Peter: You mention leadership – when you talk about leadership within the context of knowledge exchange, how do we have to think about leadership differently?
Cathy: Good leadership in knowledge exchange is having the courage to question some of the assumptions behind it and to push boundaries. And so for me early on, good leadership was the idea that we could share information differently. That in it of itself was good leadership in this area. And then I began to think that good leadership was about actually really stepping back and re-examining our assumptions about knowledge – about who's knowledge – about what knowledge for what purpose. And what…the thinking that I've been doing recently is on this whole idea of lateral knowledge exchange where we're not talking about people who have solutions for problems and handing them over, but rather we're talking about again, coming to a mutual understanding about what the issues are or what the problems are and mutual and collective figuring out of how might we go about solving these? And that's….many people who talk about knowledge mobilization haven't even begun…begun to think about what might be involved in supporting dialogue – in supporting ongoing dialogue – never ending dialogue with an idea of coming to some mutual understanding as the goal and then some collective action taking perhaps. That's often not the goal. So I think the leadership is about trying to help people get to a different place and to be really open to where that knowledge might come from.
One of the examples that I can give is around our work with First Nations communities in the North where people reached out to us from the North and said, “Can you help us?” There was an idea because we were a southern-based knowledge-based organization; we might have some resources or knowledge that could be useful to them. Well in fact, we don't but we went and we said, “How can we help?” So that was our first, kind of paradigm-breaking…a step that was to say, “you've asked for our help, we need to know what you think we might be able to do – how we might be able to help you”. And I have knowledge and experience in the area of suicide so I certainly went with some knowledge into this process and yet we learned so much about how suicide is understood within First Nations communities with the stigma and the impact that stigma has. And while some of those issues might be the same in the communities that I'm familiar with here in Southern Ontario, they get talked about differently, they get handled differently, it means something different when the community is of 200 people versus Toronto of 2.5 million. And so without that sharing or without taking the time to ask to try to understand “well what does it mean to talk about suicide in your community?” From the get-go, we would have done terrible things if we hadn't taken those steps - I'm convinced. And one of the other things that we learned was that there are young people in the North who are grappling first hand with these issues. They have ideas about how to tackle them. So we decided at our job was to support them, to put their ideas forward.
Very few organizations are really open to re-thinking how they do what they do. So what we did in that instance is we discovered that our job was really to be an ambassador for them, to help make connections for them in the South, to help draw people to listen to them, to help remind non-aboriginal people that First Nations people have their own solutions and that if we actually listened and asked, we might actually help them to implement them. This is pretty ground breaking stuff to other people who think of First Nations issues as another charity that they ought to give some support to or give some attention to. So it's just…it's about really re-thinking – not presuming, asking questions, and again entering into partnerships to try to figure out, “how can we help make change happen?”. Peter: Part of what I'm hearing is that everybody knows something – that they have knowledge but the capacity to take what they know and put it into action may be different. One of the - I think the challenges is that you talk about the difference between the North and the South is the knowledge that people hold or the evidence. When you hear the word evidence, what do you think of? What does evidence mean to you?
Cathy: It does always mean to me, right off the bat, something established through scientific method. It always does. That's where, I think about it and I think carefully about it and then I distinguish evidence from knowledge lets say. And then I think about ‘well what does any of this mean to someone's experience – let's say of suicide? ' And ‘why is, what is learned through the scientific method necessarily more important or more valuable then what someone learns through their own experience? ' And I'm always wondering and balancing those different sources of knowledge – perhaps different sources of evidence about a problem. Peter: So are they on a hierarchy? Is one better than the other or how do they relate? I mean I know you're trying to balance and I'm trying to pull that out a little bit – of, there's this movement and it's talked about as evidence-based decision making but we know that people make decisions all the time, regardless of what the evidence says. If they don't have good evidence or they don't have good scientific data, they are still going to make decisions and all sorts of actions follow from that. So maybe lets start with evidence-based decision-making – what does that mean?
Cathy: Maybe it means something grounded in reality. So a decision that's being made based on something and hopefully that something has something to do with the issue at hand as opposed to it being something external – that in theory shouldn't weigh on the decision-making. But of course we know money decides things, priorities decide things, what is the latest fear that's being experienced by the public? All of those things enter into decision-making. When is the decision-making based on what the evidence is telling us when we ought to be doing and when is it happening completely independent of that? And I guess what I think about is, ‘what's the evidence?' And what makes some evidence more worthy than other evidence? And I guess the culture that we live in right now says that evidence that come through the scientific method is the better evidence – it is the gold star evidence and there's lots of merit in that but my concern is that sometimes, often it's put forward without consideration to other kinds of knowing – other kinds of experience that are also very important to bring to bear on the matter. Peter: So is it possible to bring them together? One of the conversations I had with someone else talked about the exchange process. That the coming face-to-face - you can actually have that intersection, except that there's a difference between the competition of perspectives and then trying to collaboratively build understanding and take action based on that understanding. How do you avoid the inevitable competition of opinions or competition of perspectives?
Cathy: I think it's very difficult, however I think it can be done. And I've lived it in the work that I've been doing where, through the Kids Grow Ontario initiative, it's been about “what does science have to tell us about how the kids are doing in the Province?” And it's been about ‘alright, how do we involve more people in that process and how do we help more people understand what the science has to tell us and how do we somehow get the science to connect with everyday living? ' And recognizing that that divide exists is half the battle. And then it's about engaging in that relationship or those relationships and the dialogue where we go back and forth – we go back and forth. We've arm-wrestled, we've debated, we've discussed. And I don't know that it's as much about opinion as it is about ‘here is the evidence, okay well what do we do with it given that it doesn't make any sense to anybody? ' So it's the back and forth has been, how do we apply it, how do we make meaning out of it, how do we put it to work when it isn't landing anywhere because people just don't get it? And it's the learning that can go on in all the corridors then involved in that dialogue because I've worked with researchers who refer to children as cases, who refer to children's issues as you know, using such technical language that I don't actually think we're talking about children anymore. And so they need to understand, that that kind of language and that terminology is already setting them and their knowledge apart from the very people that they are trying to relate to. So it's a dance, it's an arm-wrestle, it's an exchange but I think throughout, it's this ongoing dialogue – it's that back and forth. Peter: So how do you support that back and forth? There's lots of talk about the Web right? Facebook, Youtube, and Google and all of these electronic tools help this back and forth. Does this happen on the Web or is it face-to-face? What is the best way to support that exchange?
Cathy: In my very limited experience with this, as we learn as we go, I'm going to say it's through dialogue and it's primarily face-to-face but I've lived it happening on the phone. It doesn't happen as well using words through email for example. I would say it's strongly a face-to-face interpersonal interaction. Peter: So at one level then, it's political? It's that discussion that's going on yet politics – in a conversation that I had this morning that decisions get made within bureaucracies and decisions get made within the political world and sometimes the two don't mesh very well. And so how do you allow people to enter into those debates in way that's informed? One of the other interviews I heard is about learned helplessness, that people don't …they don't know how to learn about the processes that are affecting their lives so they don't engage in the dialogue that you're talking about. And so how do you support the ongoing learning process for people to enter into that dialogue?
Cathy: You start early which goes back to our earlier conversation, “how do we help that from the beginning?” And I think again you then create processes that help all of us learn how we can do it better and differently next time. And so for example, Bill 165 – one of our tasks was to take a 45-page piece of legislation and try to make sense of it, not only for young people but for any adult who didn't write it and who isn't a lawyer let's say. Peter: So what is Bill 165?
Cathy: That's the legislation to establish an independent advocate for children and youth in the Province of Ontario. And we gave up trying to translate it because there isn't enough time in the day to actually come up with a way to take something that is at it's core, inaccessible. And so we decided than to just try to extract the ten most important things that this legislation would want us to know. And we did this and we shared it with a group of youth and we said “would this help you to understand Bill 165 so that you can go in a talk to the committee about what you think is good about the Bill and what you think should change about the Bill.” And they said, “it's still too long, it's still too complicated – we really don't get it”. And so it wasn't then just the words on paper that were going to help them, it was the conversation where they could say to us, “it still doesn't make sense, we're still nervous about going to the committee. We still don't understand really, what we're there to do”. Because the whole idea of them being involved in this political process is completely foreign to them and interestingly, as we've shared the information with other people or around them, they've all said “this is the first time I've understood a piece of legislation – this is the first time I've understood that Bills go through these various readings and now the public has a say”. We had to actually take this whole process and break it down into steps and lead people through it and this was a new experience for adults. And so here we talk about influencing the policy process, and yet it's a completely foreign activity for most of us. Peter: So your organization is acting as a facilitator for that process? How did you become a facilitator?
Cathy: I think we took it on ourselves. I think that's where Voices has a knack for trying to figure out how can we help in this instance? But I want to be really clear, we've primarily played the information facilitation role and I guess the point I wanted to get at before was, the young people groups that are coming in to present are the people who have a relationship with another individual who works at the Child Advocacy office who they trust and when this person says, “come, it will be good, it will be worth your while, you'll get a chance to say something to people in power that you've never been able to say.” - they're coming because of that relationship. Voices is helping in a small way and again I think we could have put even more energy into the translation of the content and yet we might never have had a single group turn up to speak because it took the relationship that these young people have and the adults connected to them with this other figure to actually get them there. I think we've eased it; we've helped but it was the relationship that is actually going to deliver I think. Peter: You mentioned the word trust. What do you mean by trust?
Cathy: I guess it's almost like shorthand in this instance, the example that I'm thinking of - it's like shorthand for ‘it's okay, you can do this. This person wouldn't ask you to get involved in something that he hadn't figured out already, is an ok thing for you to be involved with'. Peter: So as a trusted individual in a trusted organization – and that's how I've heard Voices for Children described – how do you maintain that trust? Cathy: Depending on who's involved and I'll give you again, another youth oriented example, when I've supported young people to talk about what it's like to be excluded, to not have their views welcome at a table, I'll say to them “how can I help you?” and they'll say, “we have all these ideas” and they'll start to talk and I'll say, “ would it help if I write them down?” So I actually…I think one of the ways I've earned their trust is because I'm willing to check with them about what I can do to be helpful to them. And I always feel like I'm taking a very back seat, supportive role. And my sense is that that allows them to really feel like it's their thing – they're doing it but I'm coming along and I'm being a support. And we ended up in a situation last year where we were invited – I, as an adult, was invited to do some workshops on youth engagement and I said, “I won't come unless I can bring young people – it's their workshop to give.” And so then I said to the young people, “do you want to go and do this?” and they said, “we do, but we won't go without you”. And I said, “why not” and they said, “because we don't think the adult in the workshop will listen to us if you're not there”. And so again, I guess it's about being willing to position yourself or to be supportive or to help, in ways that are actually helpful. Peter: The example you just gave involves youth and adults and you can see that there's a difference in terms of perspective or hierarchy. But what about between organizations that are both adult – how do you facilitate that process? How do you allow organizations to learn from one another?
Cathy: That is so much what Voices wants to be able to do and we're not there yet. One of the roles that we've played with a lot of research-oriented organizations is we've said, “can we help you communicate with more people about the issues that you know a great deal about?” And they say, “yes”. And we usually enter into a kind of writing exchange of information and ideas. And I guess one of the ways that we've gained people's trust is that we've said, “we've got ideas about how we think things ought to be communicated” but we'd always check those ideas out with them – we always work them through with them. And no words ever get used that aren't absolutely the words that they are comfortable using. But we go through a long process to get there but in the end, my impression is that the people…from the people that we've worked with is, they feel that they can trust us because really we've been a vehicle to help them more clearly articulate what they are trying to get to. If Voices for Children can play that kind of a role, and maybe it's slightly different depending on the organization or the individuals, young people or adults working in organizations, achieve something maybe that's how we help them realize that it takes more of us to do this. That going along on a single path with a one way only way to do it, is never really going to get them very much further than just a couple of more steps down that path.
Peter: Currently what are the greatest challenges that you're running into? Cathy: The greatest challenge for me at Voices for Children now is trying to carve out that role – actually naming that role and I'm hoping that at the end of our interview today you're going to have a name for it and I'll have this challenge solved. But essentially it's that facilitator role – how do we facilitate change? How do we work in this environment, under these conditions with the challenges and the opportunities that we have to actually facilitate change for children and with children? And this is an unusual proposition I think because organizations typically deliver services or produce research – they don't actually try to get at that task of facilitating change. So our challenge is, how do we find a focus or how do we focus ourselves so that we're always doing that and not maybe doing some of the work that is better done by other people for example? So the greatest reward will be is if we can crack this and actually find a valuable way for Voices to use itself to support that change where we're really helping flow of information, where we're really helping those organizations who need certain kinds of resources or supports. If there's actually a way for Voices to use itself to make that happen, that will be my greatest satisfaction. Peter: In ten years what would be different?
Cathy: For me it's about systems opening up. It's about systems investing in dialogue and exchange and imagining other ways of doing business. I guess just to go back to your question about inspiration – it's hearing about things that are being done in completely different ways that some of us have never thought of and I think “oh my gosh, there's so much out there that's being done. How can we help share this so that it either becomes the inspiration for someone else to do it or it become the means for someone else to imitate and do it? It's fundamentally about systems changing – about systems opening up and about us having more sources of ideas, more sources of who we see as being valuable contributors of those ideas. And also really believing that many of us can make change – that it isn't the task of the chosen few. Really, many of us can make change and I'll just give you one tiny example: we held an event on bullying – we made it a public event and we said, “children welcome”. We had no idea what was going to happen or what difficulty we might be getting ourselves into. But our idea was, let's be very clear that this is a welcome environment and we're here talking about issues that affect kids; kids are welcome. And we had an eight-year old boy in the audience (who) put up his hand and asked a question and he said, “How will I know if my friends are being bullied?” That was his question, and we had three researchers or top experts answering this kid's question. And you just don't know when these moments are going to happen where you get this wonderful exchange. And what was also so powerful about that was the researchers, for very good reason, were talking about the need to promote healthy relationships in children. Very important, but that really was not the question that this boy was there….and that wasn't what was on his mind and so when he said, “how will I know?”, that reminded the researchers and everybody else in the audience that this kid had a very basis piece of information that he really needed because he was going to put it to work if his friends were ever engaging in behaviors that were going to alert him that there was a bullying problem going on. And I just love the idea that we had the experts and the eight-year old on the same page at the same time.
Peter: Great. Cathy as always, this is terrific – thank you.
Cathy: Thank you.
