Disrupt for Good: Field notes pt. 2

Last month, I started sharing some field notes on my recent experiences practicing shifts in how I live and work. My story about shifting from certainty to curiosity in Saskatoon got long, so I saved my story of shifting from activism to organizing in the Yukon for today. I hope it inspires you as much as it inspired me!

From Activism to Organizing
One of the shifts I am making in my life and work is from activism to organizing. Of course, I can’t find the exact definition that I like right now, but I’ll paraphrase it here. I believe that I first came across it in a podcast interview with Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, authors of Let This Radicalize You. 

As I remember, they said that activism is getting involved in causes that resonate with you personally, while organizing involves sitting with communities, listening to what matters most to them, and organizing around that. 

(This article and this article responding to the first article get into the difference a bit more. I’ve also written a bit about organizing here.)

To me, this shift is a natural progression after moving from charity to solidarity. 

I have an especially good opportunity to practice this shift in my work at Action Hepatitis Canada. I lead this advocacy coalition of 84 member groups, so it is natural to sit with our members, hear what is important to them, and then build our work around those priorities. 

In June, I had the opportunity to go a step further by heading to the Yukon to better understand how hepatitis C treatment access was playing out at the community level. I was joined by a seasoned hepatitis C nurse and we met up with our friends from Blood Ties Four Directions Centre, our member group in the Yukon. We had been told that all hepatitis C treatment prescriptions were written by a specialist who flew in from B.C. a few times each year and that he only came to Whitehorse, but that there wasn’t a treatment access issue in the Yukon. Our members had alerted us that actually, and obviously, there were lots of people not getting tested and treated because of the travel requirements.

So we went to the Yukon to talk to people and get the community perspective to take back to the government. This is the liaison role we have found to be effective. The hepatitis C team had this idea that travelling to Whitehorse wasn’t a health equity issue, but they hadn’t really gone into the communities to ask. With Blood Ties’ relationships in the community, we were able to talk to a lot of people and get the real scoop.  

When we brought back quotes from the communities about the many, many barriers created by requiring people to travel to Whitehorse for a specialist appointment, we had all the credibility because we had done the field work and they had not. 

And a fabulous thing happened. Every community organization we spoke to saw a role for themselves in creating community-based care paths for hepatitis C and offered to help with awareness and testing campaigns once the treatment pathway was cleared. 

We didn’t say, this is what you need to do. We said, is this a barrier, and does it matter? In six days, we had advocates in Whitehorse, Haines Junction, Mayo, Dawson City, Yukon Council of First Nations, and Indigenous Services Canada rallied around a unified policy ask to the Yukon government and offering up time and resources to empower their community members through testing and education. It was inspiring, and I’m even more committed to identifying as an organizer.