Comment North 1
Making Change
After a challenging workweek, a group of five women from Smithers with jobs on the frontlines in health, literacy, education and child development meet on Fridays at a local pub and bistro.
Yet this isn’t a traditional TGIF—the “Thank Goodness It’s Friday” ritual of blowing off steam with friends and talking about anything but the job.
These five are meeting to discuss and explore their work under a formal, organized system as part of a casual coalition called the Rural Roots Peer Learning Network. And the same volunteer effort is also taking place within groups of community practitioners in Houston, Hazelton and Terrace.
“Most working in community development and the social and health fields end up in crisis mode because of the social circumstances of people you work with and because of lack of organizational resources. You are always just putting out fires instead of thinking about the bigger picture,” said Shelley Worthington, implementation manager of the Make Children First learning initiative in Smithers.
But why would anyone with such stressful work want to give up their own time outside of their job to meet with other equally taxed colleagues to discuss their practice?
“The work we do is first and foremost about being citizens of remote, rural communities and working towards building a healthier community in which to live. That is why everyone is working way beyond the funding given to each of their organizations,” said Anne Docherty, an informal educator with Storytellers’ Foundation in Hazelton and coordinator of the Rural Roots network. “In defining themselves as citizens first, community practitioners participating in the network are naturally immersed in the difficult conditions many fellow community members are facing.”
The social circumstances and conditions noted by Worthington and Docherty are daunting in the communities from Houston to Haida Gwaii, where Rural Roots is focused. The population within this region faces severe challenges in education, health and employment. In fact, work undertaken by the Canadian Community Economic Development Network determined that the northwest region is considered the worst in the province of British Columbia in terms of social and economic health.
These dire social and economic realities are interconnected with issues of health, literacy, and historic influences of colonization and corporate control of government agendas. This means that when there is a healthy economy throughout the region, a large percentage of the population still isn’t able to find employment. Many of those who are working are dependent on resource extraction, particularly the forest industry.
As is common in resource extraction economies, employees often have a low level of formal education, and with the ‘globalization’ of the region’s economy, many of those currently working are also at threat of becoming unemployed.
“This social and economic reality is complex. It is easy for literacy and health practitioners to become overwhelmed, frustrated and discouraged,” said Docherty. “Practitioners are already overburdened working in front-line programming, and yet we can’t forget the systemic influences that have created the need for such programming in the first place.”
The socioeconomic complexities that these practitioners end up considering when reflecting on their work often come as questions. Questions like: in a land where there is an abundance of sought-after natural resources, why is unemployment running at twice, four times and, in some communities, more than ten times the provincial average? Or, why are people in our region experiencing hunger and nutrition-related disease when local food sources, from agriculture and from ecosystems, are plentiful? And why, if 70% of the new revenue generated in the province comes from non-urban areas like our region, is there severe underfunding of literacy, health and community development locally?
These questions are large, but they are grounded in the reality of the injustices practitioners see, and are touched by, every day. They raise issues regarding the systems put in place by government policy. In this perspective, the work of those community practitioners in Rural Roots is political in that they are devoted to working towards the greater common good and overcoming imposed injustice.
Most community practitioners know systemic change is necessary for them to be able to address the real reasons they have clients in the first place. But the busy-ness of their jobs—the constant “putting out of fires” as Worthington describes it—makes it nearly impossible to find the time within the job to thoughtfully explore the changes necessary and feed that back into the system.
What is lacking is support for these community practitioners to engage in the network, or simply the time to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. The regional literacy coordinator, for example, covers an area of approximately 250,000 sq kilometres with a total population of about 80,000 on 18 hours a week. Similarly, the regional community food nutritionist is allotted a mere two days a month in Hazelton—centre for a Type II diabetes-susceptible population. Or the community economic development officer in Houston, who has 20 hours a week to help build a local economy knowing the world’s biggest sawmill on the edge of town has just cut back on its shifts by 33%.
In summing up her frustration about what she sees as a question of the priorities defined by the systems we support, one community practitioner said, “As a manager in a large forest company my husband is constantly meeting with colleagues and they are [talking about] producing two-by-fours. We are talking about producing lives here in our jobs, and I work in more isolation than he does.”
Producing two-by-fours versus improving lives provokes what may be the most crucial question posed by practitioners for the rest of us in communities: are we satisfied with devoting more time, energy and finances to the production of objects, such as dimensional lumber, than to supporting people trying to make positive change in their lives?
Ultimately, the answer may not be an either/or proposition. But for those community practitioners meeting on their own time under Rural Roots, like the TGIF group, the current reality they face leads them to believe that some in our society have already made a choice. And yet, as they meet together and connect with others in neighbouring communities, they continue to be hopeful that more of us will take the time to consider the type of society we want to be part of.
By: Linda Pierre
29 December 2006