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Last 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in Economics, which argues (in the most British policy-wonk way possible) that much of mainstream economics is based on outdated assumptions about human behaviour.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. 
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I 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.  Here we are in May, and things continue to feel uncertain and precarious, beautiful moments that break through notwithstanding. You may be feeling overwhelmed—I know I am. I have a pet theory that none of our nervous systems really recovered from the COVID pandemic, and we no longer know how to recognize actual emergencies. We treat a lot of non-emergencies as urgent. I know I have to consciously and pretty regularly tell myself the difference. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all bad. I’m enjoying sunny days, meals with family and friends, teaching my 16-year-old twins how to drive, good books, and meaningful work. But I also have to be intentional and realistic about my role and my zone of responsibility in advancing and defending social justice right now. I’m no one’s saviour. I’m a part of movements with lots of smart, talented people, and none of us has to do everything. And of course, the more things change, the more some things stay the same, and this includes messaging principles. So for all of us, it is worth a timely refresher on this key communications principle: reframe, not rebut.  I am in Vancouver this week and I have had three full days in a course on the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations That Matter. It’s been such a privilege to participate and learn several methods and tools and also meet 50 great people. This morning, we learned about the Two Loops Model, a map of how change works in living systems, with one arc representing the legacy system that has to die, in order for the new system to emerge. This model acknowledges that new things are usually born out of existing things, and it all works a little bit better if you “hospice” the end of the dying system. ANYWAY, the two loops shape was taped out on the floor, and we were invited to go stand where we saw ourselves on the two arcs, and then find a partner and share some of our wisdom from that place on the arc with another person who wanted to get to that place on the arc. And I shared this: movement building is not matchmaking, and we don’t have to be 100% aligned with the people we are movement building with. Movements cannot be clubhouses if you want to get the people power to bring the change to fruition.  For a few weeks, I have pondered the challenge of living a good, happy life while also resisting the political and ideological harms we are witnessing. How do we stand in solidarity and not be complacent without also becoming cynical and miserable? Is it possible? Is it even moral? Can we truly be in solidarity only if we are in misery? Does resisting only count if it is really hard? Is it cheating to also have some fun? As Deepa Iyer tells us, we all have a role in social change, so I assume that translates to us all having a role in resisting whatever you would call all this egregious behaviour and the despair it invites. And then, just this morning, I asked myself, why do I assume resisting has to make me miserable and leave me deprived of all happiness?  Misanthropy is defined as a "dislike of humankind." More broadly, it can include dislike or distrust of the human species, human behaviour, or human nature. With so much bad stuff happening in the world, it is easy to toy with nihilism. To mumble “I hate everyone” or "people suck" to ourselves several times daily. To want to stop trying. To tumble into misanthropy. Today, I want to share Radical Gratitude Spell from adrienne marie brown that I read for the first time a few weeks ago. But first, some words from the book Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. I found them encouraging, and that is my hope for you as well, as I risk copyright infringement. This reminder is as much for me as it is for you.  Happy New Year! Today, I am celebrating my 44th birthday and the 4th anniversary of Disrupt For Good, started so long ago now with my New Year’s Revolution/40th Birthday Manifesto. We’ve covered a lot of ground together in those four years, and more recently, our discussion has centred around what I think are some key shifts we need to make together to be most impactful in our work and to continue doing the disruptive work of creating the society we want to live in.  October is my favourite month - the weather, the leaves, travel for conferences, cozy sweaters, my daughters’ birthday, Thanksgiving turkey dinner, what’s not to love? However, I’ve been feeling a tension between being in my favourite month, and the harmful/ideologically-fuelled policies popping up:
And as I have turned my attention to Canadian federal politics and the polls more this fall too, things getting worse feels…inevitable. But our job is to disrupt that inevitability. For good. So I’m sharing three unrelated things that are keeping me hopeful and motivated right now.  Last month I wrote about a new word for me, acurpar. And then within days, I had a chance to practice acurpar as encampment residents were forced out of a park in Barrie. And then our premier went on TV and said people in encampments just needed to get off their A-S-S and get a job. And then the BC government yoinked harm reduction supplies. And then multiple provinces started talking about legislating involuntary treatment for mental health and addictions. And then the House of Commons went back in session, and the divisive rhetoric ramped up to 11, to the point where it seems impossible that any conversations of substance can take place this fall among our federal elected policymakers. So it’s been a rough month for the hope-y change-y crowd. It feels like a lot of ground has been lost. Mix in some energy-draining conversations in my own life, and my September fresh-start optimism had worn thin. And then. A couple of things happened.  Last September, I wrote A Nudge to Action because September always feels like a fresh start after a summer of softer schedules, and I tend to have some restless, renewed energy that I’m ready to direct…somewhere. Today, I have a new word to share with you that comes with another inherent nudge to action. And as I dug into it this week to learn more, I think I also found what I’ve been searching for for a while now: how to articulate why these shifts in how we work that I’ve been writing about are so vital. The word is acuerpar.  |
AuthorI'm Jennifer. I am an advocacy and communications strategist working with multiple charities and nonprofits. And I want to disrupt our sector for good. Archives
May 2025
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