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This month's missive is inspired by last week’s episode of my favourite podcast, Diabolical Lies, in which hosts Katie and Caro discussed the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering, and how the two intersect and conflict. It was an interesting conversation in its own right, and also, my mind kept wandering to other applications, like the institution of the social service sector and the individual experience of being a social worker. The institution isn’t just the backdrop for our experience. It shapes the conditions under which the experience happens. It shapes what we are rewarded for, what we're expected to prioritize, what counts as success, what resources are available to us, and sometimes even what we are allowed to imagine is possible. I don’t want to flatten this thought exercise into "institutions are bad and experience is good." Motherhood as an institution gives us language, community, resources, social recognition, expectations, and norms. But it also carries assumptions about what a “good” mother should be. Likewise, the nonprofit sector gives us shared language, infrastructure, funding, professional identities, career paths, communities of practice, and ways of organizing. But it, too, carries assumptions about what “good” work looks like. It can get interesting when those assumptions don't line up with why we thought we were there in the first place. 
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It seems we can never fully let our guard down these days, and I have been really troubled by the $10M taxpayer-funded “Safer Ontario” propaganda campaign from our provincial government. This is a very slick campaign that is everywhere right now. TV commercials. Billboards. Full-page newspaper ads. Some focus on car theft. Many are about clearing encampments from parks. Where I live, this giant billboard, pictured below, is directly out front of a federally funded bridge housing site for people who have recently come from encampments. We’re experiencing new levels of government cruelty designed to fuel hatred against our unhoused neighbours. I’ve had several people ask me how we should respond, and I think the answer begins by refusing the question we’re being asked. The disagreement is not actually about whether safety matters. It’s about what creates it.  It has been a full month! Both the day I made up (Canadian Viral Hepatitis Elimination Day) and the week I made up (YIMBY Week) are in May (a bit of poor planning there, perhaps). But it means that this month I spent a day in Ottawa with some of my favourite colleagues, releasing a new report I led and meeting with policymakers, and then a week touring Simcoe County, doing flag-raisings and spreading YIMBY cheer. And of course, in between I was reading and having conversations, and the sun is finally out, so I was enjoying lunch on patios discussing life and work with friends. So today’s offering is a mix of my current thoughts on what I’m finding interesting in my work, along with experiments and reflections on how I work.  I’ve got several thoughts I want to try to connect here today, so please hang in there with me. I have spent the last several weeks working on a report called Rethinking Viral Hepatitis Prevention: Confronting Systems That Create Risk. We will launch it later this week in Ottawa. It’s an effort in reframing hepatitis risk as a result of dangerous physical and policy environments instead of dangerous people, to make the system changes that are needed more logical. The day I sent it to the printer, Barrie’s mayor announced another harmful and sweeping direct motion (no notice, no proper channels for public input) to address “lawlessness” in Barrie. I can’t link to the motion because it was never made publicly available, but I wrote a letter to the editor about it here. I felt like the report I had just written didn’t apply directly as an advocacy tool with our city council, but the framework could likely be adapted. But I also saw a very human, very real instinct playing out, one we hadn’t addressed in the hepatitis report, and I think until we talk about it, we’re going to stay stuck in this conversation about public order and consequences. That conversation, I think, is stuck because of a false binary: either you care about people, or you care about public order. Either you support compassion, or you support consequences. But real life isn’t that simple, and communities deserve better than these tired either/or frames.  Today I have two separate thoughts that, I hope, intersect in a hopeful, meaningful way for you.  Last 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.  We 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.  Today 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.  My 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.  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.  |
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
September 2026
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