<![CDATA[Disrupt For Good

<![CDATA[Disrupt For Good - Rants]]>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:59:56 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Disrupting “High-Risk Behaviours” For Good]]>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:33:07 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-high-risk-behaviours-for-goodLast month I read Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan, a collection of essays and “love notes” about liberatory harm reduction. The whole collection was well worth the read, but the biggest learning I had was a framework that helps us challenge the problematic term “high-risk behaviours.”

As Hassan notes, “‘High-risk behaviour’ is a stigmatized way of talking about the gorgeous and varied coping strategies we reach for when we are trying to heal from trauma or just survive day to day.” She goes on to acknowledge that the term likely comes from expanding a medical term “high-risk” for actions that are statistically more likely to result in disease transmission or harm in general. Still, “it is a limited understanding of risk that’s based in stigma.”

The phrase sounds clinical and neutral. But it subtly centres the behaviour (and by extension, the individual) as the problem. It rarely asks what conditions made that behaviour more likely in the first place.

Enter Risk, Set, Setting.

For some of you, Risk, Set, Setting will not be new. It is a widely recognized theory in harm reduction, but its applications go far beyond substance use.

As Hassan describes it, Norman Zinberg, through his 1984 book Drug, Set, and Setting, “gave academic support to things that activists have been saying for decades.”

In his theory, the term drug means any substance someone uses for mood- or mind-altering experiences. Mindset, or set, describes the mood or state of the person prior to using the substance. Setting refers to the social and physical environment in which use occurs. Hassan writes, “For example, a gay person sitting on a gay beach with friends during a butterfly migration using LSD will have a radically different drug experience compared to an isolated teenager in a dark bedroom using LSD alone.”

This three-part approach seems simple and even intuitive, but it has the potential to be deeply disruptive.

Accountability, Reframed
The current dominant narrative collapses all of this into one word: choice.

We are told that if someone is using drugs, it’s a personal failure.
Or if someone is living in an encampment, it’s service refusal.

Risk, Set, Setting (RSS) interrupts that reduction and widens the frame. It shifts the focus from isolated behaviour to shared conditions.

Traditional treatment and services centre the drug itself as the problem, and therefore commonly require abstinence or sobriety in order to access care. RSS challenges this practice by showing that harm is shaped by multiple components, many of which are structural.

Hassan concludes, “When we understand RSS, we can begin to play with this triangle and address common outcomes. … We can rethink this model and apply it to intimate partner violence, police violence, self-injury, medication management, disability, chronic illness, houselessness, and more.”

We can ask better questions:

What would make someone safer today?
What would reduce harm in this setting?
What stability might change the trajectory?

That doesn’t eliminate personal responsibility or agency. Rather, it locates it within reality.

And it does help us move from managing “high-risk behaviours” to reshaping high-risk environments.

From Individual Blame to Shared Environment
When we label behaviour as “high-risk” without examining the setting, we quietly absolve ourselves of responsibility for the conditions that produced it.

Importantly for our work, we can help (re)create those settings.

Policies are part of setting.
Shelter rules are part of setting.
Even the stories we tell and the narratives we build are part of setting.

And those settings shape outcomes.
When we see through the RSS lens, the conversation shifts from individualism toward interconnectedness.
Because none of us operates outside of set and setting. We are all shaped by our histories. We are all navigating risk. We are all living within systems that either support or destabilize us.
The difference is that some people are navigating far harsher environments — often ones we collectively design or at least tolerate. And harsher environments predict harsher outcomes.

Disrupting Othering With ContextOne of the most powerful aspects of this framework is that it opens space for history and context, which is the kind of reframing the Frameworks Institute encourages communicators to use.

It allows us to say:

The overdose crisis is not simply about individual irresponsibility; it is shaped by decades of policy decisions, criminalization, and an increasingly toxic supply.
Encampments are not evidence of moral decline; they are evidence of structural scarcity.
Relapse is not proof of bad character; it is often a predictable response to instability, trauma, and isolation.

When we zoom out, individual blame is harder to sustain.

A Framework For Good
Risk, Set, and Setting is disruptive because it refuses simplistic explanations. It complicates the story in ways that demand we look at ourselves: at our policies, our budgets, and our narratives.

It reminds us that harm is not just a matter of willpower. It is shaped by environment.

If we want different outcomes, we cannot focus only on individual behaviour. We must reshape the settings we collectively create, including our narratives and shared understanding of homelessness and drug use.

We can continue policing “high-risk behaviours.”
Or we can redesign the conditions that make them high-risk in the first place.

The choice — collectively — is ours.

]]><![CDATA[Disrupting Encampment Narratives for Good]]>Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:21:15 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-encampment-narratives-for-goodWe survived January. In Barrie, we have had 9.5 feet of snow since November, which has lent itself nicely to my “gentle January” plans of easy mornings and working away at my desk with cozy clothes, snacks and candles. I tried to stay focused and productive while working so I could work less time. While it might not work for everyone or in every season, it worked for me in January.

I also prioritized reading time. :) Of course.

I read a lot of fiction, but my books this month included Encampment by Maggie Helwig.

Maggie Helwig is a priest in Toronto, and Encampment is the story of her activist efforts to provide a home to unhoused residents in her churchyard. It’s a slim book and in many ways an easy read. Maggie shares about the experience in such a beautiful, humanizing way.

On understanding mental illness:
People who’ve been identified as ‘presenting with mental health issues’ (sometimes, ironically, abbreviated to ‘presenting with mental health’) have included Douglas and Isaac, grey-haired men who were once young and bright and on the verge of a shimmering world, who after decades on the street can be sometimes overwhelmed with grief and rage at what their lives have become.

On understanding drug use:
I have come to realize that there are people, housed and relatively safe, for whom visible drug use is, in itself, terrifying, people who experience seeing drug use by others as harm. I cannot deny their feelings; the feelings are real, their pain is real, although that does not necessarily mean that there is any actual threat.

There are, frankly, few people who are less dangerous to others than a habitual user of opiates only - I think of Tyler, a sweet broken soul, sleeping on the floor of the parish hall, cradling a box of pancake mix, a few months before he overdosed and died.

One of the things that strikes me most about attitudes toward the encampment is the really deep conviction, on the part of housed people, that the encampment residents are somehow getting away with something, that they are on a kind of permanent fun vacation while everyone else is going to work and behaving nicely. People have talked about self-indulgence, about entitlement. It says something, I suppose, about just how miserable many middle-class people secretly are, that they imagine people living in tents in the freezing rain are somehow, and unfairly, having too much fun. But we are taught to think about street drugs that way. We are not taught that they may be an adaptive strategy to extreme suffering, which can make rational sense in the moment. We are not taught that they may be, at least sometimes, the last-ditch attempt, in the midst of affliction, to make it alive to sunrise.

Needles won’t really jump from the street and jab you through your clothes. The unconscious person on the corner will not suddenly leap up and assault you. The weeping woman with a badly fitting Marilyn wig will not take your job away. The true, terrible threat is that, if you just once let those people get too close, you might learn that, underneath it all, we actually are the same.

Helwig even shares a perspective that fosters understanding for the “junk” at encampments:
Poor people, in particular, will rarely be able to own anything that is sturdy, permanent, well-made, or beautiful. Accept that we all, in our peculiar way, endow things with our own emotions, our hopes, and our longings. And if your life is all displacement and loss, and you have for a little while a place to be, you will hold on to the broken pots, you will imagine planting the pumpkin seeds next year, you will find beauty in safety pins because you must find beauty where you can. [...] Others may not be out of control, but everyone is hanging on to things that will eventually be discarded, things they may hope to fix, or only hope to cherish. And the rain falls, and the snow falls, and time and entropy pursue their course, and all things decay. And you are sitting in a tent full of garbage, but to admit that is to accept yet another saga of loss.

Storytelling like Helwig’s breaks through the prevailing rhetoric, I think, in a way that so many of our talking points just cannot.

I am newly reminded of the power of story to collectively provide an effective counternarrative to the fear-mongering that so many of us are seeing in our communities, with an enforcement-first approach to our neighbours who have been shoved outside by a broken system.

Or as Helwig writes, “The system isn’t broken, it was built this way… The system was built to ensure that people without the ability to pay also don’t have the ability to heal, indeed have very limited ability even to keep on living. And if we as a society are not willing to pay for treatment for people who want it, but decide that we are willing to pay for their long-term detention, then we are making it very clear that the only thing we really want to do is to punish the vulnerable for being vulnerable.”

]]><![CDATA[5th Rantiversary/45th Birthday Thoughts]]>Sat, 03 Jan 2026 02:22:14 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/5th-rantiversary45th-birthday-thoughtsToday is my 45th birthday, which means it is also the 5th anniversary of the Disrupt For Good blog, and a natural moment to pause and take stock. Some of you have been here the whole time, so thank you!

For the last few years, my January message to you has included sharing my word of the year. A few years ago, it was solidarity. Taking a posture of solidarity left me angry most of the year, so the following year my word was grace. Then last year, my word was flow (I had actually forgotten, and had to look it up just now). At the time, I defined flow as ease and movement — the ability to adjust to circumstances while maintaining a core sense of direction and purpose.

These words are usually chosen after a couple of weeks of less work and more time for reflection and future planning over my Christmas break. This year, I’ve done the same reflection and planning, but no single word has surfaced. Instead, I’ve been thinking more about how I want to make decisions about my time and attention. I thought I’d share it here in case it is helpful to you, too, in case you also like to think about these kinds of things at the beginning of a new year.

Looking ahead: 2026
2026 is going to be a year with a lot of changes for me personally: I’ve chosen to end a 12-year contract I’ve had leading the Network of Rare Blood Disorder Organizations this coming April, and the girls will graduate high school in June, and we expect that at least one, if not both of them, will live somewhere else in September.

While there are some unknowns, I’m excited to see what shows up to fill the space I’m purposely creating in my schedule and in my brain.

In the meantime, I have decided to sort of “pilot” a more structured approach to how I create my to-do lists this winter.

I regularly face choices in where to put my time and attention (you probably are too):

Urgent vs meaningful
Loud vs strategic
Individual fixes vs structural change
Motion vs leverage

When I look across the 2026 work plans for the organizations I’m part of, a clear throughline emerges: messaging and narrative work focused on changing how people understand marginalized groups and social issues — because humane policy depends on it.

Overcoming othering
Reframing problems as system failures
Shifting narratives
Building shared understanding that enables collective action

More than ever, the skillset I need and the work I do across my various roles is integrating, and I need to protect significant creative space in my schedule for narrative work and learning more about movement building, not just on the side for fun, but as a core part of my paid work. This is exciting!

I want to be really intentional about ensuring the space created by wrapping up at the NRBDO doesn’t get sucked into other people’s to-do lists.

I want to make sure that, to the extent possible, the items on my daily to-do lists flow from the strategic priorities I have set and the select few flagship projects I have chosen, not from requests in my inbox. This does not come naturally to the people-pleasing, Enneagram 3s among us! But it feels really important for me to at least try in this season.

So, while I don’t really have a word, I am trying out a bit of a new filter for 2026:

I protect my time to focus on what matters.

In 2026, outside the work I’m wrapping up with the NRBDO, I am focusing on narrative change and movement-building to counter othering and support humane housing and health policy, particularly for people who use drugs and people experiencing homelessness.

If something doesn’t clearly advance this, it’s likely a no.

I’m a pretty productive person. I plan my days around tasks, and I complete a LOT of tasks, but I’m not necessarily super conscious of whether those tasks align with my stated priorities. In January, I’m going to be testing out some structures and rhythms that let me design my days with this in mind (not just activity and checking things off, even though I DO find checking things off very satisfying).

But as I do this, I will keep a little counterbalance to hold alongside this filter about protecting my time for things that matter — something I heard on a podcast this week that really grabbed my attention and may resonate with you, too: it’s possible to optimize yourself right out of a beautiful life.

As in, time management systems are great when they serve us and the life we want to build. But we should be the boss of those systems, not a slave to them. Efficiency isn’t the goal. A beautiful, meaningful life that leaves room for curiosity and creativity and relationships and a bit of wandering is. And that's a gentle reminder I want to carry in my pocket with me into 2026.

]]><![CDATA[Disrupting Burnout For Good]]>Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:57:17 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-burnout-for-goodMy busy season is almost over. I’m writing today from Canmore, AB, where I’m participating in a small summit on ending homelessness in Canada. In the past few weeks, I’ve also spent time in Ottawa with leaders of patient organizations and travelled to Winnipeg for a symposium on pathways to care for people with hepatitis C in Manitoba.

I’ve had the pleasure of many conversations with passionate leaders — and I noticed a pattern: they’re all angry.

We’re all angry.

I’ve been running this idea by people, and it seems to feel true: in the past, burnout showed up as tiredness or even apathy. But right now, burnout looks like anger.

As in, we wake up angry. Every little thing irritates us. Every thoughtless remark feels like a personal attack. Every request feels like a burden.

If this isn’t you, I’m happy for you! But if it does, I hope you’ll find something useful in the next few paragraphs. Not answers — I don’t have those — but perhaps a few prompts that are helping me reorient my own thinking.

Lately, I’ve been wondering whether the shifts I write about might help with this particular flavour of anger. Maybe I’m angriest when I’m being certain instead of curious. Or when I’m wishing people would appreciate my efforts instead of grounding myself in solidarity.

So I tried practicing those shifts this week. And you know what? It has helped.

When I make the effort to stay curious — not my default setting these days — the anger loosens its grip a bit. It doesn’t soften the righteous anger that fuels justice work. That stays. But it does soften the ego-driven anger: the anger of over-identification, of wanting credit, of feeling like everything is on my shoulders.

But there’s more to it. Some of this anger comes from carrying responsibilities that should be collective and working inside systems that don’t meet the scale of the need. From feeling unseen, under-resourced, and undervalued. Sound familiar?

For years the advice was “self-care.” And sure — it’s better than nothing. But I’m noticing a shift toward recognizing that community care is even better. All this pressure breeds anger; connection relieves some of it.

Connection interrupts the isolation that tells us it’s all on us. It restores a sense of collective effort. It reminds us: I have an important part to play, but I don’t have to do everything.

Maybe that’s part of why unions are cool again. Maybe we’re remembering that collective power isn’t just effective — it’s energizing. I once heard Dean Spade say that we often think, “I’m too tired to go to tonight’s organizing meeting,” but when we actually go, it gives us more energy than a nap ever would. I think about that a lot.

To be clear, the anger at structural injustice, chronic scarcity, and political hostility is legitimate.

But if we find our people, stay curious, and sit in solidarity, maybe we can change how we experience this context internally. So this important work doesn’t eat us alive.

]]><![CDATA[Disrupting Systems For Good]]>Sun, 02 Nov 2025 16:44:54 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-systems-for-goodIn early October, I stumbled across, and happily joined, a Free Palestine march in Montreal on the two-year anniversary of the assault on Gaza. Around the same time, I was also reading One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, a heartbreaking, beautifully written book that looks at Western privilege and our history of treating groups of human beings as not entirely human. A few days later, I was working through the back catalogue of the Diabolical Lies podcast and heard a great (and long) episode from April called “The Rise and Fall of Capitalism.”

I’ve been marinating these three separate but connected things in my head ever since, turning them over, examining ways that they intersect with each other and with my own work.

This post is me sharing some of what I learned and thinking out loud about that intersection, especially within the context of the shift from problem-solving to possibility-imagining, and also the shift from certainty to curiosity.

Because one common thread is how often we try to fix problems inside systems that are themselves the problem, and how things we have been taught to take for granted might not be true or in our own best interest.

Language and the Lens We Use
We use the language of problem solving like it’s the highest form of doing good. Fix the system. Tweak the policy. Patch the hole. But what about when the system itself is the problem?

And the word capitalism. This word has become a catch-all for economic freedom, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Things people value.

But markets, or people trading goods and services, have existed for thousands of years, long before capitalism or modern economics.

And if markets are good, free markets must be better, right? I mean, who doesn’t like freedom? But the free part doesn’t necessarily mean “free and fair participation for everyone.” It means “free from regulation.”

Capitalism is based on this political and economic ideology of free markets, with minimal government intervention, private ownership, and competition determining prices and production. In theory, free markets maximize efficiency, but in practice, they often concentrate power.

So capitalism is more appropriately defined not as just trade, but as a system where the profits of work flow upward to a class of owners, not to the people who actually do the work. To put it plainly, it’s about extraction. It’s not just markets and entrepreneurship, it’s a system where ownership, and therefore power, is concentrated in a few hands.

Or to put a slightly finer point on it: it’s a system where billionaires donate to a golden ballroom in the White House while food stamps are cancelled.

Booms, Busts, and Bailouts
In that Diabolical Lies episode, Katie and Caro do an in-depth review of the history of capitalism, and it is worth listening to (if you don’t mind lots of swears). But briefly here, it’s useful to note that capitalism crashes under the weight of its own greed every few decades.

It is sold to us as a “market correction,” but the pattern is consistent: crash, bailout, consolidation. The rich buy low, the rest start over. Each “recovery” leaves ownership even more concentrated. Extract, exhaust, repeat.

Also of note, capitalism didn’t emerge from human ingenuity. It was built through enclosure (kicking peasants off the land they farmed), colonization (stealing other people’s land), and slavery (stealing other people’s lives and labour). The wealth of Europe and North America was largely amassed through organized theft.

And when people in other countries have tried to imagine something different—when they’ve experimented with socialism, worker control, or public ownership because they don’t have their own version of the global south to exploit—western powers have treated it as an existential threat. The US and its allies, including Canada, have meddled in, destabilized, or outright overthrown governments that threatened capital’s dominance: Chile, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba, and on and on.

The history as shared on Diabolical Lies, particularly about the interference in these other countries, was WILD. I know many of you reading are further along this journey than me, and you have been knowing all this for a while. But for me, many beliefs that I held that I thought justified acts by Canada and the US in other countries in the name of democracy have been shaken. In a good way. If this sounds all new to you, I invite you to suspend your firmly held beliefs about what is possible and do a little research. Spoiler: We’re not actually the good guys in most of these stories, despite what we have been led to believe.

People get pretty nervous when capitalism is critiqued. It’s almost like we’ve been fed a strong narrative our whole lives that there are no other viable options…

But if capitalism is so great, why does it need to be bailed out regularly by the governments that it says it doesn’t need? And why do we have to stomp out every effort to do anything different, even in countries halfway around the world?

What Marx Actually Said
Karl Marx’s critique wasn’t that the state should run everything. His point was simpler: capitalism only works by paying workers less than the value they create. The difference—the “surplus”—becomes profit for the owners. The system requires inequality to function. The wealth of the few is the poverty of the many.

He didn’t believe markets themselves were evil; he believed that when ownership of production is private, exploitation is inevitable. It’s not bad actors, it’s a bad structure.

That’s what the threat was.

The System Is the Problem
This brings me back to that shift from problem-solving to possibility-imagining. Because what we usually call “problem-solving” might just reinforce the system we’re in.

Take universal basic income (UBI). Cash helps people survive, yes. But as Jason Hickel argues in his article, The Limits of Basic Income, what good is more cash if there’s no affordable housing, no public transit, no universal childcare? A cheque doesn’t replace a system.

Under capitalism, what and how things are produced is shaped by profit, not by human need. If the system isn’t building public transit or social housing because those things aren’t as profitable as luxury condos or private cars, then UBI won’t help much. So we end up doing this: giving people money to live in a system that was never designed to meet their needs.

Hickel argues instead for universal basic services: healthcare, housing, transit, food, clean energy. He points out that such public services, combined with a job guarantee, can remake the production system itself: who controls it, what it produces, and for whom.

In short, redistributing purchasing power (UBI) is helpful, but it leaves the deep structure untouched. Perhaps shifting from problem-solving to possibility imagining leads us to transforming the economy by redistributing production and ownership.

Canada’s Polite Capitalism
Canada likes to think of itself as kinder and gentler. A peacekeeping, maple-scented middle path. But the truth is that our comfort is built on extraction, too. From the theft of Indigenous lands to our mining operations abroad to our participation in global trade systems that rely on exploited labour, we are not outside capitalism. We are its friendly face.

Disrupting for Good
If “disrupting for good” means anything, it has to mean disrupting the stories that keep us compliant. The ones that say this is just how the world works. That the market is natural. That profit is progress. That some lives are disposable.

Capitalism is not forever. It had a beginning, it has a middle, and it will have an end. The question is whether we can imagine what comes next, and whether we’ll build systems that finally belong to all of us.

And maybe that starts small: noticing the water we are swimming in. Refusing to accept what we’re told is best for us. Pushing back when we are told problems are “too complex” for us to understand, so best to keep quiet. Maybe we start by refusing to mistake the way things are for the way things have to be, and then get to work imagining something better.

]]><![CDATA[Field Notes: Rage, Joy, and Doing Our Part]]>Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:08:54 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/field-notes-rage-joy-and-doing-our-partThis is my busy season, and it's been a full day, so I'm going to keep this short.

I’m working with good people on exciting projects and to fight important systemic fights, which can feel like a weighty responsibility.

Last week in Calgary, I co-led a fascinating discussion about how to bring life-saving cell and gene therapies to more people with rare disorders. One takeaway that has stuck with me: science opens the door, but infrastructure decides who gets to walk through.
Then last night, I sat in city council chambers as one of the most oppressive encampment bylaws in the province was voted in unanimously despite our efforts to rally opposition. And tonight, I was at our Redwood Community Update Night, filled with possibility and hope. That whiplash is real.
As John Green reminds us, “Life is worrisome and the world is worrisome, especially right now, but that doesn’t tell the full story.” Because it’s always a mixed bag: rage at injustice, joy in small moments, and the reminder that none of us can—or should—do everything, but each of us can do something.
One resource I appreciate returning to when I start to feel stretched thin is Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Map. It’s a reminder that there are many different roles to play in social change work, and each one matters.
You're doing great. Let's go disrupt for good.

]]><![CDATA[Disrupting Bad Faith Arguments For Good]]>Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:53:09 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-bad-faith-arguments-for-goodWhen it comes to homelessness, politicians and community leaders often toss out quick one-liners. On the surface, they sound like common sense. But look closer and you’ll see they’re actually logical fallacies — cheap shots that keep us from real solutions.

That’s part of what makes them so slippery: they sound reasonable, so they can be hard to counter on the spot. Calling them out might not change the mind of the person saying them, but it can help everyone else watching see the holes in the argument.

I love those memes of football referees calling out false logic. If public debate had referees, here’s what they’d be throwing flags on in a few of the housing and homelessness conversations happening in my area just in the last week:

Image from https://jpellegrino.com/teaching/reflogic.html.

Quote #1: “If you don’t want help, don’t want support, this isn’t the place for you. Go somewhere else.” – Mayor of Barrie (multiple times, most recently in this article.)

Ref Call: Category Error
Treating two things as if they belong in the same category when they don’t, like offering chairs in a room staffed by security guards when what’s needed is housing, and then saying people who turn down the chairs don’t want help.
Ref Call: Oversimplification
Ignoring barriers like waitlists, eligibility, safety, or trauma. Reduces a complex crisis to a lazy blame game.

Quote #2: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” - Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, but more recently, invoked by someone in the comment section to justify not providing housing to people who are homeless.

Ref Call: False Analogy
This person is comparing two things that aren’t actually parallel in the way the argument depends on. The analogy assumes the “learner” already has tools. In reality, you can’t learn to fish without a rod, bait, and access to a body of water. Housing is the fishing rod here — the tool people need to get started — not the fish itself.

Quote #3: “The vulnerable are the law-abiding taxpayers watching their town devolve into a slum.” - Mayor of Midland, commenting on a resident’s post about a person sleeping outside being vulnerable and in need of support.

Ref Call: Category Error
The Mayor is redefining vulnerable here to mean annoyed taxpayers rather than people experiencing homelessness, poverty, or systemic marginalization. Vulnerable is a category of social risk, but he is shifting it to a completely different category.
Ref Call: Red Herring
Red Herrings are diversions that attempt to distract from what is actually being debated.
In the full comment, the Mayor shifts attention from people who lack housing to the “drug use, drug dealing, sexual violence, and property crime” that happens in encampments…still in reference to one man sleeping in a hammock outside.

Quote #4: “The Housing First positioning is a mantra that is destined to fail.” - Local former Warden and Mayor in a pretty problematic post on social media.

Ref Call: Oversimplification/False Cause
This statement suggests failure is inevitable because of the model, when in reality, outcomes depend on funding, staffing, and implementation. Housing First doesn’t fail on principle. It fails when programs are underfunded or under-supported. Blaming the model itself is like saying a car is faulty because no one put gas in the tank.

Instead of recycling bad faith arguments, let’s call it like it is: there are two ways to end homelessness - prevent it from happening in the first place, and give housing and support to people who don’t have any. All effective solutions fit in this framework. That’s how we win.

In the meantime, let’s think critically regarding soundbites about homelessness and help others do the same by calling these out when we see them.

]]><![CDATA[Disrupting the Blame Game for Good]]>Sat, 02 Aug 2025 21:52:46 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-the-blame-game-for-goodAll week, my plan for today was to write a tame, encouraging piece about overcoming othering, based on a great new video from the Frameworks Institute.

But this morning, as I was driving to pick up my daughter, I had this very cool podcast on about attention span from a historian’s perspective, and I was replaying in my head some comments I gave yesterday for an upcoming news article about our recent homeless enumeration report. I decided I wanted to get back to my ranting roots for an essay on the long history of using drugs and drug laws to other and criminalize groups who are politically inconvenient.

LFG.

When we look at the way cities today are treating people living in encampments, it’s easy to think this is a new, complex challenge. But it’s not new. Not really. There’s a long history of governments using criminal laws, bylaws, and public safety narratives to displace people who are seen as politically inconvenient, socially undesirable, or just no longer “welcome” in certain places.

Encampments are just the latest chapter in a longer story.

For some of you, this is old news. For the rest of you, buckle up.

A (Brief) Historical Primer on Drug Policy
The Canadian Drug Policy Coalition has a solid summary of how drug laws in this country have never really been about drugs or health — they’ve been about control. It draws from Busted by Dr. Susan Boyd, and it’s a crash course on how “drug policy” has always been a political tool.

It started in the 1500s, when European colonizers introduced alcohol to Indigenous communities, with devastating consequences. By the late 1800s, white Christian reformers decided the problem wasn’t colonization, it was Indigenous people drinking. So they banned alcohol sales to anyone labelled a "Status Indian" and called it moral progress.

Meanwhile, everyone — white folks included — was using what we now call “drugs”: opium, coca, cannabis. You could buy opium over the counter for cramps or coughs. Cocaine was in wine and cough drops. Cannabis was taken for insomnia and anxiety. No one was calling it a crisis.

But then in the U.S., once Chinese labourers finished building the railroads, they were no longer seen as essential, just foreign, threatening, and expendable. Politicians wanted them out of cities, but couldn’t just say that out loud. So instead, they criminalized smoking opium — the method most associated with Chinese culture. White people drinking opium tonics? Mostly overlooked. Because it wasn’t about the drug. It was a legal excuse to target, blame, and displace.

And Canadian politicians and moral reformers were taking notes.

By the early 1900s, growing anti-Asian sentiment in Canada collided with rising Christian purity politics. Opium was rebranded, not as medicine, but as a foreign contaminant brought by dangerous outsiders. Chinese men were cast as corrupting figures, threatening white middle-class morality.

Never mind that Britain had built a global empire off the opium trade. Never mind that white Canadians had been using the same substances for decades. This wasn’t about safety. It was about power. As usual.

Fast forward to the 1960s and 70s. The U.S. is in the middle of the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, and massive political upheaval. The Black Panthers are feeding kids, organizing clinics, demanding housing, and making it very clear they’re not waiting politely for justice to trickle down.

So what did the Nixon administration do?

They didn’t just go after the movement — they went after the story being told. They needed a way to discredit, surveil, and lock up the people organizing for change.
Enter: the War on Drugs.

It wasn’t subtle. Years later, Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, came right out and said the quiet part out loud:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Let that sink in. It wasn’t about saving lives. It was about dismantling political threats and using drug laws to do it.

To be clear, drug addiction can cause real harm. To individuals, to families, to communities. No one’s denying that. But the devastation we’re seeing today isn’t just about addiction. It’s about policy. When we criminalize drug use, we drive it underground. We strip away any hope of regulation or safety. We create the conditions for a toxic, unpredictable drug supply and then shake our heads somberly when people “succumb to their addiction.” Criminalization didn’t stop the crisis. It fueled it.

Present Day
And now, here we are — 2025 — still living inside that same playbook.

Today, it’s people living in encampments who are cast as the threat. When we see them as people priced out of housing, pushed out of the rental market, and failed by a shredded social safety net, then it’s clearly a government problem. A policy failure. A collective shame. As John Ehrlichman might say, a political enemy.

But that kind of framing demands action. Investment. Accountability.

So instead, the narrative shifts. Again.

The moment someone living in a tent becomes “a drug user,” “a dealer,” “a threat to public safety,” the sympathy dries up.

Criminalization is the shortcut.

By blaming individuals, we get to pretend the system isn’t broken. We get to hold onto the illusion that it couldn’t happen to us. That we’re safe. That we’re different. That they did something we would never do.

That lie is the point.

It protects governments. It protects comfort. And it lets the rest of us look away — as bylaw officers seize people’s tents, as cops clear parks, as headlines label human beings a “public safety risk.”

But let’s be honest: encampments aren’t the problem. They’re the evidence.

Evidence that housing is out of reach. That social assistance rates are a cruel joke. That healthcare is underfunded. That colonialism never ended. That austerity is policy violence.

Instead of facing it, governments are scapegoating.

Provincially in Ontario, we’ve got Bill 6, a piece of legislation that pretends to be about safer parks, but really just cements this shift from “people priced out of housing living in tents” to “drug dealer takeover of parks” into law. Whether it was done to appease the mayors calling for action or not, it’s about spin, not safety.

And it works — in part — because we’re an easy sell. We want to believe that people living in encampments did something wrong, made a bad choice, went too far. We want proof that it can’t happen to us. That there’s something they did that we can simply choose not to do, and in doing so, protect ourselves from the same fate.

So if you’re reading this, and you’ve ever felt that little voice inside say, “Well, they must have done something to end up there” — that’s not your intuition talking. That’s a story you were sold.

Let’s stop selling it.
Let’s stop swallowing it.
Let’s stop criminalizing survival and start demanding system change: like more supportive housing, livable social assistance rates, and tenant protections, for starters.

Let’s disrupt the blame game. For good.

]]><![CDATA[Disrupting Scarcity for Good]]>Wed, 02 Jul 2025 01:15:26 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-scarcity-for-goodLast week, two very different pieces caught my attention.

The first was a paper called Fixing the Holes in Economics, which argues (in the most British policy-wonk way possible) that much of mainstream economics is based on outdated assumptions about human behaviour. It calls for new models that account for factors such as trust, institutions, and our actual social lives. In other words, things that don’t always appear in spreadsheets, but nonetheless shape how we interact and make decisions, including financial ones.

To quote the author:
Economists have long been bothered by a ‘problem’ that, for most people, seems like a good thing. Humans are a lot more cooperative than economic theory implies. You might call it ‘nice’. …Excessive cooperation appears to be widespread.

Honestly, not something I’ve thought much about.

The second was a podcast episode from Money with Katie, all about social wealth funds. (I just found her recently, and I enjoy her hot takes on personal finance in the much-broader-than-usual context of social norms, unbridled capitalism, etc.) Social wealth funds are public investment vehicles. Katie and her guest discussed Norway and Alaska’s oil funds. Unlike Alberta, where private investors, mostly non-Canadian, reap most of the profits from oil reserves (check out Linda McQuaig’s The Sport and Prey of Capitalists for a history of Canada selling off public goods to private interests), these jurisdictions consider oil a public good. They collect the returns from these publicly held resources and return the gains back to the people, either through annual dividend cheques or through well-funded social programs. It’s a way of organizing money around collective benefit rather than individual accumulation.

Most interestingly, they made a case for publicly held shares in profitable companies over trying to collect a share of this wealth through taxation. For example, while countries struggled to collect taxes from Apple, Norway held shares of Apple and received its dividend payments on time and in full.

Interesting, right? I had never considered it, but taking shares in wealth-generating companies instead of collecting taxes from the shareholders might be a brilliant move.

My brain was tickled by how both of these pieces—whether explicitly or not—challenge the story of scarcity that underpins so much of our economy, and, by extension, so much of our nonprofit and advocacy work.

So today’s post is about that - not a fulsome examination of these two concepts, but a quick look at one place they intersect. One of the essential shifts, albeit one I haven’t written as much about here: from scarcity to sustainability.

Scarcity in non-profits
If you’ve spent any time in nonprofit work, scarcity thinking is familiar. We talk about limited resources as if they were an unavoidable truth. There’s never enough money, time, staff, political will, housing units, or space in the shared fridge. We compete for crumbs with other organizations helping THE SAME PEOPLE. We treat burnout as inevitable.

And it’s not just operational. It’s embedded in our culture! We celebrate scrappiness. We praise doing more with less. Exhaustion can be a badge of honour.

This makes sense inside the economic frame most of us inherited as fact: that people are selfish, resources are scarce, and systems are neutral.

But what if none of that is actually true?

Challenging Dominant Economic Theories
Behavioural economics challenges one of scarcity thinking’s core pillars: that people are selfish and purely rational actors. Turns out, we’re messier (and more generous!) than that.

We actually care about other people. We seek out trusting relationships, not just transactions. We participate in systems we believe in, even when it’s not strictly in our self-interest. These truths about humanity are not captured in the classic models.

The Fixing the Holes in Economics report argues for updating our theories to reflect how people and institutions actually function. If we assume mutuality and social connection are part of the economy, not irregularities to explain away, we can build economic models that don’t rely on extraction. We might even stop designing systems that exhaust everyone.

The concept of social wealth funds builds upon this idea. These funds are based on the assumption that shared resources should generate shared benefits. Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game, and sustainability is a crucial component of a healthy economy.

They offer a radically practical vision of what a post-scarcity framework could look like, recognizing that we create value collectively, so maybe we should share it collectively too.

A New Narrative
So what does any of this mean for us, the advocates, changemakers, and organizers?

It means replacing the story of scarcity with a new narrative that better serves us and the people we care about.

A narrative that says:

There is enough wealth in our communities to make sure everyone has what they need.
Our alignment is more powerful than our competition, and we are stronger when we collaborate.
Good work can be well-resourced, stable, and life-giving.
Sustainability frees us to put our energy into the real work of systems change.

As the Fixing the Holes report notes, economics often overlooks how institutions shape behaviour. When we assume scarcity is a permanent condition, we build systems—inside and outside our organizations—that are optimized for burnout and competition.

But we can tell a better story. Social wealth funds are one example. As Katie put it, these funds “acknowledge that wealth is created collectively and should be returned collectively.”

That’s not charity, it’s structural equity.

The same is true in our organizations, our campaigns, and our communities. We don’t have to stay trapped in scrappiness. We can organize around sufficiency, sustainability, and solidarity. Not someday—now.

Let’s stop building futures on fumes.

Let’s disrupt scarcity, for good.

]]><![CDATA[Disrupting for Good: Fieldnotes and Pride Month Inspo]]>Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:25:24 GMThttps://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-for-good-fieldnotes-and-pride-month-inspoI had many opportunities this past month to practice the messaging ideas I share here. Canadian Viral Hepatitis Elimination Day and Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) Week, the day and week I made up a few years ago, were both in May. I found myself releasing our 2025 Progress Report in Viral Hepatitis Elimination in Canada, preparing a one-pager about supportive housing, preparing a proposal for decentralizing hepatitis C treatment in Manitoba, meeting with provincial policymakers in Ontario about both hepatitis and housing (separately), writing letters to the Public Health Agency of Canada, and attending a medical conference in St. John’s.

And I have some observations on what worked best.

In honour of Pride month, I’m also going to weave in some lessons that are still relevant today from the fight for marriage equality, an important and inspiring victory for the LGBTQ2S+ community (and arguable for us as a society). Winning over the majority of Americans on marriage equality seemed impossible. In 1996, only 27% of Americans supported gay marriage. However, by 2015, marriage equality was law. Public support had increased to 60%, and it hasn’t dropped since then.

I’m borrowing heavily from a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Aspirational Communication, by Doug Hattaway of Hattaway Communications. I hope something here sparks a thought that helps you with your own messaging.

Field Notes + Pride Month Inspiration
1. Moving Beyond Rights to Community Care
Most organizations I am part of love to bang the drum of human rights. And they’re not wrong that we should fight for rights that are not being realized.

However, that is often not the packaging that wins hearts.

When I tell a policymaker that they have a responsibility to work toward the progressive realization of the right to housing, they get defensive. (I’ve done this many times.) BUT, when I say we know that by almost every measurable metric, we are all better off when we all have a home, and that [insert city] is a city of people who take care of each other, and that includes making sure we all have a safe, affordable, hopeful place to call home, those same policymakers mostly nod along.

I’m working toward the same outcome, but I’m packaging it up differently - crucially, in my opinion, I’m still making it a system problem to address, not an individual failing of the people experiencing homelessness in my community, but framing it up with the values of community care and interdependence feels better, so, as I have observed, it lands better.

We also see this in the marriage equality movement: an initial base of support in the U.S. was built using messages about civil rights and equal protection under the law. But to get to a majority, it took a reframe to “love and commitment” and “love is love.”

Which brings us to point #2.

2. Connecting Our Cause to Their Aspirations
As Hattaway writes, “Your aspirations are your ideas about the kind of person you want to be, the life you want to live, and the world you want to live in. Aspirations are important to our personal identities and play a powerful role in driving our attitudes and behaviours. What’s more, lifting up aspirations and values that people with different backgrounds and perspectives share can help them see themselves in a cause. We can relate to people who seem very different to us when we sense that they share hopes and values similar to our own. We recognize our common humanity.”

When we feel under attack, it’s tempting to slip into crisis mode and fight against the threats. But in a long game, tapping into aspirations and a vision of who we want to be and the world we want to live in has more staying power.

3. Winning Words
Framing is so key. We’ve talked a lot about it here. Words that people hear first shape their opinions on an issue. And words that get repeated win, so simple but meaningful words and phrases that are easy to understand, remember, and repeat are going to help win.

Hattaway summarizes:
This short-and-sweet message also delivered a powerful counterpunch to the opposition’s message, which defined marriage exclusively as “a union between a man and a woman.” Marriage equality supporters could now say simply, “Marriage is about love and commitment between two people.” Two words helped take the moral high ground on the way to a winning majority. Who wants to stand in the way of love and commitment?

4. Focus on the Undecideds
Sometimes our instinct is to take on the die-hard base of the opposition. But it is so energy-intensive and can be demoralizing. Also, it rarely works, and often, we don’t need them to build a majority. We can usually get there with our base + a good number of the undecideds, or those who are “of two minds” on a contentious issue, so are staying quiet or leaning toward maintaining the status quo.

Anat Shenker-Osorio calls this the “movable middle.” This group is a great place to start on your way to a winning majority, and many of them will join you when you have effectively employed the other messaging tips here.

5. Tell Strategic Stories
Did you think I would write about messages that win without mentioning stories? Oh friend. Stories are where it is at.

I was reminded of this at the medical conference I attended last week. There were a lot of scientists reading their slides and attention in the room was often low. I found myself Googling “how do you know if it is perimenopause or ADHD?”

But then, Leonard got up and told us the story of growing up with hemophilia in rural Newfoundland. I know you will believe me when I say the room was hanging on his every word, that I can tell you more about Leonard’s life than I can recall from every other presentation over the three days put together, and that I was newly motivated to take up the cause of rural and remote care for people living with bleeding disorders.

Stories create empathy like nothing else can. Using them as a scaffold to deliver the information you want your audience to take away is a solid strategy all day, but it does take a bit of work to make sure the story uses winning words, connects to shared aspirations, and ideally, shows your audience a clear path or role for themselves in your cause.

Thanks as always for reading. As I said above, I hope something here inspires your own messaging as you disrupt for good!

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