusive Organization
Dancing on Live Embers: Challenging
Racism in Organizations. Tina Lopes and
Barb Thomas. Toronto: Between the
Lines: 2006. www.btlbooks.com
Inclusive Community Organizations: A
Tool Kit, Ontario Healthy Communities
Coalition, October 2004.
www.healthycommunities.on.ca
the Ford Foundation, looks at how
neighbourhood centres in Canada and
around the world create opportunities
that foster inclusion and promote diversity. http://inclusion.ifsnetwork.org
Building Inclusive Communities, This
website, developed with support from
the Multiculturalism Program of the
Department of Canadian Heritage and
Marketing your Nonprofit
Andy Goodman, a communications
consulting firm that helps public interest groups, foundations, and progressive
businesses more people more effectively.
Author of several books including Why
Bad Presentations happen to Good Causes,
and a free monthly journal on public
interest communications.
www.agoodmanonline.com
Developing Effective Media Communication Skills, a toolkit produced by the
Institute for Media, Policy and Civil
Society (IMPACS) who also produce an
electronic
newsletter,
eCatalyst.
www.impacs.org
Strategic Marketing for Nonprofit
Organizations (6th Edition).
Alan
Andreasen and Philip Kotler. PrenticeHall. 2002.
170 Bloor St. W. Ste. 804
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5S 1T9
• featuring writing from some of the world’s most
interesting thinkers, writers and community leaders
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• visit our website: www.ideasthatmatter.com today
A publication to stimulate public discourse

Volume 3, Number 4 - Ideas That Matter

Transcription

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