|
In 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. 
0 Comments
This 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.  When 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.
All 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.  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.  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.  |
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
October 2025
Categories |
RSS Feed
|
|