Listen

Alert Bay, 2013

“When learning to see yourself as an oppressor, the experience is by definition hidden from you, because part of the process of becoming a member of an oppressor group is to be cut off from the ability to identify with the experience of the oppressed. It is this lack of empathy, this denial that anyone is hurt (at least, anyone viewed as fully human) that makes oppression possible. When the oppression is not part of your own experience, you can only understand it through hearing others’ experience, along with a process of analysis and drawing parallels.” (from Becoming an Ally, Anne Bishop, 2002).

Girls just want to have Facebook

To be honest I haven't really spent too much time thinking about the whole #deleteFacebook issue (crisis?). My reaction to the major themes: Privacy compromised--horrors! Lack of oversight--say it isn't so! Something MUST BE DONE--yawn. But this article by Vancouver-based technology critic, Alexandra Samuel, brings some new interest to the conversation. 

Samuel says, "#DeleteFacebook feels like yet another situation in which we are shaming women for using a tool that makes our unpaid and emotional labor easier." She brings a gendered perspective to the issue, and asks us to consider the role of gender politics and female vs. male communications styles in the use of social media. Samuel is also concerned about the impact that deleting Facebook will have on connections with family and friends, which is often the responsibility of women.

Am I going to #deleteFacebook? When my girlfriends go, I'll go. 

The only constant

One of the things that impacts all development strategies and all communications plans is organizational change. In a small non-profit, the role of communications in development is critical; so, too, is its role in planning for and communicating internal strategies. 

The past several months, my organization has been experiencing significant change, and in recent weeks my thoughts on communications for development have slowed down to thoughts on communications for internal change, and then focused even further to strategic communications on individual roles and projects, and in recent days I have found myself unable to think strategically at all. At times like this, I try not to "think" my way out of the flood of information and priorities, but rather to try to be more socially intelligent, creative, and intuitive until systems and structures can be redrawn. 

Organizational change has much in common with social change, and we sometimes forget that organizational change is a social and collective process, not just a technical one. There are many parallels in the way social and organization change is managed and in the formal and informal development of new systems and networks. It has been interesting for me to carry concepts of social transformation at the individual and community level while trying to manage structural change at the organizational level. 

In the meantime, I have kept an eye on the fascinating, expanding, evolving, collective and individual actions of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas Highschool including their takeover of the Guardian magazine, and the stunning financial impact of student David Hogg's retaliation against broadcaster Laura Ingraham's criticisim of him. 

Also, this is tells you everything you need to know about reconciliation:
Interview with Chief Dr. Robert Joseph and Karen Joseph from Philanthropist Journal on Vimeo.

Print advocacy by design

My organization publishes a quarterly print magazine called Focus on Adoption. We’ve been thinking about transitioning to a digital version, but each time we poll our community, they overwhelmingly favour the print edition. They would love both digital and print, they say, but very few say that their preference is digital only.

The magazine remains my favourite medium for communicating the particular issues, concerns, and stories of adoption. It is the one place where images, graphics, news, and narratives come together in a cohesive whole to provide a creative exhibit of BC’s adoption community. We’re not a professional shop, but I like to think we do a pretty good job of being the right amount of sensitive and provocative. We think long and hard about our imagery and our content, ensuring that it reflects the social and cultural milieu of adoption in BC. 

With so many different media to curate content for now, I often worry that the magazine will not survive. It seems like a luxury these days to be able to spend the many hours that are required in design, interviews, writing, and mailing to produce this journal. And yet, anytime I

talk to people outside of our organization they always bring up the magazine as being very valuable to their organization or to their work in child welfare. No one ever says that about our Twitter feed or our Facebook page.

We make Focus on Adoption available online on Issuu, an online platform that allows publishers to make their print content available online. Browsing Issuu the other day I became aware of The Eagle Eye, the student-run magazine of Marjory Stoneman Douglas Highschool in Parkland, Florida, where 17 students and teachers were killed in a mass shooting in February. The January 2018 issue of The Eagle Eye is smart, current, political, well-written, and exceptionally designed. And, sadly, naive to the events that were about to ravage the school and its community. But when you look at this clever publication with its
provocative story on rape culture, and its balanced reporting of protest kneeling in high school football, you begin to understand how this school, of all of the many schools who have endured mass shootings, was perhaps accidentally designed for this moment of powerful student advocacy.

Maybe the print environment is the right place to start thinking about the words and images and context of an issue. Maybe it's the right place to design a communications for development plan. Maybe, with all that's going on over at Facebook right now, the good old, semi-private print magazine will survive another day.

C4D Apps

Coquitlam, 2016

Over the last week I've become aware of a few different apps that have emerged or been adapted for potential use in communications for development (c4d) strategies. Some, like Kialo, have developed as a response to "fake news" on social media, and offer a more structured form of debate and dialogue. Others, like Participedia, are repositories of  community development models, research, and communications research. In some ways, it illuminates the gap that may exist in c4d--a logic model for affecting social change through communications. Prescient tools, like Blockchain for Social Impact, hold promise for more transparency in social development interactions, but have no methodology for practical application yet. 

Affinity Bridge, a Vancouver-based creative agency, has worked closely with the Vancouver Foundation on their Fostering Change campaign. The goal of Fostering Change was to improve youth homelessness by improving financial and legal support to youth, allowing them longer to secure employment, adult relationships, and finish their education. The campaign used a participatory approach, and several c4d activities including petitions, surveys, political interference, performance, and youth advisory teams all supported by Affinity Bridge. Was this a campaign using a specific c4d design and strategy? I'm not sure, and I believe the campaign design was more iterative than the final report suggests. But maybe that's the point: an effective c4d strategy has to have the right balance of strategy and iteration. 

Surface tension

In a recent article, Black Press reporter Tom Fletcher describes the “protest industry” that he suggests funds and coordinates the defense campaigns against Canadian energy projects. Fletcher says that many seemingly grassroots, spontaneous public protests are, in fact, carefully planned and managed campaigns by large, American-based organizations like the Sierra Club and 350.org. Fletcher further suggests that recent BC-based “public” opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline is actually being quietly manipulated and supported by the NDP government.

It’s interesting to think about the corporatization of public protests and their role in large social movements like environmentalism. Social movement media may include a wide variety of platforms and formats including public broadcasting, online platforms, graffiti and performance art. But the kind of social movement media that Fletcher describes is something a little different. It is perhaps more of a political and media network that uses various media tactics to build enough tension on an issue so that a singular grassroots activity can have a shattering impact. But how do transnational organizations ensure that they are using their vast funds and political and social networks to support the needs and wishes of local environments, cultures, and economic priorities? Are large, international intermediaries like the Sierra Club, Tides Canada, and the World Bank evil? Or necessary? Or both? Or neither?

Update 3/10: Watching today in Vancouver as two opposing public rallies take place for and against the Trans Mountain pipeline. Are you going to #ThinkAgain or #ProtectTheInlet?

The NRA and me

The Florida school shooting earlier in February has provided some particularly compelling examples of development communications in practice. I keep thinking about Downing's description of participatory communications as empowering "those most affected." In terms of mass shootings in the U.S., previous groups of parents, lawmakers, and citizens have certainly rallied and tried to affect change. So what's different this time? I think it's that the "those most affected" group was the discreet group of young people who survived the shooting at their school. Their vulnerability in terms of trauma and power structures became their strength, and they were empowered to speak for themselves rather than being buffered by parents and other adults. They are motivating change where others could not. 

The students' represent a clear message for change: The failure of adults to enact gun control is killing children, i.e., children's survival depends on gun control. This is a change from more abstract messages about how we manage the purchasing of guns, or the mental health of gun owners, or the political framing of "freedom" to own a gun. It is now turning to accusations of "blood money" for taking NRA funding, and masses of companies are cutting ties with the NRA and conglomerates who manufacture weapons. 

Here in Canada, Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) is being pressured to stop its distribution of outdoor gear made by a U.S. weapons manufacturer. I am an MEC member and this news made me realize that it's not just the NRA standing in the way of gun reform, it's me. Never have the negative impacts of my ignorance around my purchasing decisions been clearer. And it made me think about the way that organizations like MEC are being held to higher standards of social responsibility. Apparently, “very few boycotts ever result in a significant change in consumer behavior.” When they are effective "it’s because the announcement has grabbed the attention of the media and threatened the reputation of the company.” In this case, the downward spiral of the NRA's corporate reputation may be enough to end the tyranny of influence that has stood in the way of meaningful gun laws in the US. 


#NEVERAGAIN

Community media

"We are unaware that the city walls are alive with its social drama. We don’t hear the intricate commentaries they have to offer us about the lives, relationships and identities of those who wrote them. And why should we even care? Because…this drama, these commentaries and the vibrant subculture that lies behind them have a great deal to tell us about the culture we live in and some of the people who share it with us." ~ Nancy MacDonald, The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York.

After the riot, Vancouver 2010

Gibsons, 2017

Venice Beach, California, 2018

Burnaby, 2015

I've always had a fascination with graffiti. Maybe it's related to my background in design--certainly graffiti is font design writ large on the landscape. And maybe it's in the subversion--that the graffiti writer/designer uses space, time (as in train graffiti), and governance as elements of the communication. Graffiti must be observed within the context that it is public, ephemeral, and illegal. So, maybe it's that it's anti-capitalist. Bradley Bartolomeo writes that “Graffiti writing is one of the easiest and most efficient ways for individuals and opposing groups to register political dissidence, express social alienation, propagate anti-system ideas, and establish an alternative collective memory." 

Social movement media

Grand Chief Ed John is the author of a seminal report on Indigenous child welfare in BC published in 2016. The report begins with and expands on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's recommendations and makes them relevant to child welfare issues in BC. The report, along with the TRC recommendations, has provided a necessary roadmap for Indigenous child welfare change in BC. It is a great example of a Communication for Development and Social Change (CDSC) strategy, meant to influence power, decisions, and social change in political environments as well as communities (Wilkins, 2014). 

John was the keynote speaker at a fundraising gala I recently attended. Before he spoke he showed a video made by and featuring youth of Tachie of the Tl'azt'en Nation, his home nation. Why Me? is a powerful visual message that hopes to illuminate and destroy misconceptions about the youth of Tl'azt'en Nation. This example of citizens' media shows how small, local media projects by ordinary community members can have broader impact (Wilkins, 2014).


For CDSC strategies to be effective they need some combination of the robust, long-form, participatory types of research projects like the Ed John report combined with the visual, emotional impact of a citizen-led, 'nano-media' project like Why Me? (Wilkins, 2014). These combinations of (mostly) small and large social movement media are the necessary elements of creating layered and systemic change (2014). Downing (2014) confirms, "[W]e have to acknowledge macro-media ­and nano-media as symbiotic, imbricated worlds, not as an absolute, mutually repelling binary" (2014, p.333).



Reference: Hamelink, Cees J. (2014). Chapter 5: Equality and human rights. In K.G. Wilkins, T. Tufte & R. Obregon (Eds.),  Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change (pp.72-91).

I'm back

Sharing trail food at Clo-oose, BC

"Community is the unit of change.The only way we get through difficult times is together." 
~  Margaret Wheatley

My journey from BA Communications to MA Community Development began on the West Coast Trail in Clo-oose, a small village of the Ditidaht people near the west end of Nitinat Lake. A family of three children, father, and grandfather lived close to the trail, and were offering meals to hikers of home-smoked salmon. Tired and hungry, we stopped to rest and enjoy a meal of actual not dried food. The children were particularly curious about the various equipment we had, and I was anxious to talk to them about their home in such a spectacular part of the world. I don't remember all of the father's story but it included being taken away from his land to a residential school, and his anger with his father for letting him go. Father and son had worked hard on forgiveness, and their return to the land included a commitment to raise their children and grandchildren on their land forever. The children were delightful and I was happy to share the Smarties from my trail mix in exchange for some tips for finding leaves to use as toilet paper and their eager laughs and smiles.

I have pulled out the photo of me and the children at Clo-oose several times over the years as a way of grounding myself in who I am as a person and as a professional. I believe strongly in community development done at a micro scale, and I do my best communications work when it involves, respects, and includes the history and the culture of the people I am working with and for. I believe in sitting down with children to understand what is best and delightful and simple about a place, as well as listening to their parents and grandparents about what is historical, complicated, and tragic. 

Communications for development has layers and paradigms and theories for understanding and framing my work as a communications professional. But all that I need to know about participatory communications I learned from a Ditidaht family at Clo-oose on a hot day in the middle of an exhausting hike.