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Welcome to Episode 46 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I’m joined by Ibukun Abejirinde and Nancy Clark to talk about their work looking at how to re-imagine digital or virtual health care through a compassionate lens, focusing on Newcomers to Canada.

In an article Ibukun wrote for Canadian Diversity she wrote that it is “relevant to explore if and how the digitization of health care impacts the experience of compassionate care for marginalized groups, including immigrants and refugees.” How do Newcomers experience virtual care? How do they experience compassionate health care in general? With a number of colleagues Ibukun and Nancy continue to work on this question as well as new lines of inquiry regarding the overall settlement experience and the role of digital technology in supporting the settlement experience and setting newcomers up for success. I think their research focuses on some essential questions that should impact the entire Newcomer-serving sector’s approach to digital transformation, hybrid service delivery, and how we can ensure that our virtual and hybrid services are equally compassionate, client centred, and ultimately focused on meeting the needs of our clients and communities.

Some of the questions we discussed:

• Ibukun, in your article for Canadian Diversity, you wrote that it is “relevant to explore if and how the digitization of health care impacts the experience of compassionate care for marginalized groups, including immigrants and refugees.” How do Newcomers experience virtual care? How do they experience compassionate health care in general?
• What lessons have you learned in your study? What recommendations do you have for health care practitioners as well as settlement practitioners?
• What kind of investments are needed to ensure that virtual care is compassionate, appropriate, equitable, and accessible for Newcomers?
• Access is a huge issue in many areas, such as language, transportation, systems navigation, etc. But when it comes to virtual care, digital access is something we need to talk about. Where does digital inclusion fit into a vision for compassionate virtual care for Newcomers? What needs to be done or considered?
• Your work fits into an ongoing body of work and I’m curious where you see next steps for what you’ve learned and have been sharing. For example, recently Access Alliance with other partners published A qualitative study on the Virtual Emergency Department care experiences of equity-deserving populations. They found that “Patients from equity-deserving populations described negative past experiences with ED in-person care, which included recounts of discrimination or culturally insensitive care while waiting to see the ED physician or nurse. Conversely, participants found the Virtual ED to be a socially and culturally safe space since they could now by-pass the waiting room experience. However, virtual care could not replace in-person care for certain issues (e.g., physical exam), and there was a need for greater promotion of the service to specific communities that might benefit from having access to the Virtual ED.” They also found that there were digital inclusion barriers to accessing the Virtual ED, but that patients from equity-deserving populations might still choose the Virtual experience because of poor past experiences. What does it tell us about the state of care when, even with barriers and imperfections, people from equity-deserving populations would choose a digital experience over an in-person experience for their health care?
• Where do you hope to see your work go from here?

Some useful resources:

• Beyond Technology, Beyond Healthcare: Promoting Equitable and Integrated Supports for Newcomers and Refugees in Canada project website which also credits other project team members
• “Digital Crossroads” Comic Book
• Settlement Journey Map
• Ibukun on the Good Tech, Compassionate Healthcare Podcast
• Canadian Diversity article by Ibukun and colleagues: Beyond Technology: Digital Health Compassion for Canadian Immigrants and Refugees

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation using Otter.ai. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.

Marco Campana 0:00
Welcome to Episode 46 of the technology and human services podcast. In this episode, I’m joined by Ibukun Abejirinde and Nancy Clark to talk about their work looking at how to reimagine digital or virtual healthcare through a compassionate lens, focusing on newcomers to Canada. In an article Ibukun wrote for Canadian diversity, she wrote, it is relevant to explore if and how the digitization of healthcare impacts the experience of compassionate care for marginalized groups, including immigrants and refugees. So how do newcomers experience virtual care? How do they experience compassionate healthcare in general? With a number of colleagues, Ibukun and Nancy, continue to work on this question, as well as new lines of inquiry regarding the overall settlement experience in the role of digital technology in supporting the settlement experience, setting newcomers up for success. I think their research focuses on some essential questions that should impact the entire newcomer serving sectors, approach to digital transformation, hybrid service delivery, and how we can ensure that our virtual and hybrid services are equally compassionate, client centered and ultimately focus on meeting the needs of our clients and communities. I think you’ll enjoy this conversation. Welcome to the technology and human services Podcast. I’m going to let you both introduce yourselves and and a bit about your work before we kind of dive in. So Ibukun why don’t we start with you?

Ibukun Abejirinde 1:18
All right, thanks, Marco, very lovely to be in this conversation with you and Nancy. So my name is Ibukun Abejirinde. I’m a scientist at the Institute for Better Health, which is Research and Innovation Hub within Trillium Health Partners. And I’m also an assistant professor at the Dala Lana School of Public Health University of Toronto. So my work is really applied research, where I ask very interesting questions with the aim of addressing complex healthcare problems, and I focus on health inequity digital technology and what these mean for marginalized populations and how they access and experience quality healthcare. A lot of my work partners very closely with patients and caregivers, policy makers, community organizations, researchers from different disciplines, and I kind of focus more extensively on immigrants and refugees, racialized communities and older adults. And so that’s sort of the hat I’m wearing coming to this conversation. This conversation.

Marco Campana 2:24
Awesome. Welcome and thank you for joining. Nancy. Please introduce yourself and your work.

Nancy Clark 2:29
Hi Marco. Thanks for the intro, and thanks to Ibukun. Yeah, I’m an Associate Professor at the School of Nursing at the University of Victoria in Canada, British Columbia, my program of research focuses on refugee mental health. I’ve been a mental health clinician for about 30 years, so most of my work has been in clinical practice. I came to academia later than most people, and I really try to focus on the issue of equity and why people are experiencing barriers, and how can we make the healthcare experience equitable but also a friendly place to go to. So I think a lot of people sometimes talk about access and equity, but we also need to think about the quality of care. So what is, what is caring? How do we care for people like Ibukun? I’m interested in what we call, what we might categorize as marginalized communities, but looking at the structural pieces of that. So what are the policies, the bigger pieces that are sort of creating those barriers, but also what works, and why does it work for some people and not other people? So that’s sort of me in a in a nutshell, and really interested in advancing mental health outside of the mainstream. So looking at the social determinants of mental health, such as poverty, housing, social support, and for me, being an intersectionality scholar, gender is always at the forefront of how that works and how that plays out in terms of power relationships and things like that, so that that’s sort of my work. Awesome.

Marco Campana 4:29
Thank you both very much for joining. And that notion of intersectionality Nancy is something I think will be a thread through this conversation. Because, again, as we mentioned before we started this, this conversation is about about health care and virtual health care and equity and health care and digital equity, but it, but it also is where it intersects with newcomers in particular and other equity deserving groups. And I think that that thread throughout is where people who are going to be listening are going to be quite interested. So I want to set the stage a little bit, because we came at this originally, I became out of your out of two. Projects, right? So the first was looking at a project to reimagine virtual healthcare with a compassionate lens. So not just how do we do virtual healthcare, because the mechanics of that you can find everywhere, but how do we do it compassionately, in particular with newcomers to Canada. And then that work, as you explained to me, has evolved into new lines of kind of questions and inquiry, looking at the whole did the whole settlement experience, and where digital technology fits in, supporting that experience and ensuring that newcomers are set up for success. And so the so again, the first project kind of focused on virtual care, but you’ve expanded beyond that. And so I want to kind of set the stage for people in my audience who are more probably on the settlement side. And let’s talk a little bit about what you mean, or how you define virtual health care, and what does it mean to provide compassionate care in that setting. Okay.

Ibukun Abejirinde 5:54
Thanks, Marco, so the way we how we came to this work, was really within the context of the pandemic, and the fact that public health restrictions meant that people could not access healthcare. Most people could not access healthcare in the brick and mortar way, and everybody had to go rely on digital technology so broadly when we’re talking about virtual care, it’s a term that describes all forms of remote interactions between a patient and their care providers or their circle of care, and using digital technologies, information and communication solutions to support service delivery in healthcare, enable it, provide it, deliver it. So it includes things like remote monitoring technologies, having a conversation or an appointment with your clinician over the telephone or over a video call, even messaging, right? So sometimes you have this portals where a patient could send messages about the way that we failing communicate with a nurse practitioner provider over a portal, so emails, text message and all of that falls into virtual care. But for the particular projects we’re going to speaking about today, we kind of honed in specifically on video and telephone clinical encounters, because those were the most one the two modalities that were mostly used during the pandemic, but also by newcomer group. Yeah, so that’s that’s on virtual care for compassion. I think it’s such a complex term, and I did some work as part of this project to sort of understand how it was being conceptualized and defined differently. And I find that it’s it’s this very multi dimensional phenomenon that varies per individual, and individuals have varying expectations and experiences. But one source that I frequently go to that I think gives a very clear and straightforward answer on what does compassionate care mean? Is the Oxford Handbook of compassion science, and the way they describe and define compassion is that it’s a state of concern for someone else’s suffering or the need of someone else that has been unmet, accompanied by a desire to alleviate or address that suffering. But nobody really goes around talking about, oh, I had a visit with my doctor and it was compassionate, right? What we use are like proxy indicators and tangible descriptors of compassion care. So when you hear people talking about trustworthiness of the care or the way they felt that their clinical encounter had dignity embedded, or that they have a positive relationship with their primary care provider, or they felt respected, or that somebody was provided empathic care, all of that, those are descriptors of compassionate care. And I think what makes compassion such an important concept to dig into within healthcare generally, but also within the context of digitally enabled service delivery, is evidence is showing how intricately linked the concept of compassion and how people experience and operationalize it is linked to how they perceive care in general. So a number of interesting studies have come out regarding that. In fact, one recently published from a compassion lab in from the University of Calgary, where they they looked at the experiences of 4500 patients in 14 emergency departments across Alberta, and found that compassion was key to how patients rated the quality of care that they received. I think one thing that was very important, and I’ll probably hand over to Nancy to speak to this, is that study showed that women and indigenous patients reported lower compassion scores. South Asian patients report. Significantly lower ratings than white participants, and so it was showing that patients views were modified along demographic, cultural, ethnic lines. And for our study, we used our intersectional lens as well to unpack and make sense of how are newcomers experiencing virtual care on arriving to Canada and trying to navigate the healthcare system, and that became set the stage for our exploratory work. But I’ll let Nancy perhaps speak to intersectionality, how we conceptualize it, and what does this mean for understanding this work.

Nancy Clark 10:36
Thanks Ibukun, that’s a really interesting lens that you bring around compassionate care, especially when we think about the context of the healthcare crisis, the increasing migration, or lack of migration, that’s happening at the borders in the context of covid 19, and the fact that you drew attention to the role of virtual slash digital care in that context and where we are. Now, one thing that’s come out clearly during, I would say, covid 19 is, as you’ve heard, this sort of acronym, that it was a social X ray to see of where things are in terms of the disproportionate impacts of who is the most marginalized. And I’ll talk about intersectionality in a second. But one thing in that context that stood out for me, what you were talking about, was this notion of compassion, and I can’t help but think about also, sort of the other side of that, which might be burnout, in terms of what we heard, what happened during covid 19, and so how things started to crumble, which then impacted Those communities and populations that are racialized, that are newcomers, etc, etc. So there’s this big, broader, I think, structural piece, and that’s really what intersectionality, I think, if we could, it’s a very complex idea, but essentially it’s trying to get at, how do we disrupt and enable those structural pieces to make it equitable for all? And so that, you know, when we look at the UN Global Development Goals now, it’s like, you know, we don’t want to leave anybody behind, and yet, we’re looking at who’s the most impacted, one of the or sorry, affected by these structural processes that don’t work for everybody. So because of their unique social positioning, such as their ethnic background, their migration status, their literal literacy status. So the other thing that you mentioned was that women, I think you mentioned women and indigenous people, had lower experience of compassion. And that’s very interesting when you come at it from a gender based analysis, because typically, we know that women tend to be constructed as care providers, as people that can access resources and supports in different ways than Men and other genders, because of perhaps femininity or masculinity, and often those things are so. So it’s interesting because you specifically drew on women, but what we see in the bigger discourses in terms of forced migration and also resettlement is that the voices of men and their vulnerabilities are excluded, and so one of the things that we have to think about when we’re reading these kinds of data is to potentially not reinforce those marginalizations and potentially not reinforce stereotypes. IE, women are vulnerable, men are tough and strong. These are just very basic sort of ideas. But these notions prevail throughout and so when we think about constructing or CO creating, how digital technologies can really address some of those inequities, we have to be kind of thinking about, well, what do we already know that works and doesn’t work, and how are we sort of perpetuating or reinforcing some of those ideas within these new AI technologies and things? And I apologize if that’s a. An abstract idea, but it really comes back to, I think the essence of intersectionality is those identity constructs that shape the outcome, the health outcomes of people, and we can’t really disconnect, as you were saying, Ibukun the micro from the macro. And then one of our interests in this project is So, where is the mezzo in this where is the people that provide the care in our in our context, the connections that the primary care sector as well as the settlement sector have and who’s who’s doing what kind of work. And I really think that often, one of the big learnings for me was that the immigration and the settlement sector receives a lot of funding from our federal government, also from provincial funds to really look at supporting integration settlement and health, and often they are actually the first people or the first services that people receive. And so that brings us to then, what role does technology and digital health play within that sector, because if they’re the if they’re the first point of contact, one can imagine, then that, you know, like that, that might actually be more significant in terms of playing a role versus going to health, because that was one of our findings was that as a newcomer person, for example, an asylum seeker or a refugee, both under the umbrella of forced migration, those folks would not tend to access health. Right off the bat, that was one of the biggest things that we found was that primary care or accessing a community health center happens last so how can we forefront the the use of technology and health at the beginning, within the set, within the broader notion of resettlement and settlement context? So sorry, I went off a little bit there, a little bit winded, but really so compassionate care, then this is a really interesting topic, but I want to get back to that I would because I come from a critical orientation. I think we need to be able to operationalize compassion so that we don’t have the negative impacts of that, such as burnout and things like that, because we understand that resources have been constrained and that the when people access care, they usually access it with multiple comorbidities and very complex health issues. Yeah,

Ibukun Abejirinde 18:05
no, you’re absolutely correct. And I think from the interviews that we did so we spoke to 25 newcomers. And when I use that term, I use it very broadly to include economic immigrants, refugees, asylum claimants, those with precarious status, temporary foreign workers. So that’s the way we sort of pocketed it broadly. And when we spoke to 25 newcomers and nine service providers, settlement service providers, who provide primary care services, and one of the things that came out so strongly is more most of the providers we spoke to have lived experience themselves of being newcomers to Canada and while and on the one hand, that put them in a very optimal position to be able to meet their clients where they were at, to relate to them, to build that trust to develop the relationship quickly. It came at a very big cost to those providers at an individual level and even within the sector as a whole, at least from the primary care perspective, although I think, like it cuts across the sector as a whole, was that within the context of underfunding on the staffing, not having enough support at a systemic level for the settlement sector to provide these hugely demanding and very critical services, is that there was a lot of burnouts. That was the trade off, is providers themselves needed to go the extra mile to bridge the gaps that digital technology could not bridge, and that the system was not bridging, and so that came at an extra cost. So I appreciate the fact that you’re looking at the benefits on the one hand, but then at the expense of what? And I think that that’s something we need to keep top of mind.

Marco Campana 19:58
Yeah. I mean, I. Don’t accept your apology, Nancy, because I don’t think you went out of the scope. Because I think what you’re what you’re describing, is a broad, complex systems navigation for both those accessing care and those providing it. And the word for me, that always comes to mind when we have the and then and now, we’re layering digital on top of that. So forget the digital we’ve been talking about compassionate care probably for a long time. And how do you do it at the same the same time? We’re talking about the parallel processes of burnout. Virtual care layers something on top of a system and conversations and research that are still nuanced and undone and still works in progress and not undone, but works in progress. And so the complexity of that and then nuances. So as you described the difference, you know, there’s a lot of anecdotal or assumptions about the differences between men and women or ethnic groups. Forget about the diversity within those ethnic groups. So for example, if you can mention, you know, South Asians had bad experiences in Alberta. But what about nuances within those those groups? Or what about women from Afghan backgrounds versus Afghans in general, for example, right? The nuance in that care is something that is a huge conversation in our sector. And then, of course, the intersectionality. So you’re young, you’re a woman, you came as a refugee claimant, you’re living in poverty, and you’re, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You start to layer all of those pieces onto it, and now we layer a digital version on which may or may not benefit you. Maybe you are digitally literate, maybe you’re not, and is your provider digitally literate? So when we’re looking at that whole, that whole mess, that system, that kind of approach, I think you’re, you’re talking about what we what we need to be talking about, and we will get to some of the practical parts of the conversation. But I think it’s important to look at that, on that on that level, to say you’re describing the health system that also describes the settlement system, right is that is, as Ibukunis mentioning people, people who are trying to figure this out, who are underpaid and doing things on the side of their desks, serving clients who they’re not officially allowed to serve because of eligibility requirements, but they must serve because it’s compassionate to do so for example, which is another definition of compassionate care, right? So I think that there’s a it’s a big conversation. I’m glad you kind of put it in there, because I think that sets some of that context as well, so that projects like these can start to address and answer some of them, the sort of more practical questions, but we always have to have in mind that we’re sort of, we’re doing it in this context that is an un unfinished work in progress that we have not resolved yet. So as we talk about compassionate care, clearly my question would be, well, if we’re doing all of these studies, where are those studies then being operationalized in the healthcare settings, so that it’s not a study that has to be done externally, but there are questions that are being answered internally, with with accountability mechanisms in place to ensure that we are embedding compassion into the the healthcare system, for example. So we won’t go down that road, because I think, obviously those are works in progress, but, but I want to, I want to take us back a little bit more to the specifics. So Ibukun you wrote in an article for for Canadian diversity magazine that the why, a little bit of the why, right? It’s relevant to explore if and how the digitization of health care impacts the experience of compassionate care for marginalized groups, including newcomers. So what did you find?

Ibukun Abejirinde 23:26
Big question and but very interesting. And the way I always describe this to people is be careful if you want to be a researcher, because sometimes you don’t find what you’re looking for. Sometimes you do find what you’re looking for, and it’s not what you thought you were looking for. And then sometimes you find what you’re looking for, and it’s much more than what you were looking for. And I think in our case, we fall into the last bucket. It was opening up this Pandora’s box. First off the bat, it was there were mixed perceptions and experiences of virtual care. And the findings were interesting. We did see that, you know, if we’re using this idea, which is very important, of layering and how one person is constructed and positionally located along different axes on a social scale, some patients preferred preferred virtual care. Others preferred in person care. But what was interesting was their social identities, of how far along Am I my migration journey, or the gender of is this someone who identifies as a woman or as a man, or their ethnic and cultural backgrounds, their comforts, digitally with digital tools, and also clinical factors like mental hits, health status affected how people perceived virtual care. And you could have the same person who would say, oh, in the beginning, you know, it was scary for me, because one of the things we did ask as part of the interview. Use was the first time you were told that you were going to have a virtual encounter as a newcomer. How did that make you feel? What were your thoughts? And what was interesting was people use the words of I was afraid. I was unsure. You know, it was weird to me. I didn’t know if I wanted to go ahead with the call. But later along the line, as they warmed up to being in Canada, how the healthcare system work, figuring out the relationship, settling themselves within their new context, they started having more positive experiences, because then they appreciated that it was convenient, that it saved them time, because they could then use the time. It was like buying back the time that you would take, taking the TTC, to go to the physical clinic. You go that and you’re going to look for work, or you’re working somewhere, you’re working multiple shifts, or you’re just staying at home, if it’s someone who has kids at home and they don’t have childcare. And so it was convenient, and it saved time, it saved cost, but there were also restrictions in where they could access virtual care, right in anecdotal anecdotally, the language is virtual care was universal and ubiquitous, but it wasn’t really ubiquitous for everybody, for refugees and asylum claimants, for example, or people who have a waiting period, although the waiting period was lifted during the pandemic, you are sort of streamlining to where you can go for care if you’re uninsured or if you don’t have the interim federal health coverage. So that had limitations to who they could see. I’ve talked about the temporal effect. So we did see that people who were early migration zero to six months, in some cases, up to a year. Virtual care was more was a more challenging pill to swallow initially, but once people started settling down, warming up, getting a sense of the system, understanding the trade offs and the options, then you know that we’re more open to it. One of the pieces of work we just finished is a comic that we co designed with a group of four newcomers based on the findings of this study, and we translated it to six different languages in addition to English, and I think you can include that in your show notes. Another thing that was interesting that we found was the trickle down effect, and it was actually that strand of findings that led us into the second project that we now call the beyond technology, beyond healthcare effects, which was their initial for most people, the initial overall reaction to virtual care had nothing to do with virtual care per se. So like I mentioned, people will say I was afraid, I was worried, I was unsure. And when we reflected, as a research team, we’re like, okay, like, it’s just a phone call. Why are people, you know, conceptualizing virtual care using that language? And when we dug in deeper, we found that their overall migration and settlement experiences, experiences in the pre arrival and early arrival stages, actually shaped and framed their expectations of healthcare in general. So for those who had very rough journeys, who experienced discrimination, social stigma, being gas lit, not being able to access housing support find a job easily, they translated and extrapolated these negative experiences to their expectations of healthcare. So it was more like you’re going to call me to have a conversation with me about my health. Who are you? You know, for those who are precarious status, is this going to be surveilled by the police? How is it going to affect, you know, my hearing, who is this person? I don’t know them. I can’t see them. So it was all that complexity. So we talked about how, you know, it became beyond technology. So that’s why the second project was beyond technology. Became beyond technology, because these were experiences that were used to describe virtual care that had nothing to do with virtual care, and to use Nancy’s language, we have to go to the more structural macro level determinants that shape these things. And I think the last point I will make regarding clinical findings is mental health was a very important modifier to how people experience compassionate care and virtual care, and there have been similar studies that found what we found, and that was the fact that even though, in general, most of everyone we spoke to did say that having a pre existing relationship with the provider facilitated a better virtual care experience, most people admitted that depending on the provider and The patient, it was possible for them to make the efforts to bridge the gap. However, particularly in those who had mental health challenges, it was very difficult. We did have one particular person who had established a relationship with her provider before the pandemic hit, she was going through severe mental. Challenges, which was actually influenced by social determinants of health. Her refugee claim had been denied multiple times, and her provider, pre pandemic, had been the one helping her navigate these complexities. And then the pandemic hit, and she was told, oh, all of your consultations with your provider is going to happen by the telephone. And she just went downhill. From there, she shared with us how this person who she had known prior became somebody that she didn’t know at all because she said she can’t see me, she can’t feel me. So how does she know exactly what I’m going through? So that that trust that had been established actually became broken because of virtual care? So yeah, I could go on and on about that, but just to give you a bit of the layers of the things that we discovered which then led us down to start this other project called Beyond technology, beyond healthcare. It’s

Marco Campana 30:51
interesting because, as you were speaking before this last example, I was thinking exactly about trust and rapport, because so much of health and even I mean, many social services have become very just transactional, right? And there’s there’s an expectation that you understand that, and you know that we’re going to have a conversation and I will tell you what to do next, or I’ll send you a prescription, or this 10 minutes is up, and you’ve moved on, because it’s and and for someone who doesn’t know that system, and in the context that you’re describing, comes out of a very hard experience, migration experience, and doesn’t have an opportunity to set up trust and rapport with that person, that transactional experience over the phone is fear inducing and anxiety inducing, potentially. But then it’s so fascinating to hear that even after you’ve established that trust and rapport, it can be broken based on the service modality alone. It’s the same person, allegedly, that’s that’s now long, no longer sitting across from you, but you’re having that conversation with that you had established a relationship with. And I wonder what does that mean for our systems of care? If, because that’s that, that’s a that’s a specific nuance, and it’s a specific group of people, but surely that those feelings in that experience must translate into other groups in society, which means it’s a bigger and even if it doesn’t writ large, it’s still a microcosm of an existing problem of some sort. So without delving into massive systems change, what is what does that mean for like as a settlement practitioner, let’s say, or a healthcare practitioner, I kind of already know this stuff, but I’m expected to be transactional in my approach. What can I do? Or what do you recommend people in those settings can do to at least create something a little more humane or or rapport building, or at least slow things down slightly in the process, to make sure that someone is comfortable and feels that compassion.

Ibukun Abejirinde 32:44
Nancy, do you want to Sure

Nancy Clark 32:46
this is my brain’s going all over the place. So Marco, one thing is that it’s not that people are not necessarily not doing anything it but I think, and, and it’s a hard question to answer, I think what I’d like to maybe touch upon is go back to the notion of pre arrival experience. And a lot of the time there’s this discourse that, oh, when people they’ve been granted refugee status, meaning they’re granted some security and safety, as defined by the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees. And so with that, you know, notion of safety, there’s this tendency to forget what happened before people arrived, and it’s something that I think matters in terms of how we deliver care. So sometimes I think more education can be helpful in terms of what were those pre arrival experience? Because most refugees are residing in camps or host countries prior to them, waiting to come to Canada. During those experiences, there’s very little health care access. Sometimes there’s issues of violence, there’s issues of trust, so the disruption of war and the displacement already comes with these pre migration experiences. So you’re right. There are some sort of expectations post migration that I’m going to be cared for, looked after, etc. And then we have this bigger sort of discourse of trauma, and we look at it as a one point in time situation. It is not. It is what we found with research is about one in five people that have been affected by displaced dis. Placement related to violence of war experience, some sort of mental health condition. That does not mean that people go on to develop post traumatic stress disorder and that, you know, they’re going to be living with these conditions. What where it matters is in the resettlement context, is that what we know is that that context, in and of itself, can compound pre existing risk factors for mental health, what we call mental health, when I say mental health, there’s a distinction between a mental health condition or overall health promotion, social determinants, type of things. So one of the things that does compound risk is this notion of sort of how we’re treated, and that’s what you’re talking about, about experiences of discrimination, distrust, and I think I don’t have the answer, but I think that understanding a little bit more about the pre migration experience and context and where people come from, I’ve heard over and over again In different research projects with working with different migrant groups that it matters that the provider knows something about me. So in other words, the burden of responsibility for compassionate care should not be, should be on our health system to actually try to understand, you know, where people are coming from their situation, and there should be more flexibility. So compassionate care and virtual care can be seen as sort of these, one on one, inter interactions, but not necessarily. Sometimes it involves more than this sort of provider care. You know, care seeker person. What we know is that the majority of people experience severe language barriers, severe literate literacy barriers, as you mentioned already, with health system navigation and so one way where technology can be really beneficial is with mitigating some of the language barriers, and when we and this can be very tricky, because mental health is highly stigmatized, so it begs the question, what are our studies showing, and how is Mental Health sort of constructed when this is a highly stigmatized across, you know, cross culturally, globally and also within our own Canadian culture, you will not find people saying, Hi, I’m here because, you know, I have depression, or I Have post trauma, post traumatic stress disorder, what you will find is, I can’t sleep at night. So when we’re talking about compassionate care, it’s the burden of responsibility should be around looking at so what can we do to make to if you’re not sleeping at night. What is the root cause of that? Well, I have to travel two hours to get to work, and then I have to work 14 hours, and then I’m worried about not making enough money because I have to send money back to my family. That’s also what you know. So it becomes this whole really understanding and knowing the context and the situation of the person. And so when we think about developing trust, that’s that’s where I think it lands, is what do? What do I need to know about you, and positioning oneself as somebody that, how can I, how can I learn about what what matters to you, what’s important to you? They may be coming in because, you know, they’re for various reasons. Well, they’re anemic, but they’re anemic because they can’t afford nutritious food. So for me, that’s where I see that trust and that compassion really being operationalized, is if we can try to think about coming at it as you know, what do we need to know about this person and their context of why they’re here? And not to forget that what happened before someone comes doesn’t stop when somebody arrives in Canada, it’s actually it, it gets compounded. It’s a very complex situation. And yes, over time, acculturation, people get used to navigating systems, etc, etc, but, but that doesn’t also necessarily mean. That there, as you were mentioning, there’s more trust or more equitable access. So that’s sort of my response to some of the things that you’ve been talking about, and especially coming back to the notion that Ibukun mentioned that most of the providers in the settlement sector, particularly, have lived experience already, and so really paying attention to some of like that, should, should they take the burden of all of that like, like, really, as a society, we need to support those people and, and, yeah, in terms of looking at the broader, sort of the broader notion of, I always go back to the structure and and how sort of that social justice or distributive justice works In terms of equitable distribution of resources, so that we’re not just talking about virtual care and primary care, or we’re not just focused on the settlement sector, but really, how do we make sure that there’s equitable distribution of health resources and then recognition that there are differences between social identities and groups, but there’s also some similarities and things, and we also know a lot. So how do we implement what we know in terms of promoting equity, trust and better care?

Ibukun Abejirinde 41:33
Nancy, actually, I feel like you were picking my brain and answering that question, because the first thing for me, you know, when Marco asked that question, like, within the sector, what is the one on one thing? Let’s, let’s, let’s not try to make any policy changes or systemic shifts. The settlement sector is doing such a great job. I have to say, like, I have a lot of respect for settlement workers. You know, like I shared earlier, Nancy also acknowledged, now it’s the lived experience puts people in a great position to be able to understand preemptively, just because you’ve gone through it, many settlement sector providers can say, I kind of know what this person is going through. And so there’s a, there’s a great work being done there. But in querying that question of at the expense of what, what, where it’s burnout and it’s fatigue and it’s compassion deficits, there’s actually a term called compassion fatigue that comes out of the moral injury and moral distress when you’ve identified the need and you’re trying to address it, but because of all these other complexities in the system that you’re leaving with, you can’t address that need. And that’s something that we’re seeing happening with care providers all around, both within and outside the settlement sector. And so we, we started querying this idea of the need to advocate and support or engender systemic compassion. Because compassion has, currently, I think the conversation has currently been limited to the one on one interaction, and I think that there’s just so far that one on one interaction can go. We have to start looking at what are the systems and structures that enable and foster people to be able to deliver compassionate care at the individual level. So that’s one to what Nancy was saying about pre arrival work. So I think that one of the things that can be done is to really find a way, and I think this is a way that technology can help to expose newcomers. Again. When I’m using that term, I use it very broadly, immigrants and refugees to Canada, about the healthcare system and the social system, pre arrival, or area arrival. I know that you know, at least for economic immigrants, you will get this sort of blurb from IRCC when you’re coming in that says, here’s a pre arrival list. And there’s all these hyperlinks of, how do you find a job? How do you get a house? But there’s the health issues are usually silenced and not paid attention to. But what our research shows is that the gaps that the social system ends up not being able to meet the social determinants, they end up falling at the bedside of the clinician. So we talked about this concept when we’re looking at it temporarily is from border to bedside, structural determinants of health, social determinants of health, they land at the bedside of the care provider. So how do we handle these at an upstream level? And so I think there’s knowledge and expectations setting that can happen, pre arrival or early arrival, because when people manage their expectations or know what to. Expect. They don’t feel disappointed and let down, and that shapes their overall experience, right? So it’s, for example, you’re going to your doctor or your dentist, and they’re like, oh, you know you’re coming in, and you would just wait about 15 minutes and it should be fine. And then you go there and you wait for three hours. That already tankers your entire experience, even if you get the care eventually that you’re looking for. The third thing I wanted to talk is about data mobility. I feel like migration is about mobility from a policy perspective, you know, you can say what are the different factors that shape why people move, but I think that there’s an opportunity here, from a technological perspective, to look at what is the data, the information and experience that people are coming into Canada with, and how can we receive that information very early in their journey, so that before they have that first conversation with an intake worker or with a physician or with a social worker, somebody already knows the backstory without asking them to rehash it all over again and possibly re traumatizing them. We don’t have very good interoperability of data sharing within the sector. So if I go to one walking clinic and I narrate my entire experience, and then I have to go somewhere else. My data doesn’t move with me as a newcomer, and then I have to rehash it all over again. And I think that that is frustrating and but that’s something that can be fixed. Like that’s a problem that can be fixed. Um, the fourth thing I will say, I’m sorry if I’m just going on, it’s just because this is one of the rich Pandora’s, you know, you open the Pandora box and there’s all this thing in it. Wow. This is great, please. Yeah. Nancy had talked about one of the surprising things that came at us through the dialogs, and we’ve seen continue to manifest afterwards, is the muscle level, which is the sector, the settlement sector, the providers, community organizations. There’s a lot of power activity, energy that is happening there. The one of the challenges is that it seems all of this knowledge and expertise is siloed, because the sector is not speaking to each other. Organizations are not talking to each other enough. Like I appreciate this podcast, because, like you said in the beginning, it’s opening up the conversation more broadly, and when we had the beyond technology, beyond healthcare dialogs, at the very last day, which was a co design event where, which bringing people together to co design, what does the best in class experience look like for newcomers? There was just so much energy in the room and hope that filled the space, because everybody felt there’s something I can learn from you that you’re already doing and I can adopt in my practice. There’s this insight you share during the breakout group that I had, you know, I thought that’s the solution to the problem we’ve had in my organization for five years. And so that event, you know, through it, we’ve built this community of practice. We now have a newsletter. We’re hoping that we can keep that community engaged and energized, but I feel like there’s a lot of power and richness that can come from different organizations coming together to support each other and exchange knowledge, and I think you do that very well with the km hub, where you know you just have all the information so that people can be aware of what others are doing. And I think the last thing I will say is what has become clear through our study is compassion. Compassionate Care is a social justice concept. It’s not just, and that compassionate care cannot just end at the clinical encounter or at the bedside. Compassionate Care, from a provider’s perspective, is advocating for better policies. It’s supporting your patients to have good civic engagement, to understand their rights, to know how to advocate from for themselves, to understand the resources that is accessible to them. I really feel like the second sector is doing quite a good job under challenging circumstances to do that very well. I feel like the rest of society needs to come on board and support that sort of work.

Marco Campana 49:10
Thank you. Thank you both. I want to unpack the last thing, because when you say compassionate care is a social justice issue in theory, so too is virtual care or access to digital inclusion and digital equity is a social justice. If we’re going to be able to do virtual care effectively, we need to look at the question of digital inclusion from both the newcomer in this case, or the client or stakeholder or community side, but also the service provider. And I know that that that conversation came up in your in your in the first project in particular, like, how do we ensure that these people were now layering a second system on in terms of how they provide service. Can do that and do it in a way that that they feel competent, capable, and it’s not on the side of their desk. And and also, how do we ensure if we are moving to new versions of accessing service through virtual care? That the people who want to be able to access it have the skills, technologies, bandwidth, you know, abilities, in order to do that. So I wonder, and I know that came up as a conversation for you, is that part of the conversation that this group has been in the CO design or in the work that you’re doing, in the beyond technology project you’re looking at,

Ibukun Abejirinde 50:21
yeah, great question. Marco, yes, it did come up. I feel like between compassionate care, like you said, compassionate care, virtual care, digital health, AI trust is central to everything, and the the inability of certain groups within population to engage meaningfully, meaningfully and fully to the extent that they want within a very digitally enhanced society, whether it’s healthcare or the banking sector or education or whatever it is, I think that’s a very crippling effect. And some of the things that we talked about that came out from the CO design is lack of access to the hardware, right, lack of or insufficient, let me say, because we are now seeing a demographic shift in the profiles of newcomers, asylum seekers, refugee claimants that are coming in that is that goes beyond the stereotype of, oh, you know, they can’t speak English, or they have this every accent. We’re seeing a rise in highly educated professionals who are coming in so that digital literacy, but also digital comfort, right to be able to demonstrate your skills comfortably in a for lack of a better word, psychologically safe environment, right? So internet bandwidth, one of the one of the exercises that we did at one of our engagement sessions, and we’re talking about trying to walk through, what does a person need to need we need to do to be ready for their virtual care appointment? And a person we lived experience as a refugee was in the room, and everybody was talking of, you know, going through, you know, they have to schedule the appointment, and they click on the Zoom link and blah, blah. And someone said, Well, you have to recognize that we come into the country and we actually have mobile phones, smartphones, but nobody really realizes that some of the smartphones we come with are not compatible in Canada, and that’s one challenge. So we have to solve that compatibility issue right with the same card fitting in and everything. But then the second bit is, you can’t get a mobile line without an identification or a sin. And if I’m a refugee claimant and I don’t have all my documents, or I’m someone with precarious status, I don’t have that so I can have a smartphone, it doesn’t mean I have access, and we’re like, oh, we need to go back, like the journey starts very early on. So we need to really think about the step to step of how we’re designing digitally enabled systems. And we have to design for equity, because if we design for the least group, the most marginalized group as as a professor, Stephanie Nixon, will call it the bottom of the coin, everybody else will be able to have access. But I think there’s this predominant where we are designing and using technology in a very transactional and commercial way, where it’s it has to work for the majority, and once it works for the majority, we don’t care about anybody else, so I feel trust, equity access very key in how we’re supporting populations to be able to access and make the best of the potential of virtual care and other forms of technology.

Marco Campana 53:56
That’s another great example of nuance in digital inclusion. So you’ve got the phone, well, so what if you, if you if it’s not compatible, or you can’t use it, or the system that you’re trying to connect to isn’t mobile friendly, for example, which we find a lot in the settlement sector. I want to ask one question related to because we’re talking about virtual care, and in person care a lot. And in a nuance in our sector, we’ve been talking a lot about hybrid care, the idea that you can access services in person and online, remotely and and move fluidly between those. So it’s a high bar that we’re trying to reach. But do you do is that part of this conversation of virtual care as well, that client that people accessing health can do both. They’re not just an in person client or a virtual client, but they’re a client who will sometimes come into in person and sometimes on the phone or by video call, or what it might be, is that part of this conversation, or is it more of a binary kind of either or?

Ibukun Abejirinde 54:47
No, I think it did come up in the reimagining virtual care study, but it came up with a but so when we finished the study, we did go to the three different community organizations that partnered with us. And supported us, and we’re sharing the findings. And it was interesting that compassionate care was conceptualized as giving the patient the option to choose what is best for me right now, do I want to have a virtual appointment, or do I want to come in person? And one of the feedback we got was for the patient to be able to choose in an empowering way. We have to assume that they’re making an informed decision. And if you don’t understand the Canadian system and how care is delivered, and what circumstances I can make a diagnosis or not, or the information that the clinician has, then the patients may not always know this is the right thing for me right now, it takes a while, and it takes a different kind of patience to be able to say I can make the decision for myself. And this is something we captured in the comic, the Knowledge Translation comic that we released recently, which is you will see in the comic. The comic tells the story of two different newcomers, different genders, and their experience with virtual care, navigating that decision making. And for both of them, there was always this prompt of, would you like your next appointment to be virtual or in person? And you will see in the comic the person thinking and the woman, in one case, who had a toddler at home, was like, I don’t think this is going to work for me, because the only way she had had a virtual encounter and the baby was crying in the background, and she’s like, the only way you work for me is if I can get my friend to come look after the child, or my husband stays at home with me. So it’s all of that. What are the decisions, or what is the information that people are using to make a decision about what is right for right now and for me, and I think it’s going to change from day to day, from circumstance to circumstance. So hybrid definitely needs to be the option. The Interview showed that people felt that virtual was good in this context versus that context, going back to Nancy’s point of, we have to think about what works, what doesn’t work, for whom, under what circumstances, why. But Nancy, I don’t know if you have anything to add on that point.

Nancy Clark 57:10
No, I don’t have too much to add. One thing that strikes me in this conversation is sort of the that question that you just said, but also, what role does virtual, digital health play in the overall healthcare experience of newcomers? And I think that there could be a lot of positive a lot of I think one of the words that was used was empowering, or empowerment. And sometimes we come at this from a deficit base, meaning that, you know, there’s this tendency when we apply intersectionality to look at the marginalization, the the lack of voice, the lack of agency. But there may be, in fact, what newcomer the knowledge that newcomers bring, or newcomers that have been here for a while, that hold particular expertise. And so how can we harness that knowledge to promote change? And so I always think about this notion of belonging and connection. And if we come back to can virtual care in whatever modality is used, if it can promote belonging and connection, I think then we can also address the issue of trust and perhaps even well being. What we want to do is make sure that it doesn’t further what I mentioned earlier, marginalized, stigmatize or re stereotype. So even in the process of CO creating tools, or, you know, there’s a lot of work being done in M health now with promoting these apps that can have better access for mental health, for example. But, but you know, if we’re co creating like, I think the inclusion of people and their knowledge is important for creating these new tools and technologies, but also when we’re creating that, that that we don’t re stereotype in a way that, you know, like I said, force reinforces this marginality versus really thinking about, You know, people already come with knowledge and again, what I know from my research is that for newcomers, it’s important that providers know something about them, but it’s also important that providers don’t box or categorize people in ways that a. Make assumptions that this is going to be a barrier for you or not, and so I think coming back to that notion of empowerment. And you know, it may be that people are already quite used to some technology, but we know that globally, there is a digital divide as well, as well as when we think about gender as well, so meaning people that are more literate, literate tend to have better access. People that have better wealth tend to have better access. And generally, that tends to not be women in general, and making that generalization, so it just comes back to some of the points that we become raised already earlier. And I would sort of leave with, you know, how can we promote compassionate care, but also better connection and belonging for newcomer people in Canada,

Marco Campana 1:01:05
I feel like we could have this conversation for a few more hours, but I want to be respectful of your time, and I mean, maybe we will revisit this in a future conversation. So I just the final question I want to ask then for you, Ibukun, is there’s a lot of places this work has taken you, the Pandora’s boxes, as you mentioned, and there’s a lot of places it could go. So where are you hoping, or where are you taking this work from here in terms of next steps?

Ibukun Abejirinde 1:01:27
Um, good question. So I think one is recognizing the energy, the assets, um, that already exist, and elevating, championing and maintaining that which we’re doing through the community newsletter, and sort of trying to keep a community of practice engaged for sharing, mobilization and moving the work forward. The second is the last day of the dialogs. Was a co design event about designing a best in class experience for newcomers, and what came out very clearly is within the specific context for immigrants and refugees. Technology has a role that it can play in supporting navigation and enhancing that experience, but it has to be human powered. We can’t leave technology to do its thing by itself. There’s what technology is great at doing, and I think we need to champion and ensure it’s doing that, but there’s that human connection that technology is not able to bridge. And so we’re thinking of what would it mean to deliver a best in class experience that is human powered, technology enhanced and is supported by very transparent, accountable and equitable governance framework. So we sort of have straw drug ideas that came out of that CO design event, and now needs to secure some funding to be able to do some interventional work to translate those ideas into a prototype and test it and see how it works to support navigation and to enhance the settlement experience, we’re also still disseminating our work to different audiences. Upcoming webinar that will happen with n4 we’re going to be at the metropolis social determinants of health conference to share some of our findings, disseminating the comic that I shared about which you can put in your show notes. And there’s continued work now in putting together the paper, a paper which is more to an academic audience, but translating that into this idea of intersectionality as acknowledging that they are existing solutions that we can leverage. And what does it mean to get that work going? So I feel like that’s one place we are at now where we’re seeing very clearly that at their mechanisms at the miso level. And when I say that, I’m talking about within the settlement sector and from community organizations that can be activated to get things done despite the limitations within the overall, broader system, and so thinking through and talking through, what does it mean to be able to do that work within pew region? One of the things that is coming up, and I’m sure you’re aware that there’s a crisis of trying to support refugee claimants and asylum seekers who are coming in, are trying to navigate finding shelter, food, settling. There’s workshops that have been, I’ve been co leading with the Region of Peel, Mississauga oht and the local immigration Partnership, which is pure newcomer Strategy Group, to think through, how do we build accessible, equitable and quality pathways for refugee claimants and asylum seekers to be able to navigate the system in a way that is compassionate, that is trustworthy and is responsive to their needs. So just a couple of things that have been coming up. Nancy, I don’t know if there are other things I may have missed that you want to add as well. No,

Nancy Clark 1:04:56
no, I think that’s pretty thorough. We’re pretty I’m pretty. Excited about that conversation, and it’s, it’s sort of like we’re trying to catch up with you know, we’re already live, we already have all these complexities. And as you said, Marco, now we’re adding the digital solution. And so just to be mindful again, that we’re not saying that the digital culture is the solution, however, it can be very a very useful tool when used appropriately, and that really that human experience is at the heart of care for providing the best care, the best equitable care and the best compassionate care.

Marco Campana 1:05:43
I think that comes through really strongly. So fingers crossed for the funding, but it sounds like there’s lots of touch points now and in the future where people can find out and maybe tap into the work as well. So thank you both. Thank you. I’ll just is there anything I haven’t asked you or that you want to make sure people know about before we finish up? This has been a really rich and interesting conversation and lots to think about. But is there anything that you’re dying to say that I haven’t asked you or given you the chance to throw onto the table?

Nancy Clark 1:06:11
Well, I just want to put in another plugin for mental health. I guess I feel compelled, because that’s sort of something I’ve been trying to work on and understand, especially when it comes from different cultural worldviews and perspectives. And I wonder if we make that assumption that the digital that these tools that are, you know, AI, you know, info use, AI, if that is something that would be a natural go to culturally speaking. Because, as I mentioned before, mental health is is a social construct. And yet, globally, we have this dispo, you know, we have these mental health conditions across cultures, such as severe, persistent mental illness, and all the way to, you know, post traumatic stress, stress, schizophrenia, etc, etc. So when we’re thinking about that too, to think about what would be the first thing that people would need or go to for support. And so I guess I’m answering my own question, coming back to this notion of the human experience and that that shouldn’t be disconnected from these tools. I

Marco Campana 1:07:35
think that’s a really important point through all this, some people talk about with AI, for example, the AI sandwich start with the human, use AI as a tool, and then end with the human to make sure that everything is is not hallucinating or is not leading people astray, for example. So Ibukun any final thoughts?

Ibukun Abejirinde 1:07:53
I think this is a conversation starter, and there’ll be many more conversations to have. I think for us, it’s we’re very we think as in a very applied way. So it’s like, Okay, we have the theory, we have the framework, we have the tools. We know all of these things. What? How does that translate into action? And so I’m very curious, and literally having an invitation to say, anyone who has ideas on how to move this work forward and the role that we as applied researchers could play in contributing to that work, we’re happy to support and champion it. Thank you very much for having Marco.

Marco Campana 1:08:30
I love that idea too. I appreciate that because I think there are people who have ideas and questions but have no outlet for them, so that’s a great invitation. I appreciate that. Thank you both conversation and as you said, we’ll continue it, but a lot here for people to reflect on. So thank you for that.

Nancy Clark 1:08:48
Thanks for the opportunity. Marco thanks Ibukun,

Ibukun Abejirinde 1:08:50
thank you.

Marco Campana 1:08:52
Thanks so much for listening. I hope you found this episode interesting and useful for you and your work. You can find more podcast episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts or also on my site at marcopolis.org I appreciate you listening. And if you have any tips, suggestions, ideas or want to be interviewed, or know someone who wants to be interviewed, please drop me a line through my website or marco@marcopolis.org Thanks again.

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Welcome to episode 45 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I chat with Tracey Mollins from AlphaPlus, an organization that provides digital support and solutions from peers in Ontario’s literacy community.

Tracey is a Professional Learning Specialist – Education and Technology at Alphaplus. She has worked in adult education at community programs, school boards, colleges, universities, unions and network organizations. Her work is informed by her experience as an instructor, program worker and researcher as well as project experience developing e-learning strategies, blended or distance curricula and models for online instructional design. She is especially interested in investigations into connectivism ~ diversity, autonomy, interactivity and openness + creativity, collaboration, camaraderie, critical thinking, justice, kindness, freedom and fun ~ in digitally-mediated networks.

I’ve written that I think that the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector needs an AlphaPlus to help support our hybrid service delivery evolution and work. I wanted to talk to Tracey to find out more about how they do their work and what we can learn from and replicate.

Some of the questions we discussed:

• Our sector has seen an increase in awareness about how digital technology can be part of a useful and practical service intervention model, bringing along some workers and organizations that were more skeptical before the pandemic. Have you seen a similar trend in your work and sector?
• What I’m particularly after is how the support models came about and their impact/outcomes on the literacy sector. In our research about other interesting digital literacy and inclusion models, AlphaPlus came up as something our sector could learn from and replicate.
• As mentioned I think we could spend a nice chunk of time discussing the AlphaPlus support model focusing on your Coaching, Quick Tech Help, Educator Network, the Digital Toolbox course, Wayfinders and Community Gabfests, a well as Custom Solutions for service providers.Let’s start with the overall mission of AlphaPlus and the ways you support literacy service providers when it comes to digital strategy, implementing digital tools in their literacy work, and more.
• The Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector also wants to “use digital technology to increase the relevance, responsiveness and reach.” You help both adult literacy educators integrate technology into teaching, as well as program managers and co-ordinators integrate technology into program administration. That seems like an important combination, getting the front line as well as agency leadership literate and involved. Can you tell me a bit about the different challenges and approaches that come with those 2 different groups?
• Can you tell me about some success stories in that work, as well as some of the challenges you still face?
• If we were thinking about creating some of the services and supports that you have created at AlphaPlus in our sector, what advice would you give to help get us started?

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation using Otter.ai. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.

Marco Campana 0:00
Welcome to Episode 45 of the technology and human services podcast. In this episode, I chat with Tracy Mullins from alpha plus an organization that provides digital support and solutions from peers and Ontario’s literacy community. Tracy is a professional learning specialist on education and technology at alpha plus, she’s worked in adult education, community programs, school boards, colleges, universities, unions and network organizations. I’ve written before that I think that the immigrant and refugee serving sector needs and alphaplus to help support our hybrid service delivery evolution and work. So I wanted to talk to Tracy to find out more about how they do their work and what we can learn from and replicate. Our sector has seen an increase in awareness about how digital technology can be part of a useful and practical service intervention model bringing along some workers and organizations that were more skeptical before the pandemic alphaplus has done a lot of work during had after the pandemic and before the pandemic, to move these models long to ensure that digital technology is integrated in an inclusive and equitable way. And I think you’ll find this a really useful conversation and of interest to anyone who’s thinking about what their sector any nonprofit or charitable sector might need, when it comes to supports, interventions, and an organization like alpha plus to provide them with some direction, I hope you find it a useful conversation. Welcome, Tracy to the technology and human services podcast. I wonder if you can start maybe by just telling us a little bit about yourself, your background and what brought you to the work that you’re doing now?

Tracey Mollins 1:30
Yeah, so I’m I working at alpha plus. And I work there as the Professional Learning Consultant. So my, my bailiwick at alpha plus is working with cohorts of adult instructors in the literacy and basic skills field, and mostly on on questions around blended learning, and integrating digital technology into teaching and learning. So alphaplus has a much broader

Tracey Mollins 2:02
remit for digital technology. But that’s my my area will probably talk about the other things we do a little bit later. And I started as a volunteer tutor in a literacy program in Toronto here.

Tracey Mollins 2:16
And then I worked as a as a supply instructor, and then as a link instructor at the Toronto District School Board. So that was my first full time paid position as an adult educator was in the Link program and that ESL literacy class, which was fantastic. And then oddly, I got that class closed eventually. And I started teaching in a computer lab at the at the school board, which was quite a weird experience. And, and after the school board, I went back to community based literacy, actually, in the program where I had been a volunteer, I worked there for a couple of years. And after that, a group of literacy, workers from across the country started a journal called literacy. And I became the publisher of literacies, for about six years, was funded through the National Literacy Secretariat, and was part of that movement of sort of research and practice and trying to create a pan Canadian sort of professional learning network for literacy workers, because nothing like that sort of existed. And the the purpose of literacies was to start a conversation between literacy practitioners and literacy, education, researchers create that conversation. So that was part of it that but at that time, and after that, since then, I’ve been working mostly on contracts, and different all kinds of different projects, often projects that include some element of digital technology. And I came on staff at alpha plus about five years ago.

Marco Campana 4:16
I love it. I love hearing people’s meandering kind of paths. But it’s great that you’ve also worked in the settlement sector, which is, which is kind of where this, this podcast is kind of centered. And also, I just came out of a conversation earlier this morning about building communities of practice and collaboration and things like that. And so I wonder how how, how successful was that effort because it’s so important to bring practitioners together with each other, but also with researchers and policymakers and decision makers at a broader level in the sector. And I’m curious how that contributes to the work that you do at alpha plus now just having had that experience of convening and trying to create collaboration.

Tracey Mollins 4:54
Yeah, no, I it has a powerful impact on the way I think about it. It’s, it’s a real shame that work kind of stopped when the National Literacy Secretariat was, I don’t know what you call it defunded changed. But because I first experienced it as a practitioner, I went to some the OISE here at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, they, they had some opportunities for practitioners to come in and work on small research and practice projects with a researcher from Boise. And that it was such a great experience, it was such a interesting way to learn and to understand my role as a, you know, the teacher as researcher role that you’re that you’re really always in. But it made it sort of intentional and, and because of the, because you had to do the reflective practice piece to be part of it, it made that piece of it much more intentional, as well. So I certainly saw the power of it, in terms of advancing my own practice, as an instructor, and then when when I was involved in the OISE, had a thing called the festival literacies, that was part of Ontario’s contribution to that pan Canadian network. And I was involved in a lot of projects there. And it was it, it did, it was a very powerful thing for all the people who participated in it, just in terms of being able to collaborate and to connect with each other, but also that sort of intentional examination of of their practice, always with the idea of, you know, making it more more relevant, more responsive, more engaging for learners who are coming to our program. So,

Marco Campana 6:53
I mean, yeah, that intent that intentional reflection is, it’s such a luxury I find in our sector and in so many others, but it’s so important if you can actually bake it in or build it into your work, because it just has an impact. It can shorten timelines, right? If you have time to reflect, you have time to change and iterate and maybe improve, right? Yeah,

Tracey Mollins 7:11
no, for sure. For sure. And it was a practice that I when I was working in the Link program at the school board, that was full time, or considered full time, you know, nine to three classes every day. And I tried to bake it in there. But, and I actually was fairly I did it. Okay, you know, as as, as you do, then you get busy. Sometimes it falls away. But I did keep records of what I did. And I would look back on it and think about what work. But one of the things about sort of being part of a community when you do it is listening to other people’s reflections and having feedback on what you’re doing as well. Right. So I think that piece is also also really helpful. It’s, you know, we and we don’t get those opportunities. As much as meaningly. We’d like to but yeah, I think that.

Marco Campana 8:06
Yeah, I mean, it’s, I feel like it’s become I mean, it’s always been important, but it’s, I feel like it’s become even more important. In particular, over the last couple of years, right, we’ve seen a huge increase in awareness during the pandemic, because everybody had to pivot to online and remote, but in awareness about how digital technology can be a really useful part, but also a practical part of service interventions. And in our sector, it’s brought along some workers as well as organizations and leadership that were really more skeptical before the pandemic. And I’ve heard this conversation and other sectors as well. I’m wondering if you’ve seen a similar trend in the literacy sector, with with people who are realizing the usefulness and the place, right, the appropriate place of technology in their work?

Tracey Mollins 8:50
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t know if I would always characterize them as being skeptical. I think people could see the value of it, but I think it was lower down on their list of priorities in some ways, right? Because people were, they had curricular materials and activities and lessons that worked. They were sort of kitchen tested, they were and learners were engaged and, and learning what they wanted to learn. And so and so because of that, and because of this sort of time issue that always exists. It was something that a lot of people were doing sort of off the side of their desk, in a way, right? Oh, well think about it. And people did tell us they say oh, you know, I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, but it keeps slipping down the to do list because of so many other things that are happening. So I think people sort of had an idea of the value of it but

Tracey Mollins 9:51
not as a priority meeting. Right. So. So definitely with the pivot we were talking about That was, in another meeting, we were talking about a level setting

Tracey Mollins 10:05
activity. And I was thinking about that pandemic, in terms of being a level setting activity or event, right, where everybody sort of had to all the things they already knew, and all the things they didn’t know, yet, they sort of had to put all that into practice and kind of rise to the occasion. You know, so and, you know, it was an awful time, and a lot of people were being hurt in a lot of ways. And one of the outcomes for education, I think, across all jurisdictions of education with that it pushed us sort of rapidly along this road, that we’d been kind of ambling it down quite slowly. Before that, right. So I, you know, I mean, I think in some ways we were ambling we were sort of taking time to explore and evaluate and analyze. And, you know, how can this work, and we were doing it very, very slowly. But certainly, the pivot to remote learning during the pandemic kind of pushed us all into a similar place. So at the same time, which is unusual, right, in these times, right, everybody would be working from a similar place at the same time, so that afforded us a lot of interesting opportunities for professional learning, right, because there, there was a large group of people who wanted to learn the same thing at the same time. So that was kind of we actually worked with the Metro Toronto movement for literacy on something. Somebody who works at the charter school board started it. Her name’s Susan, the FAB, and she called it the Silver Linings cafe. Because it that was sort of the silver lining of it was that it did put us in this place where we could all learn the same thing at the same time.

Marco Campana 11:57
For sure, and the things that you were learning and working on the for alpha plus predated the pandemic predated the silver lining, if you will, because this is kind of the work that are parts of it, at least in terms of some of the services and the the help and the support that alpha plus provides. The literacy sector. Really, my sense is that, or I guess the question is, were you able to kind of hit the ground running with some of this stuff and just scale it up? Because it’s something that you were already working on?

Tracey Mollins 12:24
Yeah, no, we had? Yeah, for sure. We were in that position. Where we were, we had a sort of a bank of knowledge, a bank of resources, a way that we had learned how to work with practitioners. That’s quite that works quite well. So. So yeah, I mean, are first of all, like, everybody, right at the beginning to be at these meetings are like, wow, there’s just so much to do. And, and, and what what is the best thing to do so but as, as per usual, we kind of took our, our guidance was, what people were asking for, and what people were telling us. And, you know, some things really stood out in the beginning, of course, everybody had to learn how to use Zoom, and not just on their own computer, but how to help everybody get on zoom in on all kinds of different devices and in different configuration. So, you know, there were some basic things that really jumped out at us. But But yeah, and and I think also, I mean, I think one of the things is that there was a apple plus over the years had sort of laid some groundwork, right, so that people were in a place where even if they weren’t using digital technology, and all the ways that they ended up using it during that pivot, they they had been exposed to a lot of ideas, and they had sort of been thinking about a lot of things. So implementing it was a challenge, but the thinking behind it was sort of already percolating. And then, and we have obviously, different programs were in different places around that, but yeah,

Marco Campana 14:14
right. I mean, yeah, I’ve always looked to alpha plus as a sort of a role model organization, because you’re unique, at least in our sector, and in a research that we’ve been doing during the pandemic alpha plus kept coming up as something, you know, around digital literacy around digital inclusion, the you know, the research, the advocacy, the creation of resources, but certainly the support services as kind of a model that I see sectors like ours could could learn from sort of this central hub where this is the conversation. This is the expertise and people can come and know that they can learn from this place, but they can also get different kinds of help and support. I wonder if you’ve noticed yourselves as a unique entity in that way and and is it a wrap applicable model, I guess in other places?

Tracey Mollins 15:03
Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, we there’s an Oregon like, I don’t really know as much about them as possibly I should there’s an organization in California that’s similar, but on a much larger scale. I mean, California being a much larger place called Oh, 10. And I can’t remember what those initials stand for. But they they do similar work to us in some ways, and they’ve become sort of a hub for that. But I mean, I think so I think it’s, it’s taken a while, I think for alpha plus to get to this place in the field, and it steps slowly, in terms of the leadership role, and, and advancing that piece right around how sort of how that conversation between alpha plus and the field app. And that sort of evolved over the years, I feel when I came on. Five years ago, there was a project that was sort of waiting for me when I arrived, which was working on the paper, our alpha plus his position on blended learning. And I think that was a very interesting piece to do around saying what do we mean by blended learning, and not to say it in a prescriptive way, like everybody should be doing blended learning the way we think it is, but this is, these are the things that we that we think blended learning is, and this is, this is the way we think we can support the field to get to this place. And I think that was a really interesting exercise for us to go through. And, and now we have that paper that kind of grounds, our work and helps us decide what to do and what not to do right around our supporting people.

Marco Campana 16:58
So based on that, I mean, we’ve noticed that I would say, Well, I would say I’ve noticed that in the research that we’ve been doing in the sector is that your your approach, your the way you kind of center, work around digital literacy, digital inclusion, and blended learning was something that we really looked at as a sector as well, because it’s, it aligns really nicely with I think, the core values of our sector. And it was something that we saw as a, as a model to continue to kind of investigate. So not just the sort of the services and the support, but also just the way you approach technology. And thank you for the Oh 10 link, and now I’m on their site, I’m going to try not to look at it while we’re talking because it looks like such a rich, rich site of information, the outreach and Technical Assistance Network, and I’ll add it to the show notes, the Episode notes, so people can check it out as well. But yeah, there’s this there’s, I feel like there’s just such a possibility with things that we could learn from and, and, you know, replicate and scale, basically. So, I mean, let’s talk a little bit about that support model. You know, when I look at your site, I see things like coaching, quick tech help an educator network, a digital toolbox course, a Wayfinders, and community gabfests, as well as you know, offering custom one on one solutions for service providers. So I wonder if you can speak to what that ecosystem of supports? How is it how it’s evolved? And how it’s working?

Tracey Mollins 18:22
Yeah, sure. Um, so for everything we do? Well, maybe not. Yeah, for everything that we do. Our motto is, you know, learning first, technology second. So always behind the things that we do we learning is the first goal. We updated our our motto a little while ago to say, fun first, learning second and talk technology. Third, love it. Because we want to, because it’s important to engage people, right, and when people are engaged, and they can see, and they’re enjoying themselves, they feel like it’s a more pleasant way to go. So and it’s part of a sort of People First approach to the work, where we see ourselves, you know, more in a asset building role. And we we try to always start where people are at and help them get to where they want to go by listening to what what they have to say and and treating people well, knowing that people are the experts in their own context. So we don’t really come in with a lot of our ideas in the beginning, we do a lot of listening. I wasn’t around at alpha plus for all the conversations that evolved the coaching model, but But it’s definitely grounded in that idea that program workers and literacy practices are the experts of their own work. They know the requirements and goals of the learners they work with. And they just have a long and deep experience is supporting learning in their communities. And that there’s no one size fits all solution. And, and in our experience, you know, literacy workers are always trying to meet a lot of immediate, evolving, urgent, sometimes urgent needs in in the, in their programs and in the field. And the field is constantly changing. So coaches can help by taking on some of those change management roles. When people do want to make change in their programs, doing some of the research bringing the experience of other programs that we’ve worked with, who are trying to find similar solutions or dealing with similar challenges, or questions, we can help with planning and designing solutions. And sometimes we’re doing some training and providing some expertise in tools, and resources. And one of the roles that the coaches take on too is sort of to help projects keep moving, and not to slip down the To Do Lists too far. And so then I think you mentioned that quick tap tech help. And that’s the, the basis behind that is that a lot of programs, especially smaller programs don’t really have an IT department or IT support on site. So we’re there for that. So you can, if you’re, and you know, everybody knows what it’s like when you’re trying to do something new with technology, or you’re trying to remember something you did before and can’t remember how you did it, how frustrating it can be and how you can end up sort of scrambling down all these little rabbit holes as you’re trying to research it on the internet. So we have that service. So people can just get in touch with us and say I’m stuck in you helped me figure this piece out, right. And then that’s what we’re there. For. Sometimes people just get in touch with this kind of under that role, but and they’re just looking for a resource or something that they can’t find, or they heard somebody talking about in a webinar or something like that. So. So if either we have those answers at our fingertips, or because of our funding model, we have time to look them up. And maybe we can go down the rabbit holes a bit and find solutions for people and then bring back to them an answer that’s based on our research, right? So we can say we can look into these five things and era that advantages and, and drawbacks and each of those things? Well, and

Marco Campana 22:35
I mean, I can see the additional value, as well as that you’re not just like a tech help desk from Dell or something you actually understand. And you you had subject matter expertise in the sector. So you know, who these folks are their organizational cultures, the how they’re funded, even, which can have an implication on the kind of solutions that you might even recommend, right? And I imagine that’s incredibly valuable, to have that unique kind of approach as a as a as a, as a tech help desk, if you will.

Tracey Mollins 23:04
Yeah, no, we’re, we’re very grounded in the field, we, you know, we don’t know everything, but we do know a lot about what’s happening in the field. And, and, and what the parameters are burns. And sometimes when people are making choices, we know enough about their funding model to know, Well, you gotta go with the free choice, right? So that, again, you know, are the things right, so we don’t, we don’t sort of cloud the issue by bringing in a lot of things that are, you know, unaffordable or unattainable. So, you know, we have enough knowledge to be able to do that to sort of winnow things down. And when programs who are well funded or have maybe some project money and stuff come to us, we can, you know, we can expand the range of things that they can look at.

Marco Campana 23:53
For sure. And I mean, yeah, your connection to the sector, I’m looking at the, the virtual showcase, sessions that you’re running are and have run in the past. And you mentioned earlier that, that idea, kind of of knowledge mobilization, working within the sector, and what they know, because they’re experts in this as well. And the value of this peer to peer learning that you’re creating, where you’re bringing in people to talk about how I use tick tock to engage learners, right? Because, you know, again, people don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole, they hear, oh, you should be on YouTube, you should be on tick tock, you should be on Facebook, but But hearing the practical application in these sessions must be incredibly valuable for the for the other folks in the network as well.

Tracey Mollins 24:32
Yeah, it’s interesting, actually, because we’ve started including something in this showcases that, that field assets for because we were getting people to sort of talk about it. And, and people were saying we want to see more actual examples, right, like, of a, you know, a lesson with tic tock or something rather than just kind of talking about how we’re using it. So in the last session, which was about games and the He’s like Kahoot people used examples. And that was it was really fun. It was really interesting. And I think people really responded well to that. But yeah, for sure, I think when people can see how people are using something in their practice, in effective ways, it even if they don’t go to that particular tool, or that particular resource, it kind of opens your mind to possibilities that you might not have thought of before. And some of them can be very simple ideas. That don’t necessarily mean a lot of change, but small changes, starting around just different ideas about how to do things. And I we do here, and I think other researchers have found this, too, that sometimes people will hear about something this month, and they don’t really do, it’s just kind of in the back of their mind somewhere. And they don’t really do anything about it. And then one day, they’re working with a learner. And they all suddenly think, oh, yeah, I learned about acne. Yeah, that would really help this person, right in this situation. And they’ll go back to that, that resource, or that idea that they they heard about a long time ago. So it’s, it’s sometimes the impact can be immediate, you know, you see people like, the next day going, Oh, I tried this. And now they might write back to us and say, Oh, I tried it, and it was really fun. Or the impact that we probably it’s harder for us to quantify is how people are taking that on, and what it means for their practice in other ways, right? So how does it open up their mind to different possibilities? How does it make them think about digital technology in a more general sense, rather than around that specific tool? Right,

Marco Campana 26:50
so sometimes you can expand them down or narrow it into that tool, but sometimes it can help some expand them up into just that general sense of digital tools can be useful in different ways. And in a more kind of a generic sort of idea.

Tracey Mollins 27:05
Yeah, I think so. And I think when whenever you can get a group of practitioners together and foster conversation among them, I think the IT people really appreciate that. I know I always have, but just that learning from each other. And one thing we we hear sometimes when we when we’re talking to people, but you know, how do you like to engage in professional learning? And people will say, Oh, you know, what I really like is when I’m at a conference, and I have a hallway conversation with somebody, and they tell me something really, you know, I learned a lot there we have, I have lunch with somebody I’ve never met before. And we have a really good conversation about teaching and learning and stuff. And that’s what we tried to do with a gab fest. It’s a bit a bit weird, because we’re trying to create ad hoc conversation in a planned and scheduled manner. But but just those ideas that trying to give people opportunities just to talk to each other about whatever they want to talk about right around around their practice, especially using digital technologies, or teaching and learning.

Marco Campana 28:16
Well, it’s interesting, yeah, because it’s interesting, you say that, because I find it with digital, you’ve got to be intentional about serendipity almost, are intentional about creating those informal spaces, because they do just happen when you’re face to face at a conference or even in a workshop. And after you know, you’re walking away, you go for coffee or something like that. And we’ve heard a lot from folks in the sector that they’ve, they’ve had trouble kind of building that in without, because it doesn’t happen as naturally. Here’s your work. Here’s your webinar, here’s your q&a, and then we’re kind of done. So if they don’t build in some opportunities for breakout, or just like, here’s 20 extra minutes for everyone to stay in the virtual room and kind of, you know, mill about kind of thing. So So it’d be really interesting to see where where you get with the gab fests as potentially a model to kind of have that intentional serendipity.

Tracey Mollins 29:03
Yeah, it’s interesting, because that’s sort of what we talk about is the, in our description of it. Is that intentional serendipity? And what a weird idea that is. But, but yeah, so we Yeah, and we have people go into breakout rooms. And we give them a conversation starter, and we say if you talk about this fine, if you talk end up talking, and we don’t we’ve only done two of them. So we don’t actually even know sometimes what exactly they talk about in there. I mean, people tell us things when they come when they come back to the larger group, but we don’t really know. And I think that’s so yeah, so it’s it’s an evolving thing. We’re still trying to sort of figure it out. But yeah, just to give people some space to have those conversations that are fruitful and, and move their practice forward in unexpected ways, right.

Marco Campana 29:57
Yeah. And I mean, I guess it just creates a certain high are a level of accessibility if you can pull that off without having to require people to come physically together at a conference, which it’s just difficult for time, money, and and other resources, but, but if you can kind of replicate that in small chunks, then people, there’ll be people will continue to continue to continue to build those connections, regardless of where they are in the country. Yeah,

Tracey Mollins 30:22
no, I think so. Yeah, no, it’s true. It is, we don’t have lots of conferences, first of all, and then as you say, it’s the whole logistics and costs of getting there. So and it is something that we’ve thought about in terms of online learning is how do you create those spaces? Right? Because you do have to be more intentional about it. Right? They don’t happen by accident. So, right. So yeah, we’re trying to try to figure out that piece of like think instructors are trying to figure out that piece to write some of the ways. And some people have some interesting ideas. And I thought it was interesting, because when we went during the pivot, what during the Silver Linings cafes, you know, at the beginning, everybody was like, Oh, how do I get in touch with learners? Right? Like that was the main thing is just making contact with all the people who had been participating in programs and figuring that out? Because obviously, with some people, they had email connections and stuff, but not with everybody. And then how do I get everybody on Zoo? And then how can I find them something to learn? Right? Like, how can I get them connected to learning materials in this remote environment, but very quickly after that, people were like, Okay, now that I’ve figured out those pieces, the sort of logistical pieces how now how do I create engagement and space for learners to learn from each other and talk to each other and engage with, you know, the way they would in a classroom? It bricks and mortar classroom? Like how can I replicate those environments online, and I thought that was interesting, right? How quickly people came to around ideas around building community and sharing those kinds of ideas. So it was interesting, people shared lots of really cool, warm up ideas they were doing, and how they were kind of leveraging the fact that people were at home to talk about some different things, right? Like, bring your favorite ornament, and show it on Zoom and talk about that, you know, just doing some activities to sort of engage people differently in the online space. So it felt like a friendly and community space, just the way the bricks and mortar classroom could feel.

Marco Campana 32:46
Yeah, I mean, that creative resilience, we saw that in the settlement sector as well, people, you know, it was a big pivot, but within a week, a lot of organizations were, were just figuring it out and moving forward with their clients. Um, but what a what a difference I felt, I feel like it would have been tip have had an alpha plus to at least sort of gone to make a you know, the help desk and say, I’m freaking out, you know, can you help me at least figure out the logistics of zoom, because after that, that was the first hump. And then the second home was like, Okay, now being creative in using the tool. And because you’ve got sort of a, an ongoing community of practice, and you’re learning and sharing from what you’re hearing from others, you know, and I’m just looking at some of the past the wayfinding sessions, and just, you know, these are topics that are, that are that come up everywhere. And, and your connection to to your your community means that you could address these quickly and tell the story of how people in the sector themselves were addressing it.

Tracey Mollins 33:45
Yeah, for sure. And I think, yeah, it’s interesting, actually, one of those Wayfinders she was talking about, she participated in the Silver Linings cafes, and she was talking about how, when she, at the beginning, when she was just trying to figure out so many things, she was so exhausted, that she was finding it really hard to be creative. And she was spending hours trying to figure out how to connect with learners and doing things on email. And, you know, she said, she was just really, she, she got really tired and, and then and she said, You know, when I’m tired, I can’t be creative. And that’s why the Silver Linings cafes were why she really liked them, because she could figure out a lot of things there. And it made her less tired, so she could be more creative. And she was she was trying to figure out the other pieces of, you know, good learning, good learning environments, right, in an online in an online space. So yeah, yeah, I think it I think, having alpha I think a lot of people were happy to have alpha plus around during those days, and we were certainly busy but very happy to be busy as well. Yeah,

Marco Campana 34:58
no, I mean, that’s such a great story. I mean, it’s actually it feels like a huge success actually, in terms of the model, because for that one person, it’s like you described earlier, you know, they didn’t have to keep going down certain rabbit holes with the technology or the the engagement or the facilitation, because you were available to do that, as were others who came to those sessions. And so her ability to not be tired to be more creative to address things that maybe were more within her scope of interest or ability. She didn’t have to figure out that other stuff, because, you know, she got support from you and from from her peers. That’s a massive success in for an individual as well as the people who they’re serving.

Tracey Mollins 35:42
Yeah, know, for sure. Yeah. And that I mean, that’s our, our role. I mean, when we’d like doing those things, right, like, that’s so, you know, anytime we can do something like that, that, you know, that fulfills us as workers in the field. And, and that, it gives people a space to do the work that they should be doing. Right. Not worrying about how to access the zoom from an Android phone or, you know, yeah, I think so. You know, we heard all kinds of stories or people meeting learners in parking lots during the isolation days seems crazy now, doesn’t it? But you know, so the learner could hold up their device, and they could say, Oh, see, the button is there, right. Like,

Marco Campana 36:26
yeah, but that’s that makes all the difference then, right? Yeah,

Tracey Mollins 36:31
yeah. No, for sure. Yeah. But yeah, trying to describe it over a zoom session to somebody who’s, you know, it’s just, it’s crazy making?

Marco Campana 36:40
Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, I mean, you, you were speaking a lot about the practitioner. So yeah, the practitioners, the teachers in terms of who you support, but you also at alpha, plus, you support program managers and coordinators, just around sort of broader technology integration. I wonder how the approach or the challenges are different between those groups? Yeah,

Tracey Mollins 37:03
it’s some. I mean, one of the things that’s interesting about it is that in our sector in the smaller part, and we tend to work more with the smaller programs.

Tracey Mollins 37:11
So in literacy in basic skills, there are programs that are in colleges, in school boards, and in community based settings. So often, the colleges in terms of digital technology, they have a support system around them in their college, so we don’t work as much and little bit, but not as much with those programs. And sometimes school boards, it depends, school board programs can be quite different. So the Toronto District School Board is massive. In some school boards, it’s the literacy program is much smaller. So we tend to work with the smaller programs. And a lot of the times in those programs, people are wearing more than one app. So you know, one day we might be talking to somebody as an administrator, and next day, we might be talking to them as an instructor, they might be doing both. And a lot of people who are in administration roles in especially in the smaller programs also have done even if they’re not working as instructors anymore, they still are. They have in the past worked as instructors. So. So the division between those roles isn’t like a big line. Right? It’s, it’s there’s a lot of crossover in terms of that. But you know, that said, Would before I came on staff at at alpha plus, I used to do interviews for apoplast, like I was on contract, and do interviews for potential coaching, programs that wanted to engage in coaching, and I would do the sort of ifs kind of sort of partly needs assessment, partly just a conversation about what the starting place would be for coaching. And I did notice quite a difference in terms of like, when I talked to administrators. And when I talked to instructors, I was mostly talking to administrators. And sometimes I just noticed the difference in those conversations sometimes, especially when they were talking about, you know, what they wished teachers would be doing. And then when you would talk to the teachers, just about the realities and possibilities in their classroom, it could be quite a different conversation. But yeah, I think working in both arenas is important for the field and important for us to get you to understand the the realities of the whole scope of where people are working. And probably this is similar in in the settlement and ESL, but the administration burden can be quite like the load of work that people are, the administrative side can be quite heavy. And there’s a lot of reporting like so there’s a lot of data collect Shouldn’t about learners, for example, and a lot of reporting to the funder about who the learners are, and then what the progress is that learners are making in the program. So, so programs are always looking to streamline those kinds of processes, right. And, and anything we can do to help them do that. And digital technology is, you know, one of the ways that you can streamline some of that stuff. So any thing we can do that lessens that administrative load, can leave people open to that more creative side of creating programming, and working on that side of things. So, so I think it’s, I think it’s important that way to work with administrators, because they’re often the leaders in in programs in terms of what programming is going to happen and, and making sure that their programs are meeting the needs of all the possible learners in the community. So the less time they spend, trying to figure out their drives and where everything is, the more time they have for that kind of that sort of work.

Marco Campana 41:13
Yeah, and I imagine having both sides also helps ground you in the kind of advice and help that you might provide, because you understand some of the limitations or the structural challenges that you know, a practitioner might have, because of the administrators own challenges and, and limitations and things like that. So, like you said earlier, here’s a bunch of different tools, but you’re going to need to choose the free one, because you’re not going to you don’t have the funding infrastructure to continue this over the long term and things like that. So it just makes it so much more practical. So I wonder, I want to wrap it up a little bit, because I know I’ve made you speak for so long. But there’s such a richness in, in what you’ve been able to do. And I again, I keep coming back to Alpha pluses is a model that our sector and others can use. But imagine that there’s things you wish you could be doing. So I wonder with all of the the services, the advocacy, the research, the impact and outcomes you have, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you want to do more of? Or differently or new? Or add to what you’re doing with alpha? Plus?

Tracey Mollins 42:16
Wow, that’s a big question. You

Marco Campana 42:18
have to dream now we’re not allowed to most of the time, but you know, here’s your, here’s your chance,

Tracey Mollins 42:23
do a lot of dreaming it at alpha plus, like we really do, and then we, you know, then we have to face reality. And so and we have great leadership there that, you know, our executive director definitely lets us dream a lot. And those are often some of our more fun sessions where we kind of, you know, pretend we work in a perfect world where we can do anything. And, and one of those dreams, actually, one of those sort of dreamy sessions was led to the educator network that I’ve been working on for a couple of years. And and I’m really enjoying it and the practitioners that participate in seem to really enjoy it. And I have a lot of dreams for that project. But I also it’s around I think it’s it’s partly around what we’re doing, but it’s partly around. How do we, in Canada, let’s say just build a culture of continuous learning, where it’s valued, and it’s built in. And I feel one of our real challenges is in doing our work, is that people don’t have time. And there’s no time built into their work day. Right? Professional Learning, or, or reflection, or, you know, even if they weren’t doing it with us to do it somewhere. Right. So I feel like sometimes when we dream, we dream about system change, right. And we dream about, imagine a place where, where this was just a built in thing that it would be an expectation it would be funded, it would be supported, it would be people would have work time to do it in, they would have a time of day when they could go to things you know, that kind of thing is because I feel like that’s one of our so when we start to dream like, Oh, what if we could offer a program like this? Often the thing that makes us go Yeah, but who could come to it? Right? Like, everybody’s so busy and, you know, that would take that would take an engagement of several weeks or several hours or something. So who could who could participate in it like, and are we building things that, you know, would we be building things that nobody could have access to? You know, what’s the point about really? So I think That’s. Yeah.

Marco Campana 45:05
That’s a huge dream. I share your dream. We haven’t you know, I mean, right now we have to ground ourselves in reality. But I think like you said the importance of earlier, for example, not being too tired to be creative, because if you dream, sometimes you create something like the educator network. So I think that’s so important to continue to do that this is, you’ve just reaffirmed my love for alpha plus, and how will we have to bring you or your model to our sector, so I appreciate that. And now that’s my dream. So we’ll see if we can ground that in some reality eventually. Is there anything I’m curious that I haven’t asked you about that you want to share or you think is important to talk about when it comes to being, you know, that kind of support for, for nonprofits, for community service agencies, in this case, literacy service providers and facilitators that we should know about? Or be thinking about if we’re moving down this path as well?

Tracey Mollins 45:58
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, when one of the things I was thinking about, when we were talking about doing this, I was thinking about, like approaches. And I was thinking, Oh, it’s interesting, because when I talked to my alpha plus colleagues, I was thinking about the words we use for the people that we work with, for example, right, like, so some people I work with talk about clients. And some people I work with, talk about customers. And my frame is always colleagues, right? Like, I always feel like I’m working with colleagues, but it could be because of this sphere, I’m working in that I work with instructors and on their professional learning, so and I was thinking, does that matter? Like, does it matter? What word we’re using the end? Does it change the way we operate? And I, I don’t really have anything, you know, firm or concrete to say about it. But it’s just a thing I’ve been sort of mulling over in my mind, like, what does it? How does that impact the work? And and do we? Are we working sometimes with people as clients, and sometimes as with people, as colleagues, and and maybe that’s how we, we can be successful, right is knowing when somebody is a client, and so we’re providing a service. And when somebody is a colleague, and we’re, you know, working together, kind of mode, right? So when, when do people just want us just to help them and just provide a service? And when do people want to be in conversation with us and, and help us learn as well, right? So about how to do the things we’re doing better? So I don’t know if that’s really anything, but I just know, I love it. I

Marco Campana 47:46
mean, I think language does matter. And I think the way we exactly I mean, we have that struggle in the sector, even when it comes to service providers to quote clients slash newcomers, slash communities. It’s a huge, it’s a huge topic. I think that keeps coming up. So I think I think that’s a great reflection, for sure to think about, as you’re building out these kinds of services and approaches, how are you? How do they want to be considered in that interaction or intervention? And how do they want to be treated differently? So that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Listen, thank you for this conversation. Really interesting, really rich, and I appreciate it.

Tracey Mollins 48:21
Well, thank you, Marco. It’s been great chatting with you. And I hope we have lots more conversations. Not always on the podcast, but just

Marco Campana 48:32
absolutely, I look forward to it. Thanks again.

Tracey Mollins 48:34
Take care.

Marco Campana 48:39
Thanks so much for listening. I hope you found this episode interesting and useful for you and your work. You can find more podcast episodes, wherever you listen to your podcasts are also on my site at marcopolis.org I appreciate you listening and if you have any tips, suggestions, ideas or want to be interviewed or know someone who wants to be interviewed, please drop me a line through my website, or marco@marcopolis.org Thanks again.

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Welcome to episode 41 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I speak about Knowledge Mobilization with David Phipps, Assistant Vice President of Research Strategy & Impact at York University and director of Research Impact Canada (RIC).

David has been a Knowledge Mobilization pioneer in Canada and I was excited to chat with him about how KM has evolved and continues to evolve in Canada and beyond. As a past alum of MobilizeU, a course designed by York University for folks interested in learning more about Knowledge Mobilization, I’ve long been a fan of the work York U, through David, has done, including in the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector.

You know that Knowledge Mobilization is near and dear to my heart, and is really the point of the work that I do. In our conversation, we talk about some of the foundations of Knowledge Mobilization, how community organizations can connect and work with academics, as well as what KM can mean in our community work. I think you’ll find it an educational and interesting conversation.

Some questions we discussed:

• Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and what brought you to the work you’re doing in Knowledge Mobilization?
• Someone once said to me that the art of Knowledge Mobilization is answering 3 simple questions What? So what? Now what? The goal is to move knowledge to action, or as your work suggests, from research to impact. Can you tell me a bit about your experience and some examples where you’ve seen success in the research to impact continuum? I work in the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector so any specific examples of where Knowledge Mobilization has had an impact would be great.
• Knowledge Mobilization takes time. For many nonprofit front line workers, having time to read, reflect, analyze, and potentially apply research to their practice is a challenge. What advice would you give them?
• What advice would you give researchers to create more impact from their work?
• I find Research Snapshots particularly useful in distilling research into something that helps answer the What? So what? Now what? questions. Can you tell me a bit more about what Research Snapshots are, how they came to be, how they have worked, and how widely they’re being used. How can we encourage more researchers and academics to create Snapshots?

Resources:

Here are links to documents David mentioned during our conversation:

• Jonathan Grant analyzed 6679 impact case studies
• Barwick, M., Phipps, D., Myers, G., Johnny, M. and Coriandoli, R. (2014) Knowledge Translation and Strategic Communications: Unpacking Differences and Similarities for Scholarly and Research Communications. Scholarly and Research Communication, 5(3): 0305175, 14 pp.
• Bayley, J.E., Phipps, D., Batac, M. and Stevens, E. (2018) Development of a framework for knowledge mobilisation and impact competencies. Evidence and Policy, 14(4): 725-738
• Public Scholars Initiative at the University of British Columbia
• Phipps, D.J., Johnny, M.J. and Wedlock, J. (2015) An institutional process for brokering community-campus research collaborations. Engaged Scholar Journal 1(1): 69-86.
• Bayley, J.E. and Phipps, D. (2019) Building the concept of research impact literacy. Evidence & Policy. 15(4):596-606
• Bayley, J.E. and Phipps, D. (2019) Extending the Concept of Research Impact Literacy: levels of literacy, institutional role and ethical considerations. Emerald Open Research. 1:14
• Phipps, D., Poetz, A., and Johnny, M. (2022) Demonstrating impact – considerations for collecting and communicating the evidence of impact. In, Kelly, W.B. (Ed.). (in press, 2022). The Impactful Academic: being and becoming an impactful researcher throughout your career. Emerald Publishing Limited.
• Impact and Engagement Case Study Guidelines for collecting and communicating the evidence of impact in English and French.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation using Otter.ai. The transcript has not been edited. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.

Marco Campana 0:00
Welcome to Episode 41 of the technology and human services podcast. In this episode, I speak about knowledge mobilization with David Phipps, the Assistant Vice President of Research, strategy and impact at York University and director of research impact Canada. David has been a knowledge mobilization pioneer in Canada. And I was excited to chat with him about how knowledge mobilization has evolved and continues to evolve in Canada and beyond. As a past alum of mobilize you, of course, designed by York University for folks interested in learning more about knowledge mobilization, I’ve long been a fan of the work your cue does through David, including in the immigrant and refugee serving sector. You know, that knowledge mobilization is near and dear to my heart. And it really is the point of the work that I do. In our conversation, we talk about some of the foundations of knowledge mobilization, how community organizations can connect and work with academics, as well as what knowledge mobilization can mean, in our community work, I think you’ll find it an educational and interesting conversation.

Marco Campana 0:56
Welcome, David, to the technology and human services podcast. Thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. And why don’t we just get started if you could introduce yourself the work that you do, and and what is knowledge mobilization?

David Phipps 1:09
Oh, well, good question. Thanks, Marco for the opportunity. My name is David Phipps. I am a settler born to white parents in England. And we emigrated to this land that some people call Canada when I was two, I live with my husband in Toronto, which is on the traditional territories of the Anishinabek nation, the hood, nashoni Confederacy, the Huron Wendat and the maytee. And the current treaty holders are the Mississauga the credit. So that’s my journey, where I am now is as the Assistant Vice President for Research strategy and impact at York University. That means I get had the pleasure of working with all of our researchers on running the grants office and helping the researchers get their money. But the fun stuff that I get to do is work on what we call knowledge mobilization. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit. But as part of my fun, I am the network director of a network called research impact Canada, a network of 23 research, performing organizations, all interested in building institutional capacity to support knowledge mobilization. So what is what is known as mobilization, I like to say in an uncomplicated fashion, that knowledge mobilization helps make research useful to society. And so it gets research outside of the academic walls and into the hands of people from the public, the private or the nonprofit sectors who are looking to use that research in, in non commercial forms. I’ll talk a bit about that in a minute. But to help inform decisions about public policy or professional practice or social services, this is particularly important for research that’s not served by commercialization that’s not partnered with industry. It’s not the focus of startup companies. So and it’s research centers in all disciplines. shirk was one of the first organizations surfshark, the social sciences, and Humanities Research Council was one of the first organizations to use the term knowledge mobilization in Canada. But it’s not just limited to shirk disciplines, any any social sciences, human sciences, creative arts, or STEM disciplines that can have an impact on public policy, professional practices, social services, these can all be served by knowledge mobilization, and they very much fits a lot of federal priorities. Things like homelessness and housing, public health, immigration and settlement, environment, policy, emergency preparedness, these are all disciplines that are never going to be served by commercialization, but nonetheless are of interest to Canadians, and for which academic research can help provide evidence for these decisions. And I like to conceptualize it or not conceptualize, but sum it up by saying, We’re never going to patent our way to reconciliation. Right, we’re never going to patent our way to reconciliation. So it’s, it’s really connecting university research from the University and connecting it with organizations from outside of the university so that research can leave the academy and get taken up in in places that will provide societal benefit. So I’m curious if because York is one of the pioneers in knowledge mobilization. And in fact, I think you’re the the hub for research impact Canada, right. And in a lot of ways, a lot of other universities are kind of following your lead around doing this work. And I wonder if in your experience, those academics who have committed to knowledge mobilization if their work actually even starts with the question of how can this be useful instead of kind of just, you know, hey, this is an interesting question. But even out of the gate, is there a sort of a preconceived idea that I want to do something that will have an impact on the communities that I’m working with? Because, like you said, it’s multidisciplinary, you know, you and I talked earlier about the immigrant and refugee serving sector, which is where I come out of, and and we’ve done a lot of work with a lot of academics. And you can see the difference when someone has kind of, you know, out of the gate committed to knowledge mobilization versus someone who’s just kind of doing an academic exercise, and the difference of what that that research can have an impact on in turn.

Marco Campana 5:00
to the community, do you have a sense of those who’ve committed to Cam? If it actually matters and has an impact in the way that their research gets rolled out or even, you know, accepted or acted on?

David Phipps 5:11
Yeah, I think I’ll comment first by saying that not all research must have societal impacts, right, that we must create space for basic science for fundamental inquiry for research. That is, for knowledges sake only, and for whom the next user might not be a social service agency. But it might be another academic might take up that research evidence and use it to further the realm of thinking and critical inquiry. But in those areas, where there are opportunities for research to inform decisions by the public, private nonprofit sectors, we see researchers really taking, making meaningful efforts in knowledge mobilization, most grant applications that are outside in the renewal, applied sciences or in the social sciences. And many of the human sciences, they start out with a problem statement, they’ve identified what the challenge is that they’re expecting to address through their research. And that challenge usually sits outside of the academy. It sits in society somewhere local, or global communities. And and so researchers are really passionate about wanting to be change agents in the their fields. Some of it some some researchers take it as a personal mission. And some researchers do it because funders ask them to, but then they realize how amazing it is to be able to see the results of their research being taken up and having an impact on broader society. So I do think there is there is when it’s right for the researcher, and it’s right for the institution, like at your university, and it’s right for the funder, that’s when those three come together. And you’ve got a nice opportunity, oh, and also I should say, right for the potential partner or beneficiaries, then that’s that those are the correct conditions for knowledge mobilization and research impact.

Marco Campana 7:01
And you mentioned funders in shirk, for example, I’ve see and I think you’ve noted this in your in your work as well. There’s increasingly fond funders of research are looking for knowledge mobilization, or the the empathy ability to show research impact in social studies work is that is that a trend that comes out of kind of knowledge mobilization,

David Phipps 7:21
I would say, the trend for funders, if we look at funders, like the health charities, they have always invested their funds from their donors into research in order to make a difference into the lives of people who are living with or, you know, patients and public involvement with with the subject area of the charity. So I would say that health charities really have led the way by investing in research that is intensely focused on making on improving the lives of of patients and families. The federal funders have come along in different ways. So the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, when they had the CHR act of 2000, the year 2000. The CHR Act says that CHR will undertake research and translate that research into improved health for Canadians, specifically, the word translate. So CHR has this word in their legislative mandate that they will not just do research, but they’ll translate that into improved health for Canadians. Sure, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council released a revised program architecture, they did a big review, certainly the last part of the first decade of the 2000s and the 2009 relaunched their revised program architecture, and every grant application now must have a knowledge mobilization strategy, and must also have an outcome statement. So the outcome statement is what’s the difference we want this research to make. And the knowledge mobilization strategy is how you’re going to get there, what are you got to do to achieve it? So one is the the, the impact you want to have and the other the knowledge mobilization is how you’re going to get there. And those are two very important concepts that link knowledge mobilization is the doing of something. And research impact is the thing that arises out of that. And answer has similarly always wanted to have an impact mostly on the economy by working through university industry partnerships, but they’re, they’re expanding, they’ve never they’ve never not had an interest in public policy or in social services. But they’re expanding their language now to encompass knowledge mobilization and broader impacts on society, with advice to grant applicants and reviewers to really be looking where feasible to have to describe an impact on broader society. And I say where feasible because, you know, things like fundamental mathematics and space science research, you know, those are things that are not ever going to inform public policy, but are really important fundamental areas of inquiry.

Marco Campana 9:57
Right? Yeah, no, I mean, I guess being In the immigrant and refugee serving sector, it’s always about the, in general is how will this impact policy? How will this impact service delivery or frontline settlement? And I’m wondering, with that increase in in funders, having people create knowledge mobilization strategies and impact statements and things like that. Is there a sense of consistency around that? Or is it is it sort of a bit of a wild west in the km community? Like when when you say, a knowledge mobilization strategy? What are the core components of what that should look like?

David Phipps 10:30
Right. Okay, I’ve got answers to both of those, you might have to remind me of the second one, which is, what are the core components? will I tell you about the first one? So is there is it the Wild West is there come some consistency, so there is a program in the United Kingdom called the Research Excellence Framework, and universities get block grants of funding totaling 2 billion British pounds a year, based on the university’s ability to describe the excellence of its research, the research environment, that’s the infrastructure in the environment that it hasn’t also in 2014, or the exercise, it runs every six to seven years, they introduced societal impact. So all of a sudden, you had overnight universities and professors rushing to describe the impact of their sciences, their research has had, they’ve never had this before. And in the 2014, exercisers research done by Jonathan grant, and I know that you’ll be hyperlinking this into the into the text. But Jonathan grant, he was at King’s College, London, at the policy institute of kings, and he analyzed the 6679 impact case studies submitted from all of the UK institutions, he did word analysis, and he found out of those 6679 impact case studies, there were 3709 unique pathways to impact.

Marco Campana 11:55
That’s a lot. A lot,

David Phipps 11:57
right. And so there is no cookie cutter approach, there’s no templated approaches to impact because the research is different. The geography is different, the partners are different, the potential impacts are different, which is why every time I work with a researcher to help craft an impact strategy and a Grants application, we go back to first principles, we start now how I plan how I help them plan is the same each time because this is the second part of your question. There are common elements to an impact strategy, whether it’s a knowledge mobilization strategy for knowledge for Sherk, or a knowledge translation strategy for CIHR, or a health charity application. And I work my researchers with a tool that says, first off, who are your partners? Who are the people you want to listen to, you want to work with? And you want to disseminate to? So who are the people that you’re going to be engaging with? figure those out? And they figure them now with those people? What are your goals that you want to accomplish? And I say with those people, because the goal should be meaningful, both for the academic researcher and the potential partner, right. And so in the immigration and settlement space, there should likely be a frontline service agency, possibly Ministry of Immigration, refugees, and citizenship Canada, right? So so craft the goals of your knowledge mobilization strategy with those people that you identified in number one. So people, number one, goals. Number two, the activities is number three, what are you going to do to help meet the goals that you’ve identified with the people you want to work with. And those goals in my experience are often focused on dissemination, we’re going to write a policy brief, we’re going to put out an infographic we’re going to send out, we’ve got a social media strategy, and that’s all good, that’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient to be able to inform change. We know that when you when in CO production, when you collaborate with your end users or with the people with lived or living experiences, that’s when you start to get some research into the hands of users. So one is your goal to it. And sorry, one is your partner’s two is your goals. Three is your activities. Four is your evaluation, we suck at evaluating this stuff. Now we’ll talk a little bit about sure we’ll get to talk about that a little bit more. So what is your what’s your valuation? How are you going to know you’ve reached your goals by doing your activities with the people you’ve identified? And we’re not really good at that and critical in there is what’s the data the qualitative and quantitative data you’re going to have access to and not just wait till the end, please don’t wait to the end of your project to evaluate, be collecting these data along the way. So that you you’ve got access to the data when you need to do if you are going to wait till the end to do your evaluation. So and then the fifth element of a knowledge mobilization strategies, the budget, right this this, these are real costed activities that in many grant applications and depends funded by funder. Many grant applications have these as well. Trouble expenses. And I always say that this is not a 10 hour a week undergrad student role. I mean, we want undergrads to be involved in research and we want to fund them. But these are real roles that that have the potential to be to engage professional knowledge, mobilization of knowledge, mobilizers, and that the budget should reflect the activities that you want to do.

Marco Campana 15:21
That’s a really important point, I think, as well, in terms of not leaving the the the actual role, too, as an afterthought in the same way that evaluation shouldn’t be an afterthought. And I’m curious if that’s, I mean, I’ve seen an uptick probably in the last 1015 years in the professionalization of that role, right? So you’ve got sick kids doing training, you yourselves are doing training at York University through mobilize you. There’s a number of other folks who do training and again, some of its more specialized into health or into other places. What is that role looking like from, from a professional perspective? What What should someone be trained in? Is it subject matter expertise, plus the knowledge mobilization and communication and you know, all of those things, or is it something? What’s the profile look like for someone who should be a professional knowledge mobilizer?

David Phipps 16:11
Yeah, it’s a good question. We there are some resources, which I know I’ll send to you. And you’ll put into the links of these. I did a paper a number of years ago with Melinda Barwick from SickKids. And, and we, we unpack the difference between knowledge mobilization and communications. Right. And it was partly and that was from a sense of the profession, partly from the sense of skills, also did a paper with Julie Bailey from Lincoln University in the UK, around competency frameworks for knowledge mobilization. So we’re starting to really get an evidence base on Who are these people and as you said, mobilize you and the knowledge translation professional certificate to SickKids. Guelph has a knowledge mobilization certificate program. So there are increasing li some practice based courses that that are being informed by scholarship, the scholarship in the space, what does the person look like? We know that a good is on the commercialization side of the house, we know that a good commercialization manager is someone who’s got experience in academic research, but maybe has also worked in industry or started up a company or something like that. I find that people who excel in this are people have had a bit of experience in the academic side. But it’s also worked somewhere in potential partner or beneficiary organization. I’ll give the example of the manager of knowledge mobilization at York University, Michael Gianni, he’s my first hire in knowledge mobilization in 2006. And bless his heart. He’s still with me, which is amazing. He has his master’s in native and Canadian Studies from Trent University, but he also worked in adult literacy and adult literacy and indigenous settings. And so he’s, he’s had came to our knowledge mobilization unit at York University with both he’s written a thesis, he’s done research, but he’s also had that community social service aspect, professional in his in his in his job history. So to me, it’s having an understanding both the community side and the academic side makes for a really, really rich knowledge mobilizer. But increasingly, we’re seeing people coming out of their grad programs or PhD programs, with, with experience that both academic research and also engaging more broadly beyond the Academy. And there’s a wonderful program at the University of British Columbia called the public scholars initiative, and we’ll send you that link will get that link up. It’s a program where they hold an open call for PhD students whose research has a public face to it, whether that’s to industry or community or to government. And they select I think they they get, I don’t know, 8090 applications, they select 30 ish, I’m making these numbers up, but I think I think they’re close. And they these students get specialized training and outreach and engagement. And they also get some additional funding to fund their engagement and outreach activities. So it’s a wonderful program. I had the pleasure a number of years ago at going to public scholars initiative conference, and they’re just brilliant young scholars, you know, in a mature phase of their PhD Career, so there is increasingly going to be capacity building for knowledge mobilization, even within a PhD program.

Marco Campana 19:39
That’s great. So so at the at the core, the researcher themselves doesn’t need to be a cam expert, but they need to have someone who can straddle both worlds whether it’s industry or community, as well as academia in order to help kind of translate that information into the communities and the stakeholders, like you mentioned earlier.

David Phipps 19:56
Yeah. And I’ll say it’s, it’s a relationship you use the right risk relationship between the researcher and the knowledge mobilization professional, what? Unlike transfer, so technology transfer is I’m a researcher, and I’ve developed something that might have commercial potential in my research. So I hand that off to the bank transfer office who arranges to have a patent file, and then they market that out and they try and find a licensed company licensee for that. That’s very much a handoff from one one set of expertise to the other set of expertise. In Knowledge Translation, we can’t, we don’t usually do a handoff like that, it’s usually an ongoing collaboration, because, you know, I was the Knowledge Translation lead for a network called kid’s brain health network, which was a network of centers of excellence based on childhood neurodevelopmental disorders. And there’s no way that a researcher could give me their research in whatever, you know, community support system might be, and they say, Get David, go do it. Right, I am really what I prefer to do is work with that researcher from the beginning of the research project, to support them all the way along, because the i You can’t separate the research from the knowledge mobilization, you know, I can’t a researcher can’t give me say, David, can you write me an ultra mobilization strategy, I can’t do that without reading what the research is. Right? So So I do think that it’s there’s, it’s not a handoff like there isn’t commercialization. It’s much more a partnership between academic researchers and knowledge mobilization professionals. And let’s not forget the some of these, some of these are academic researchers don’t need me, right there. They’ve just been doing this their whole career. And sometimes they want help with, you know, more contemporary collaboration platforms or something like that. But we’ve all got researchers who are long standing in their careers, you’ve got long standing relationships with community or policy partners. And they’re just doing this as part of their scholarship that you do not need me to help.

Marco Campana 21:56
Interesting. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk less about academic researchers and more. Because there’s, there’s been an explosion over the last few years in community based research, where organizations frontline organizations, in our case, local immigration partnerships, umbrella organizations, are increasingly doing research sometimes with academic partners, but not always. And, and so they, they, they then don’t necessarily have access to that same kind of infrastructure, or even the idea of knowledge mobilization, I think they’re very focused on impact, because generally, the point of their research is to try to either get some funding or meet an identify a need in the community. But I know that they struggle, because communications and knowledge translation isn’t something that’s heavily funded at the community level. And I wonder, through research impact, or through your own work at York, because you’re connected with a lot of those organizations, what what can they do to figure out how to how to bridge that role, if you will, to ensure that their research is actually which again, typically has an impact outcome focus can actually have that outcome instead of just sort of, you know, being thrown on the pile and set out nice research, but you know, there’s nothing that’s going to happen with it.

David Phipps 23:05
Yeah, yeah. It’s a good question. My, my world is focused. Well, it’s not focused internally to the university, my lenses on the university, but it’s also supporting, opening up creating a permeable university that is more open to working in collaboration with public policy and social service organizations. So how can a social service organization frontline organization gets supports for knowledge mobilization? Well, first off, I think they could look at the members page at the research impact Canada website, and they could see if there’s a local research organization in their community, and they we’ve got contact information on all of our members organizations, if they if they are not in a research community where there’s a research impact Canada, member university, they can always see an email or generic line info at research impact.ca and say, Hey, I’m looking for I’m looking for some help in this right they can try it try and describe what that is. All of our resources on the resource page of the research impact Canada website are free and free to use. We’ve got some standalone self directed resources, one on making infographics, one on holding accessible knowledge mobilization meetings, and I think we’ve got one on working in partnership. So these are all standalone items. But then, depending on where they are, certainly at York University, we welcome local organizations to attend to mobilize You of course, it is designed, it is not designed specifically for academics. It is always designed specifically for researchers. And there’s no reason that a community based researcher could not also focus or take that course. That may not be true certainly is not true of all knowledge mobilization courses in Canada, but they could certainly join mobilize to you if they’re local to York University, and there’s another organization in Canada called community based research Canada or CBR, Canada, and they have a lot of resources as well. And there is a focus there specifically on community based researchers, those are both researchers in the academy. They’re working in and with community, as well as community based researchers. This concept is getting growing roots, beyond research organizations, I had a really interesting time I was invited to speak on this work to the Continuing Care Association of Alberta. It may not be exactly that, but there’s a two season two A’s and it’s continuing care, and it’s Alberta Association, so and they said, Could you come and talk about knowledge mobilization, I said, oh, so are there researchers in the room, they went Nope. I said, who’s in the room, and they said, long term care institutions, managers, unions, nurses, evaluators, policymakers, everyone associated with continuing care in Alberta. And so I had to work hard actually, to remove the word students from my language to remove with the words, research. And first I started out by saying, raise your hand, this is in person, raise your hand if you work in an organization that wants to make a difference. And of course, everyone’s hands went up, right? And I said, raise your hand, if you if you use evidence, or some opinions or some surveys, in order to inform the business that you do in order to form improvements. They all put their hands up. I said, you know, so that’s knowledge mobilization, we take an input into something, whether it’s an evaluation report, it’s data, it’s, it’s a testimonial from from interested parties, and then that goes into some decision making machine and outcomes a result, right. And that’s using this knowledge mobilization. So even in a non core research, space, knowledge mobilization is really just helping evidence or helping evidence in, translate into, into impact.

Marco Campana 27:06
I think that’s really great to be able to democratize and demystify it a little bit as well, because I think it also, as you’re describing that I can think of people in the room who are thinking about communication, which is more outputs oriented, here’s what we did, and then shifting it to outcomes, which is the impact, which is the knowledge mobilization, and instead of just talking about what you did, like, figure out how it could be the be implemented or, you know, who could take that knowledge for what kind of thing and it’s a great, it’s a great frame, the way you’re putting it, I think, because people should understand that they are in this it’s not a role that is divorced from their reality, if they just have to shift the thinking a little bit, right.

David Phipps 27:43
Yeah, I will encourage the communicators who are listening to this to look at that paper that I did with Melanie Barwick, Compaq, and communications and knowledge mobilization. Because communications as I said before, communications is communicator communications is a skill that I practice. But I don’t call myself a communicator, right. And there are some important differences between communications and knowledge mobilization, and communications is is a critical role in knowledge mobilization. You can’t do knowledge mobilization without communications, but you can communicate without necessarily doing knowledge mobilization.

Marco Campana 28:22
That’s a great point. And speaking of that, it’s a nice segue in some ways from from my brain anyway, to some of the tools that people use around knowledge mobilization. Now, you and I spoke about this a little bit that it’s something you’re moving away from. But research snapshots is something that says for example, you mentioned earlier, the Center for Excellence in Research and immigration and settlement, which doesn’t exist anymore. That’s where I was introduced to these and I found them incredibly useful. So research snapshots, a two, three page summary, asking a template of asking you some very specific questions and giving some very concise answers about who did this why it was done? What are the outcomes? You know, how can it be used by people in the field, when I worked in the field was really useful to really help me understand well, should I read this 100 page report? The two to three pager at least told me that yes or no, or which sections of it maybe I should read, for example. And, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how that template came about, and perhaps even why it’s not used as widely now?

David Phipps 29:18
Yeah, um, so the template, we applied for a very small shirt grant, and it was early days in grant 2007, I think in our knowledge, mobilization history. And we wanted to be able to do exactly what she said ticket, take a published academic paper, and one of the challenges in knowledge mobilization is the people who are frontline service providers, policymakers, they may not have the skills to read academic scholarship, right? Or they may not have the time to crank to figure out if this 10 or 200 page paper is something I should I shouldn’t look at. So we created this tool called research snapshot, which is as you say, it’s two pages. You It asked the questions. What is this about? What did they do? How can you use this and then there’s a little box of about two or three bullets. It says what you need to know. So the idea is, you know, you look at the title, which is going to be the title again, it’s not the title of the paper. It’s, it’s a more like a headline, a journal headline. And you read the headline, Oh, that’s interesting. You read the textbook. So that’s three or four bullets, I can read that. And then you go, Okay, well, now I can read the two pages. And if I want, then I can get the reference. And I can read the whole paper. So we were using it as a way to try and make the outputs of research. So journal articles more accessible to non academics. It was a standard two page layout. Interestingly, we hired them a summer student out of a PhD program in English as an English, this guy was a poet. That was his PhD. He’s a published poet. And so he was the first one to draft the clear language, right? So he’s was not a scientist. He was he was a poet, and his name is Jason Gurriel. And and I think that’s really important to conceptualize what we mean by clear language. We didn’t call it plain language called a clear language. And, and and we then drafted we drafted I think they’re still available on the York University Library site. And they’re publicly available. I’ve got a few 100 in there.

Marco Campana 31:22
Yeah, it’s a great repository. Absolutely.

David Phipps 31:25
Getting steel now, I would say, right, so we haven’t written any probably since about 2018 2017 2018. But it did inspire McMaster University, a research impact candidate member, they adopted a program called research snaps. And so the research snaps are actually even snappier than the snapshot. I in very, they lend themselves very much to social media. And they actually won an award for science communications, the snapshots, which is really cool. So they took the research snapshot, we inspired them, for them to adapt it into their own research snap, which is a which they’re still going it’s still going on those. You know, one of the other reasons we stopped is we didn’t really know how they were being used, like you can you don’t we had a social media strategy around them. We knew that they were being downloaded. But we didn’t know who what was really doing with them. We didn’t know who was reading them. Yeah, we considered embedding a very simple evaluation, if you open one of these things, and you know, two questions pop off, which pisses everyone off. So we never did that. You know, so there was a bit of lack of evidence about, you know, what, what, who was using these. But we really also remember I said that communications is necessary, but not sufficient to inform change. And our practice and knowledge mobilization has become much more about supporting research collaborations, rather than pushing knowledge out, which is what a research snapshot does, as important as that is, I don’t want to say it’s not, we’re much more focused at York University in creating those collaborations so that end users partners can actually pull the research out of the university than us having to push it up. And so and again, we, if we’re going to do good knowledge mobilization, we need to be doing that, according to what not just the academics feel is important. But what the community partners or the agency partners think is important as well. And the research snapshots were really only just communicating what the university had done, there wasn’t that reciprocal engagement, that that I feel is very important.

Marco Campana 33:39
So can you speak a little bit to that, because a collaboration obviously makes sense. But it also is more time consuming more resource intensive, but theoretically, likely more likely to have that impact that researchers may even be looking for. Right?

David Phipps 33:53
Yeah, it’s and so it does have more impact. Because if a researcher is working on their own in the academy, and then they’re trying to push it out to try and get it taken up, you don’t actually know whether you’re working on something that’s needed. And so when you actually go out and talk to potentially interested parties in this area, you’re going to understand what their needs are. And then that can inform the work that you wanted to do. It doesn’t mean that you should only do work that is meaningful for partners. But if you want your research to be taken up by partners, you better know what they think is important. And so that’s one of the things that we help researchers do is, is when we’re brokering relationships in the knowledge mobilization unit, we we basically hung up a shingle and said to partners, if you ever want to talk to your researcher, give us a call. Please don’t cold call my researchers because you’re going to get someone who’s never done to call you back number one, because they don’t know who you are. And number two, you might get someone who is it should never do this work right. They should be best left to their good academic scholarship. And we know We will help you have a good first experience. In looking at our numbers, we know that we get about 30 to 40 calls a year 75% Are those from the outside looking to partner in. And of those most are community organizations. Again, this is knowledge mobilization, that York’s in numbers. And we’ve got a paper which we published with United Way of York region at the time, when that’s what they were called. And we’ll put that as a link into the notes. And it was describes our process for knowledge brokering with partners, with community organizations, and we are successful, I think the number is 92% of the time successful to at least host the first conversation, we don’t necessarily guarantee you’re going to get your needs met in that first conversation. But we’re good at getting someone to call you back. And and and it’s because we created this, this door into the university, that community and governments and industry can call to say, Hey, I’m looking, I’m looking for help in this.

Marco Campana 36:06
Yeah, no, I mean, that’s safe, that would save so much time and frustration on both ends, I imagine to be able to sort of go with someone who understands the internal system, and can, as you say, find the right person. Is that is that for community groups, for example? And I know you’ve written it up, so we’ll certainly look at that. But is that for community groups who already have a research, a funded research plan and are looking for an academic to depart to bring into it? Or someone who’s just looking to explore a piece of research and they need someone with the research credentials? Yeah, it’s

David Phipps 36:36
usually someone who who’s who already knows that they have a question. And one thing we’re not here to do is to broker consulting agreements for our faculty members, they consult they’re allowed to do that, but that’s not our thing. We’re looking for people who have an actual research question. So for example, many in 2007, it might have been early on. The Ontario collaborative response to family violence was a colocation of a number of agencies that were providing services to families emerging out of situations of domestic violence, and they co located and the each agency had its own funding, and they they knew what they needed to evaluate to get their own funding, but they didn’t know how to evaluate the collaborative, what you brought together. And so they phoned up Michael Jonnie, and the manager of knowledge mobilization said, Hey, Michael, you know, we need some help, understanding how can we evaluate this difference that we make, we know what we do individually, but what does the collaborative do? So they were able to Michael was able to hook them up with Mina Singh from the School of Nursing. And she was an evaluator in working in community based settings. And she worked with these agencies to develop a unique evaluation tool and method to be able to help these agencies tell the story of what sort of what they’re doing as a collaborative. So they each know what they do, but now they can know what they’re doing together collectively. And so that was because Michael was able to hook them up with the right researcher. So they had a specific question. And we were able to provide, find the specific research and help them with that.

Marco Campana 38:12
And then obviously apply for a grant to be able to actually do the work. And well, then yeah,

David Phipps 38:17
the agencies themselves were funded evaluation was part of their funding. So they they took, they took that work and interesting is an important point. Sometimes, this work does require funding, you can do a little bit of work with, with grad students who are looking to do some, some interesting work. But sometimes you need to this, this does lead itself to really well funded opportunities. In fact, I’ll say the very first knowledge mobilization event that we held was on youth mental health. And through that one of our researchers have met someone from the mental health, Canadian Mental Health Association of your region. And they put together they started chatting about what their shared interests were. And ultimately, that became a $1.5 million funded CIHR grant that had researchers from five or six universities, working with a dozen community service agencies. And importantly, there were 10 young adults with lived experience of mental health challenges that were part of the whole project. So it was the recruiting the academics in the community, community agencies would idea and the youth would identify what the needs were academics would go in and find out what the literature says and synthesize that into actionable messages. And then the youth would take those and turn them into tools, by Youth for Youth, you know, and then the agencies disseminated those tools out to their their clients. So created this wonderful feedback of starting with the need identified and community and by young by youth, youth leaders, and then academics, searching into the literature to get the evidence in the actionable messages. And then the youth develop developing tools and the tool they developed was a backpack. And every part it was an online backpack and you’d open up different compartments. And there’ll be different types of mental service mental health services that will be taught to it. And then it went back to the agencies who disseminated that into their populations.

Marco Campana 40:17
Very creative, Hans really interesting. Okay, so yeah, so if someone’s got an interesting question, and you’re not sure where to start contacting your in your office is a starting point to help me connect to a prof to some students to just some infrastructure to help kind of flesh that out a bit even.

David Phipps 40:32
Yeah, and we will we work at York, we work local first. So if you’re a local agency into the in the GTA, absolutely give us a call. But if you’re not local, email info at and research impact.ca. And then the research impact network will pick that up, and we’ll try and do that same work, we’ll try and find someone at one of our member institutions to be able to pick up the phone and give you a call back.

Marco Campana 40:56
So those member institutions, I think you said there’s 20 or so they’re also doing a similar kind of approach.

David Phipps 41:02
Yeah, it will be similar ish, you know, we all respond to our local opportunities. And, you know, some like Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC, they’re an exclusively undergraduate, university. So their knowledge mobilization is connecting to undergraduate classes, right and doing work like that. So it’ll look differently than in a program like York, where a lot of our work is connected with grad students and researchers. So it’s kind of it’s a little bit different on each campus. But ultimately, each campus member institution is interested in creating these connections between science and society. And science. They say science, writ broad social human sciences, and science, technology, engineering and maths.

Marco Campana 41:46
Amazing. So I feel like as we’re talking, I’m hearing about how knowledge mobilization has evolved. It’s, it’s still as much an art as a science, where do you see the next few years? I mean, so for example, moving from outputs, like not research snapshots to outcomes, like the collaboration and doing more intensive work and being a support to local agencies to say, you can contact us, we’ll help connect you. Where do you see the work evolving?

David Phipps 42:11
Right? I really think most of the literature, there is evidence in this space, most of the literature is focused on the research project and the researcher in the partner what are the enablers and barriers to researchers working externally to the University working with partners, and that’s really, really important work, the space that there is less evolved is what is at the institution level? What does the institution need to do to be able to support its researchers doing this work? So what are the right institutional policies that what is it? What do job descriptions look like for knowledge? mobilizers for professional knowledge, mobilizers? How do you form a community of practice on your campus? You know, these are all these are all questions that are at the institutional level. And I feel that knowledge mobilization now is like the institutional supports for knowledge mobilization now are like, institutional supports were for commercialization in the 1990s, you know that some people are doing it, not everyone’s doing it, there’s no, there’s little consistency of, of service and practice built up. And in the that, in the 90s, the federal government, through the trial councils, made funds available to Vice Presidents research to build capacity in tech transfer. And now every university has a tech transfer office. We’ve got we’ve got courses and accreditation for for the practice of technology transfer. And I feel that’s where we’re, you know, 2030 years behind commercialization. And that’s where institutions are starting to look at is, how do we then do this to similar efforts for our support the engagement of non commercial research with with end users, so I think the future of knowledge mobilization is going to continue to have a focus on the project and the researcher and the partners, but will increasingly look at what are the conditions, the institutional conditions for success.

Marco Campana 44:10
Interesting. And ideally, some of that sort of consistency across institutions, then, like you said, job descriptions and just the approaches and those core components that you talked about earlier.

David Phipps 44:21
Yeah. And we’re starting that work. I’ll just give you some other links to fill up in the in the notes. My colleague, Julie Bailey at Lincoln in the UK, and I have done some work comparing Canada and the UK systems. And we’ve developed some tools one and we’ve developed the concept of impact to literacy. So if we under the state of knowing how to create research impact, what impacts have occurred and the skills you need to to do this work, if you imagine what who and how has being a Venn diagram, the intersection of those three is impact literacy. Our research impacts literacy, so we developed a tool for individuals called the Impact literacy workbook. I’ll give you that link. And we’ve also developed a tool for institutions called the institutional health check. So how institutions can assess their readiness to support this work?

Marco Campana 45:09
That sounds great. I feel like this is going to be the richest set of episode notes I’ve ever had. And I can’t wait to link to all of those. Because I think there’s a lot of great Further reading and foundational reading, it sounds like as well for people who are interested in this to kind of get started. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to the, to the links, because I think this is going to be a rich set of episode notes. And just really useful for people who are thinking about this interested to get some of the foundational stuff, but also some of the future thinking on it. So thank you, in advance for sharing all of those. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about? In particular, when it comes to knowledge mobilization on on the social side, not that not the commercialization side, that that folks in the immigrant and refugee serving sector should be thinking about? Around around the topic around the idea around the challenge of knowledge mobilization?

David Phipps 45:55
I’m glad you use it, you ended up with the word challenge. So let’s go back to what I said, we all suck at which is evaluation. All suck at this, I do hope you use the word suck. And you’re absolutely. The challenge with with this is, in contrast to commercialization, that we’ve got quantitative metrics and commercialization, to say how many patents have been filed, how many deals with industry, what’s your licensing revenue, we don’t, we don’t have that on the social side, on the on the social side of the scale, our value, our data, our stories, our data, our data are qualitative. Now, I always say no stories without numbers, and no numbers were those stories. So the numbers give, like the breadth of how many citizens served, that sort of thing. The stories give the depth, the qualitative meaningfulness of those numbers. And again, going back to Jonathan grants work on the research excellence framework in the UK, for one of his conclusions was that the case study, ie the narrative is the correct unit of assessment for impact. So we will never Metro size, our our ability to tell the story of impact, it’ll always be stories and develop and narratives and qualitative data partnered with quantitative data. That so that being said, it’s really hard to, you know, to, it’s not hard to tell the story, but it’s hard to compare one story against another. And that’s, that’s part of the challenge with you, within one project, I can easily you know, I can, I can within a research project, you know, we you can, you can create data at the beginning, you can do your project, you can collect data at the end, quantitative and qualitative data, and you can show the journey of change over the course of your research project or your research career more likely. But you can’t compare your research study to somebody your research impact to somebody else’s research impact. So comparative data are really, really hard. The UK does that by peer review by having panels review these case studies. But we don’t have that in Canada. So in the UK, they use the term impact assessment. And it is assessment because they assessed one university against another, and they make funding decisions based on that. In Canada, we don’t have an impact assessment program. And and I’m delighted at that, by the way, and so is that we’ll come to that. So, so in Canada, we don’t, I don’t use the words impact assessment, because my faculty members don’t want to be assessed. I specifically use the term collecting and communicating the evidence of impact. And we’ve got a tool again, I’ve always got a tool on everything. And we’ve recently published a book chapter on this tool. And it’s a tool that builds off the case study framework from the research excellence framework in the UK. But we’ve importantly added a semi structured interview guide that is drawn from the literature in contribution analysis. And contribution analysis says How does research contribute to a decision or contribute to change. So the tool is composed of three parts is set of directions, the semi structured interview guide, and then the case study framework. And the idea is you collect and communicate the evidence of impact, you use the case study. So you use the semi structured interview guide to collect the evidence of impact through interviews with people who are involved, both as researchers and as partners and as beneficiaries. And then also then there’s a case study framework that is reflects the voices of not just academics but of partners as well. And so so we do have a tool to collect and communicate, the evidence has been packed and that’s getting quite a lot of play right now. In both in the network but also in other organizations that are quite interested in in reporting on the day for instant their research has made

Marco Campana 50:00
excellent sounds like a really interesting and perhaps more positive approach than the idea of impact assessment where you’re pitting. It sounds like universities against each other, which is why I can imagine your faculty might not like it.

David Phipps 50:13
There. So you said, Why am I delighted the candidate doesn’t have impact assessment, on the experience in the UK, and I’m quite close to a lot of it is not secret. I am one of the internet, I’m on the international advisory group that is advising UK research and innovation on its assessment of the ref and the future of research assessment programs, the prep, and there are reports and they’re publicly reports, both scholarly and blog reports of crazy incentive, unintended consequences that have happened when institutions are starting to chase the money, the big money, 2 billion pounds, that is liberated from the ref, and things like switching faculty members from research to teaching contracts, because then they’re not admissible to the ref. Right? We can’t get that in Canada. Right? If you’re a faculty, if you’re a unionized faculty member, we can’t just change it because you’re the contract that conditions of your work from research to teaching. And those are some of the things that were happening in the UK as they start to game the system. Interesting.

Marco Campana 51:21
Well, on that note, so it sounds like a more of a more positive system in Canada.

David Phipps 51:26
But you know, yeah, let’s let’s just end on this my collaboration with Julie Bailey, we started, we started this comparison. And yes, I will say a more positive approach. and Canada. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework is an assessment of what research has happened there, the white bubble in that Venn diagram, we don’t have assessment in Canada. So our bubble as to how bubble is and then we’re focused on how to create impact, and less so on why the impact has occurred. And so we say, in systems like the UK, but it’s also in Australia, in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Hong Kong all have impact assessment for their, for their systems, there assessment driven systems there, the academic system is driven by the assessment of impact. And in Canada, and in all other, you know, the US and other jurisdictions that don’t have impact assessment. We call ourselves mission focused. So we’re, if it’s the right mission for the researcher, the right mission for the funder, the right mission for the institution, then go and fill your boots and do great impact. But you know, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to, if you’re studying black holes, well go study black holes. But if you’re studying black holes in the UK, you’ve got to, you’ve got to express how that has changed the world.

Marco Campana 52:42
Right? A very different approach. Yeah, but

David Phipps 52:47
I do think and when I, I do a lot of conversations in the UK, and there’s a lot of researchers are now there’s a lot of challenges that have arisen because of the ref, as I mentioned. And, you know, I say that we don’t we do impact because it’s right for us, not because the government tells us we have to.

Marco Campana 53:09
Got it. Well, listen, thank you for this very rich and informative conversation. And I will send you all of the the reports that you mentioned, to get those links. Thank you in advance for that. And have a great holiday season. Thanks so much for this conversation. I can’t wait to share it with folks. It’s a really great sort of summary and overview and foundation on knowledge mobilization that I think will be really interesting for folks to hear about. Great. Thanks, Marco. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you found this episode interesting and useful for you and your work. You can find more podcast episodes, wherever you listen to your podcasts are also on my site@markopoulos.org I appreciate you listening and if you have any tips, suggestions, ideas or want to be interviewed or know someone who wants to be interviewed, please drop me a line through my website, or marco@markopoulos.org Thanks again

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Welcome to episode 40 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I speak with Agnes Thomas, Executive Director of Catholic Crosscultural Services. Agnes has led Catholic Crosscultural through a digital transformation that started before, but certainly accelerated during the pandemic.

That isn’t a new story. But her democratic approach as a leader and insights about how the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector can and should be working collaboratively to serve all Newcomers are refreshing.

And for some, it will seem new. It shouldn’t be that way. We should be following Agnes’ lead to move our sector towards an ecosystem mindset and approach that puts the humans we’re serving first in our minds. And to be fearless and intentional in our community work. In our advocacy work. In the work we do to ensure that our sector has the resources and leadership needed to move forward.

As I start this year with a bit of cautious optimism, this is a great conversation to reflect on and energize me, to be boldly, but not blindly optimistic, about what we can do and achieve as a sector. Hybrid service delivery is here. That doesn’t mean making a choice of either digital or in-person, but as Agnes so eloquently puts it, looking at how to build tech capacity to serve people while recognizing the equal need to serve Newcomers in person. It’s all about making service accessible for all, whether their preference is to be served remotely or if they want to walk in through your doors, or both.

I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope it sparks some optimism and energy in you as well.

Some questions we discussed:

• Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and the digital transformation work you’re doing at Catholic Crosscultural Services?
• In your presentation last year at the Digital Literacy in the Immigrant Refugee Serving Sector – Increasing Collaboration event you spoke about CCS’ approach to digital transformation. Can you give us a high-level overview of that work?
• Your plan included several steps that started with cyber security. Can you tell me about the guidelines you established and the steps you took to assess your organization’s cyber security and staff training?
• How did you go about assessing your technology capacity and the staff’s digital capacity? What was that process like?
• How did you address your client’s needs and capacity to access digital and hybrid services? How have you worked to help address the digital divide among your Newcomer clients and communities?
• Where are you now on your digital transformation journey? What have you learned and what are your plans?
• What good ideas and promising practices can you share with the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector?
• What leadership do you think is needed in the sector, from funders, and within organizations to ensure that the future of hybrid service delivery moves in the right direction?

Additional resources:

Agnes presented at an event last year that you might find of interest: Digital Literacy in the Immigrant Refugee Serving Sector – Increasing Collaboration

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation using Otter.ai. The transcript has not been edited. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.

Marco Campana 0:00
Welcome to Episode 40 of the technology and human services podcast. In this episode, I speak with Agnes Thomas, Executive Director of Catholic cross cultural services. Agnes is led Catholic cross cultural through a digital transformation that started before but certainly accelerated during the pandemic. That isn’t a new story. But her democratic approach is a leader and insights about how the immigrant and refugee serving sector can and should be working collaboratively to serve all newcomers are refreshing. And for some, it will seem new. It shouldn’t be that way. Though. We should be following agonises lead to move our sector towards an ecosystem mindset and approach that puts the humans we’re serving first in our minds, and to be fearless and intentional in our community work in our advocacy work in the work we do to ensure that our sector has the resources and leadership to move forward. As I start this year, with a bit of cautious optimism, this is a great conversation to reflect on and energize me to be boldly but not blindly optimistic about what we can do and achieve as a sector. Hybrid service delivery is here. That doesn’t mean making a choice of either digital or in person. But as Agnes so eloquently puts it, looking at how to build tech capacity to serve people, while recognizing the equal need to serve newcomers in person. It’s all about making service accessible for all, whether their preference is to be served remotely. Or if they want to walk in through your doors, or both. I really enjoyed this conversation. And I hope it sparks some optimism and energy in you as well.

Agnes Thomas 1:39
Good morning, Marco, how wonderful to see you again. And I am so excited to have this discussion with you today. As you mentioned, my name is Agnes Thomas. And I lead the Catholic cross cultural services. We are an organization that has been in existence since 1954, serving newcomers and refugees in the GTA, and we do have staff presence across the country, providing refugee sponsorship training. So good to be with you today. Thank you. Yeah, no, of course, I forgot that you’re actually a national organization in that respect. So that time, and that’s a great example of where digital can play a really important role, obviously, so very true. And you know, that is what we are seeing like how the whole pandemic really helped us to pivot into that space of what is possible. And what is possible when we imagine possibilities, or when we are imagining possibilities. In terms of technology and tools, I would say that we are in an exciting space as a result of a problem.

Marco Campana 1:25
Welcome to the technology and human services podcast. Agnes, thank you so much for joining me, I’m gonna let you start by introducing yourself, your background, and start talking about some of the digital transformation work that you’re doing at Catholic cross cultural services.

Agnes Thomas 2:45
Because it is making us to think new ways of engaging new ways of delivering services, new ways of thinking about security and privacy and data. Yeah, yeah,

Marco Campana 2:57
I’m sorry. So for you go ahead.

Agnes Thomas 2:59
No, for me, I was thinking that this is the next step. You know, like how, when people start talking about AI, how much there was fear. But then slowly, I think this is opening a new door for us to look into the future.

Marco Campana 3:14
That’s so interesting. And I mean, you brought up kind of your foundational stuff in last year, we had a digital literacy in the sector collaboration events. And you spoke about your approach to digital transformation at Catholic cross cultural. And so today, I really want to talk a bit about kind of that grounding and what you’ve been doing, but also where you’re looking. And it sounds like overcoming fear and anxiety is a big part of doing that work.

Agnes Thomas 3:39
Yes, I think so. Because we as you know, we all kind of got into that space. I still remember March 2020. That scary space and scary conversation, you know, people should believe right now, what are we going to do? What are we going to do about the clients? What struck me? Was that that question, what are we going to do about our community members? Who is going to walk through our door? How do we ensure that they receive the service they need? And I think for us, that was the conversation that led us to what we have in place. It is like that all biblical story of files of five loaves of bread and two piece of fish. Like, you know, we looked into, but we have, so how we approached from that conversation of like we saw the need, we saw the need in the community. And yes, there was here. But we also wanted to look at what we had and where we needed to go. And that was quick. One thing that helped us I think that this may be an important piece for me to mention. Our culture was agile. Our culture was open and transparent and everyone came together regardless of so this is something I think of when I look back so proudly that regardless of the roles and titles people gathered, and so we gathered a group of people who were well versed in the technological space, and then we made our blueprint out of those conversations. And I think I would put that into three steps. When I look back into what we have done. One was that we had to look at our technology capacity, equipment wise, as well as user, like the consumer versus, you know, what we had in place, hardware software, as well as skill set. And so we did a resource assessment, then we went to the staff to kind of learn a staff baseline. So that would allow us to look into what kind of training we needed to get on board and the capacity. Then we looked at the gathering of the whole resources together into one space, our ID team, which was actually one person, and we had like an external person watching either our cloud space and our internal team, that IT team came together, or the committee came together to propose number of trainings based on the data. So those were the three immediate steps that we did. And the question of privacy, confidentiality, all that also got addressed in the process of developing that roadmap. So it was actually we were building the plane as we were going, right, like

Marco Campana 6:31
everybody else at the time, I guess, too, but it sounds like you were already sort of in a in a different place because of that agile approach. And, and, and again, I think I’ve had some interesting conversations with organizations where they didn’t all come together in at that moment. And it was kind of more of a top down. So one of my favorite examples is talking to people who do pre arrival services, who weren’t part of a conversation about moving to hybrid. And that kind of shocked me, because they’ve been doing online services for many years. But maybe the culture of the organization was that they just didn’t think that they needed to reach into the teams, they had to do it from the top down. There’s even that fear of getting it wrong from a management perspective. But it sounds like having that Democritus sort of more democratized approach is made all the difference.

Agnes Thomas 7:15
I think so I think for for us, maybe that was also another factor. There was nobody afraid in the sense of if I’m going to say this, how is this going to be taken, in fact, everybody was looking for those, okay, this person knows how to run zoom. Well, and this person knows how to do things or WhatsApp. And so everybody maximize their capacity, like I would say, our staff, frontline staff and our leadership team, they were true champions. Like, it was such a thing to watch, you know, when people come together for a, with a unified friend to serve. And that’s why we are here. Right, and, and while dealing with their personal fears and challenges that came with a global pandemic. And, I mean, that is why maybe I mentioned that cultural, organizational cultural piece. That’s a big, yes, we were actually, you know, you mentioned, yes, we were prepared for it, maybe because it was a blessing in disguise, where we were looking into how can we improve our technological presence and our tools and our capacities to serve people beyond? Because there are people who need you know, we all know, and probably you are seeing that in the sector, there are people who need to be served in person, and they do require a lot more time than maybe some others. And so how do we serve both population? And how do we make our current so before the pandemic, one of the conversation here was, how do we make our services accessible for people who want it to just digitally served and people who wanted to walk through our door, and so maybe we were actually just, you know, like, pushed into that maybe if it was not for the pandemic, maybe this journey was going to be slower, at three to five years, probably what we were we were going to be three years from now, where we reached into data and D. So now where we are right where we should be in the next five years to 10 years, because that is the roadmap we are making, which I will discuss a little bit. So you asked about the cybersecurity.

Marco Campana 9:28
Yeah, cuz I mean, one of the things I noticed in your presentation, and you talked about it here as well around privacy and security that and we’re hearing a lot about cybersecurity is so important as we move forward in digital and hybrid service delivery. But not a lot of organizations feel like they can figure it out. And it sounds like you’ve done a lot of work in that area. So I’m curious what that looks like from a settlement perspective.

Agnes Thomas 9:50
Yeah. So one thing that we are so acutely aware was when we are so much in online like how many hackers and fishers and all kinds of have, you know, like, I get at least, I’ve been $10 million on a minimum regular basis. And also, like all kinds of banks and people are contacting, and so we wanted to send out, or an idea of where we are at in terms of a threat, if somebody tried to hack into your system, how well established we are because we are doing so much on the other space of being delivering services virtual and this is something I will recommend our process to anybody who would care to go that route. So our ID teams and our they survey. And what they did was they did a cybersecurity assessment, doing simulated phishing, emails, as well as other stuff to see if people would respond to and I am, you know, I’m happy to admit, we failed, we failed the test. And we knew, if we were going on that route, and also being so active in the virtual space, this was going to be a huge risk for us. And so we introduce this cybersecurity training group called no before. And so they started with a very basic, and so people and we are continuing that which also, I must say, it did in the end, after the one year of slaughter one time exercise right now, in order to also we are doing it continuing as the space is evolving. For example, I took a training last week, interestingly enough how much these people change the way they hack, just like the way we are, we have enhanced zoom features. Now we have enhanced WebEx features. Now, these people have also enhanced features in how do we how do they break into a two way security system etc. So, we are seeing that ongoing need, because new people are arriving and sometimes we kind of Oh, I know this, I have done this training. And we cannot because one is the data that we are carrying. And second is really the cost if something like that happens, there is a personal there is a human resources, there is an organization as well as the taxpayers dollars being invested. So we are so mindful of that.

Marco Campana 12:20
pressures coming from different places. Exactly. And not

Agnes Thomas 12:23
only that, like we wanted to protect, right, like, you know, we wanted to protect not only the data and the systems, because that is the best way to move forward. So I recommend cybersecurity training to anyone and everyone who is in that space serving clients.

Marco Campana 12:41
I’m curious if you’ve had this conversation with your funders, because there’s there feels like there’s sort of an information vacuum, from the big funders about what is expected of organizations when it comes to things like cybersecurity. And I know that that’s where some of the anxiety comes from from organizations because they don’t want to invest in a solution or a program, that might not be considered adequate. And there are many there are so many out there. So I I’m curious if you’ve had this conversation with your project or other officers about, hey, we’re using no before, we’re making sure everyone who we hire gets trained and we’re doing it, you know, not just one time, but we’re continuously learning. Is that something that they’re aware of? And what’s their feedback?

Agnes Thomas 13:22
This is part of our ongoing conversation with our office as well. And so far with our major funders, this has been a very positive response, right? And we put that in our report, but like, maybe this is just me approaching, we need to be proactive, I think all the time. Again, maybe we gotta be careful saying this. I would say when you have, this is the best bet, let us go for it without if we are waiting for permission, sometimes it is a little too late. And so and I’m not spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And we’re talking about less than $5,000 for a training, right. And so before it’s actually quite affordable isn’t to correct. Exactly. And so we are not doing like I’m not going and buying property for 50 million and putting another 50 million, that’s a different scenario. But somebody like this, these are small, well versed risk, I would say and from what I have seen from my interaction with I FCC or major funder is they have been very open to it. Yes. The onus is on us to explain why and what and how this is going to change the game. And I would say we have been in such a privileged position in that. Thankfully, these things worked out and and even if it is I think it was good that we tried.

Marco Campana 14:48
Absolutely, yeah, no, I think and I’m curious how you because I know that that’s a question that will come up from other people who might be listening is how did you decide to use no before was that something that was recommended? To you, you did some research on? How did you come to that as, as the solution or the initial step at least. So

Agnes Thomas 15:06
our I, our IT staff and their leadership team looked into number of cybersecurity training that is available. And this came up as a top top recommendation in terms of how accessible and simple the training was also how it’s cheaper, like I’m there to like it was more affordable. So that we looked at, you know, anytime when you go out for those kinds of things, we looked at different codes, and what is the best use of our money and what adds value. And so no before was elected, but after a bit of market research, and so that also, again, one of the thing that we have been doing quite well, doing market research on any product, even if nobody is telling us to do, we would still do the and so our IT team has done an amazing job.

Marco Campana 15:55
That sounds like yeah, having that internal due diligence and being proactive instead of waiting to to get permission or even be told what to do is really important, because things are so and like you said, because the the threat actors are evolving their their approaches as well constantly. That’s something that’s that’s really important, too, is that when new hires Come on, even if they say, Oh, I’ve have cybersecurity training, you bring them into your system. And so that’s a big conversation that that is happening in the sector about well, what are the kinds of skills and attitudes and knowledge that that workers need to have, as they’re coming in? But what’s the responsibility of the agency to get them to the point that they want them to get out? So you you can ensure in this case, you can say all of our staff are, you know, no, before certified, basically. And that’s, that’s a baseline in cybersecurity. Are there other things going back to some of your technology capacity, and staff digital capacity that you started to look at? Whether it was choices about technology? Because again, some organizations are like, Oh, is it zoom? or GoToMeeting? Or WebEx? Or what should we use? And then, you know, some of them say, well use whatever you want, and others say, Okay, we will all be using Zoom. And now you will get trained in zoom, and we will all become, you know, adequately baseline, if you will, in those skills. What’s the approach that you’ve taken, when it comes to the digital kind of capacity,

Agnes Thomas 17:17
I think we’ve customized it. And we are continuing to customize what we do and how we do some of the things for example, a team’s became like a big part of our internal conversations and sharing of data and sometimes meetings. And so and then, so what we have done, we looked at individual programs and the leaders and they keep them with like, Go survey your client, see what works best for them, right, like, for example, our link staff. So their need is very different from somebody who is just a basic conversation circle or settlement work. And so we customized according to the need, and then look at what can be the best technology within that, for example, one of our program that’s violent second is woman, like that program adopted soft phones, so that there was ways that it was more accessible for people who were going away from that violence situations. And so and I know, some part of the language, people who were working with people with low digital literacy, they looked at WhatsApp because some people didn’t have any other access. And so then we also worked and partnered with libraries and other organizations and small businesses, to a cube people with the right type of tools. So it’s one thing for us to say here is our some lingo. And like, you know, how do I know if you have a tablet or a computer or a high speed internet, right. And so that is, I think, something we need to be always mindful of. And so, so I think this was also again, a three way process. I’m an I’m a teacher, so that’s great. So a three way process in which one was really looking at our staff comfort and where they are at and providing that training. And it was more of a train the trainer model. People who were good at, let’s say, in a team, if there was somebody good at zooms somebody’s good at WhatsApp, managing a group, they all taught each other. So there were organizational wide training, there were program based trainings. So that was one and second was that training for the clients. So there were programs according to their need, and the nature of the program they’re delivering, they started training the clients and so then we started investing a little bit money for digital literacy person and the digital navigator. And we also started collecting as well as receiving donations. or making sure people who had a whether it is internet or the system need. So like a digital lawn? What do you call it like a technology lawn? Establish it correct? Yeah, yeah. And so one thing that we continue to do, is that an ongoing survey with the clients in terms of what are the changing needs, then something else we did. So we looked at our car, like we revamped our website in 28. And we were 2018. And we were so proud how we were doing really well. Now, right now, as we speak, we are actually revamping that, again, from a client centered approach. So from a marketing perspective, when you look at our website, it’s working fine. And like you still know how to, but then during the last few years, we know how it can be inaccessible for people who are not well versed in technology gostream. So we are changing the whole thing again. And I bet in three years from now, if you bought that rocking, I’m sure we will be again revamping it. So we wanted our website to also serve as a what we call it a shopping mall, or, or for lack of a better term, like a virtual mall where you can walk in and you can look at what are the different pieces. So that’s the current work that is happening. Right.

Marco Campana 21:23
But it’s all centered from what you’re so whether it’s technology, their digital literacy, or understanding the devices and the access that they have, it sounds like that’s really key to help guide your decisions.

Agnes Thomas 21:37
Absolutely, I think that is an ongoing thing. I don’t think none of us should ever take that for granted. Okay, now, we have done we have arrived here, because it is an evolving space. And I guess like the way our life works, you know, things are changing, and therefore we respond in order for us to be not reactive. I think we needed to be proactive.

Marco Campana 22:03
Right, looking right.

Agnes Thomas 22:05
And also looking at what are the trends that is coming up? I think one thing I know I personally do is I look at the international market space, what is changing in terms of technology, whether the banking sector or the you know, like the finance sector in general, because they usually go for this kind of things before anybody else. And sometimes it’s not only only reading the headline, and if it is interesting to that you look in look into it further, and also making it I think this is also a very key key thing. Accessibility is an important thing. It is a right, and I don’t think we should ever forget that. So are we accessible? Are we efficient? You know, are we maximizing the resources we have this is not to say that we have to be always in that austerity sense. But that is the truth, we have seen that during pandemic, who is being left behind. And so that is the other side of the picture, when we are looking at digital transformation and data. Because for me, again, those two things goes hand in hand.

Marco Campana 23:13
And I mentioned that, like you said, that’s kind of connected to the values of the sector, and also your mission as an organization, right. People so that they are not vulnerable? And potentially has to reflect that as well, I guess.

Agnes Thomas 23:25
Yeah, correct. And, you know, one of the big highlight for me, I think that probably encouraged me and inspired me quite a bit was our school settlement team did a art project with us in mannitol, in Ireland. And so they did a little gallery. And there was an exhibition, like it was such a great, wonderful project involving newcomer youth and the indigenous youth. And so here is an example or a testament of how digital technology can bring two worlds two separate worlds otherwise, you know, wouldn’t talk to together and create stories that has a virtual presence, because you definitely know that is where they wanted to play in. And so things like that, that became such a ray of hope in seeing where we are going. It’s such

Marco Campana 24:24
a great example because you see the possibilities and the connections that can be made. Because I again, I think that’s something that a lot of organizations still struggle struggle with is they get the tech and they’ve got the mechanics of it. But there’s that, that that community feeling that community development, that’s that sort of sense of engagement. And that’s a really great example of where you can you can do that across geographic boundaries and across different cultures to kind of do exactly that. So where are you looking when you think about your journey now, and I mean, you’ve been you were already on it before the pandemic as you said it accelerated like it did for everybody else, but it feels like you because you were on that journey, because you have a certain culture in the organization, you were able to harness it as not a threat but an opportunity to move forward and to do that acceleration, but to do it in a meaningful way. How has it changed your organization moving forward, when you think of your digital journey, and you think about where you’re moving to as an organization, you know, we’ve come out of sort of the purely digital part of the pandemic, and we’re now you know, seeing people in person and things like that, what impact is it having on the way you provide services now.

Agnes Thomas 25:31
So some of our programs are hybrid, and some are maybe more virtual than in person, but we are also so at least now, because again, as I said, like the space is changing so much, but we do know for sure, there are people who need to be in preferring to be in person, but then there are certain areas or pockets of the service delivery, people may prefer to be virtual. And so we are still collecting data on that. And I think, for us, maybe the baseline in that space is being open. And also in that being in that listening space. So that we Acube internal capacities in a way that can meet those needs, because it may be different, I would think, from three years from now. So I always think of times not as today. But it can be tomorrow as well. Right. And so I would think that is going to be our approach now until we see a new emerging pathway comes as a result of this, because right now, this is what is working and I know certain levels of the link classes, for example, the language instruction, they can probably do virtual, but then there are others who are due to whatever reasons because again, this is depending on the demographic, that is like you know, a woman with small children, if they are trying to manage this virtually one thing that we are already seeing is that you know, there are kids running around, and how are you going to do that. And so there are so many other factors that is in the ecosystem that we needed to consider, like, you know, if somebody is having a space to attend their classes, even if they have the equipment that is different from somebody who is sharing, like a 10 member household, sharing two bedrooms, trying to attend a virtual online platform is difficult, you can I don’t know what kind of learning can be possible. Yes, when we could in like, let’s say we’re talking about the big box stores, they all closed down during the pandemic. And we all did online. That is not because we didn’t want to drive up and go or go and look at the stuff because that was a necessity. So but that also provided us with the opportunity. So some things we don’t have to go on, stand in a call to go and buy, like, you know, this can be done, but at some other things, we want it to go and touch and feel. So those, it is two different things. And we need to be mindful of it. And so that’s how I am seeing that.

Marco Campana 28:17
Yeah, I mean, race is a really interesting conversation that I’ve been having with a few people about and because again, you’re an agile organization, because you’re you’re doing this ongoing listening with your with your clients and communities, the ability to pivot and be flexible in the way you provide services in the future. So for example, you’re describing, maybe there’s a program that’s 80%, digital 20% in person now, because that works for the cohort of clients that are going through that. But let’s say the next cohort comes, are you prepared as an organization to flip it so that maybe that cohort wants 80% in person? And 20% of virtual? And what is it like to plan around that and to have the staff have their mind shift and their skill set to be able to be responsive that way? Is that is that an opportunity? Is that a challenge? Is it both?

Agnes Thomas 29:03
I think it is both? Because like it is it is changes? One thing to say that you know, I’m someone who get so excited about change. But there are people oh my gosh, this is scary. But once how do we make it exciting? How does it make an opportunity? It is fun. It is like I think what changes the conversation and approach to is that when I tell you Marco this is how you’re going to be behaving from tomorrow onwards you may have a hard time accepting that. And but like if you’re looking at look at this Marco if you do it this way, we may be able to do this. So it changes the way that you and I having that conversation and our understanding of as a result of your behavior this way is going to happen something in a certain way, you know like so. I’m so mindful of that ongoing conversations. I would call that conversations because I was also going to say Yes, we looked into policy, we looked at process, we looked at system, and we looked at the baseline and the capacity. So all that matters, but then how you put that forward make a difference.

Marco Campana 30:15
Yeah, cuz I mean, how you manage that. And I wonder if that means you’re managing differently, not just you, but your, your, your management, your directors, sorry, your managers and directors, because to have those conversations, was that an approach that you already had in place those kinds of conversational management? Or is that something again, that accelerated because of the pandemic, and you realized, we’re in constant flux, now, change is the new normal. So we have to, we have to manage this situation differently.

Agnes Thomas 30:42
I think maybe one of our again, as I said, like we were culturally ready for it, how that happened. So I remember when I came on board in 2018, one of the biggest conversation here, for assessors, as well as our structure, and the process was looking at leadership as a collective effort, and beyond titles. And so in that collective approach to leadership, what we have created was small committees for areas like you know, whether it is now right now we have a digital transformation committee, we have a communication committee, we have a fundraising committee, we have a Innovation and Research Committee, we have a social wellness committee. So we have I think, 11 or 12 different committees, and I tell you a little bit of how that committees work. So let us say you are interested in digital literacy, digital transformation, I may not be, so how about if I’m interested in stuff well being so I get to join that committee, and you get to join the digital transformation committee. And yet a third person may be interested in doing events, so that person get to be part of the events committee. So we looked at interest, skills and capacities, to what is the need. And so we created this small ports, where people are just having a focused approach to because one of the thing I heard from staff was, I have these great ideas, but nobody’s listening to me, I don’t know where to take it. So we established so many different systems and approaches in how that no voice is being enhanced within our capacity. So of course, there are capacities and how far we can go on with something and then a certain things I need to sign, but not everything I had to sign on. And so we approach the whole approach to system view, as intrapreneurial. And also, we do make mistakes, and that is okay. You know, like it is not going to be you’re going to be punished and disciplined for one thing. But like, again, do I have a process and a system in place that will help you make the right choices and doing the right thing? So for me, I think maybe I’m investing energy on that. And that is helping the other pieces of work, for example, the digital transformation, I say, Hey, this is what I’m seeing from the report. And what do you guys think. And that is actually with another committee si here, and we talk about it in the leadership team, but the committee actually make recommendations how conversation with the external parties we are in conversation with so it is I’m trying to be make it as much as a flat approach so that the best can be built out of it. Because I don’t want to pretend I know all of it. I’m even when I’m talking to you, I feel I’m representing many voices from the organization, right? I just happen to be in that privileged position of having this conversation with you. But I am carrying the voices of my IT team, my senior team and the frontline staff who invested time and energy. So I think that whole approach is based on that principle that you want, I have something tangible to contribute, whether it is digital transformation, or social transformation, that commitment and the passion. And I think that came through and that is continuing to serve as well.

Marco Campana 34:08
So clearly, it’s important that sounds like to create that space where people can focus on what’s really of interest to them, and what they might be really good at. And then they’ll gain the knowledge from the other groups of similar people who are knowledgeable in other areas. And so across the board, then, I mean, it certainly feels like it would increase morale and engagement in the organization to to feel that their perspective is valued. You don’t have to be an expert in that other thing, because we’ll get you up to speed on it. But feel free to contribute what you’re passionate about over here. Exactly. That’s great. It sounds like a really promising practice for others to think about as well. I’m curious, this is such a rich conversation. I feel like we could go in so many directions. But one of the things that we see in the sector a lot is is the question of leadership around digital transformation. It needs to come from the sector, from funders from within organizations. There’s you know, as you said, you’re looking outside of the sector to see trends in other places, which I think is so valuable. You know, why reinvent the wheel? Why replicate when we can borrow? And, and and, you know, create a version of our own. When you look at that leadership, what do you think is needed for our sector to move forward with a hybrid service delivery model? And you know, and I’ll even put like a timeline on it, right? We’re, we’re less than two years away from the next big national call for proposals where, in theory, some of these are going to be funded based, like talking about baselining. And, you know, what leadership do we need to get to that conversation with our funders.

Agnes Thomas 35:31
So one thing that I forgot, or I omitted in well, something that we have done probably that also is probably important was last year that we hired a consultant group to look at digital transformation from a system perspective. So for example, because you mentioned the next CFD 2025, this may be very good for all of us to think I think it was in your report also, like, you know, how many systems and how many reporting systems we have in place, and how that is actually not creating efficiencies in how we, you know, utilize and how much time we invest. So, it was a problem that we have been looking at. And I know it is not, we are not isolated in that. So we hired this group, they looked into all of our systems, our policies, our procedures, our the whole structure, and they produced a report and also provide the recommendation. So right now, our committee is looking into prioritizing, which part of that can be implemented right away, what could be two years from now and what kind of money is being added? And so that leads to your final question about what we need to do and what leaders should be or funding should be thinking about, in my humble view, we need to be open, we need to be flexible, because whether I want it or not, the ecosystem is changing. And I’m part of the ecosystem. Right. And I also wanted to talk a little bit about the ecosystem, I think we need to pay attention to what is happening in the ecosystem. Right? And, yeah, so that would help us to move the needle a little bit, and then be productive. Because often we create policies or processes ones, when something is falling apart. Why are we looking at something that is working and say, you know, okay, is this good enough? Can we do something different with it. And so something new gets created and invest resources, I don’t think we talk I mean, there is so much about we need money, it’s like when we when I talk about resources, it is people, it is monetary stuff, it also added stuff that is again in the ecosystem. So I think investing and having the time allocated for that is also going to be very important and

Marco Campana 37:55
love that time is such a luxury that it should that it needs not to be anymore. Isn’t that true?

Agnes Thomas 38:00
Exactly, exactly. And so because we have conflicting priorities, this may fall into the bottom, because we are like, you know, many of us are so passionate about what needs to get done, how many people we need to serve, and there are people who need this and that. But if you don’t have a house with a roof, when it rain and snow, your house is gone. So I think that when we look at digital technology or any type of infrastructure, if you don’t invest and secure it, you can go and those good people that you want it to serve. And for me that is the same principle ITIL here internally also, if you are not well, you cannot help other person to be well. And so whether it is technology or policy, it has to be approached that way. Right? When you

Marco Campana 38:53
look at that ecosystem approach, then what is that? What does that looking like for you, it’s based on on well being, it’s based on that sort of foundation, having the foundations in place,

Agnes Thomas 39:03
I think that our foundations needs to be in place. And there are things that we are seeing from the current the past two years, like you know, as we mentioned, cybersecurity, I believe it’s a must and I think it should be mandatory for everybody to go through that process so that we are protecting like we are far over firewalling ourselves is I think that’s the language they use. And while hybrid model models are great, I think we need to find out what are the technological needs still there for each of the individual programs or specific programs and services and develop and plan according to those needs. Where it says you know, again, how this is how CTS is going to go, but that that may not be the case for air settlement team that is working in the peripheries you know like so there are various pieces to it and as I already mentioned, communication is key. Go back and forth internal and external not system Receiving one side of it is not going to be making it an equal space. And and I think we can expand our efficiencies and effectiveness by partnering and collaborating with other organizations and groups. And I think that is something we should all encourage more partnerships, more outcomes, and and then, you know, how do we become impactful in what we do? It’s not that we are not impactful, this is not a criticism at all, I think the sector is doing a great job. But what else can be done? I think that asking that question, Martin is right. And one thing that is a serious lack, I find is, we don’t have a best practice repository yet. So we needed to have a best practice repository for all aspects of settlement and integration. Even maybe it begins with what is settlement, what are the definitional outcomes of settlement and integration for individuals and groups and communities, I think that would change how we look at the whole system as going back to your ecosystem Goldston. As you can see, I’m so excited about it, I think it is space for transformation,

Marco Campana 41:15
for sure. And I really feel like it’s important that you’re bringing the digital together with the rest of our approach our foundations, you know, that ecosystem, it’s not that here, we’re doing settlement in here, we’re doing digital settlement, because that, that’s such a dangerous conversation of like, not seeing how they’re connected completely. And it sounds like you’re recognizing, and you’ve been living that this is it’s not, we do settlement, and then we do digital settlement, we do settlement, and it incorporates digital in person, you know, hybrid, whatever you want to define it as. And it’s just one, one approach to how we deliver service, we still need to be grounded in our communities, we still need to have that privacy and security perspective, we still need to go back and look at the foundations of why we do this kind of work and understand what can be.

Agnes Thomas 42:00
Exactly. And also you know that it’s maybe one other component, this is me wearing my research hat is that how much data we receive and collect? And what do we do with them? Right. And so I think an increased efficiency, then capacities within the system approach, like in a digital world, would help us to uncover some of this data. Either it is aggregated data, or disaggregated data will help us to lead into program development and design in such a way that responding to the current need. And so, I think there is much deeper, this is laid, and this is multifaceted.

Marco Campana 42:41
Absolutely. And what an interesting point too, because you can ask people, and that’s so important to do your serving and your consultation with with with your your communities and your staff. But the data can also reveal other trends and themes and outliers that they may not themselves have recognized. So I think that whole combination of of being able to be actively having those conversations, but also really like you say mining the data for trends and themes is also important.

Agnes Thomas 43:09
Can I like you know, I’m there are interesting things happening in BC, and in Nova Scotia, but three different landscape, three different type of geographical areas. And so how do we collect that data unless you go into a conference, and if you get a 10 minutes of a glimpse, do we have a system and efficiencies that we can actually pull down all these three, and look at Oh, my gosh, this is what they’re seeing there. I mean, that is not individual data, individual data may be important when we are looking at, you know, the scheme of things from a programmatic or a policy perspective, but like a national wide for that looks at different emerging trends or themes, I think would change the way we look at and understand. You’ve got my

Marco Campana 43:55
heart there. I mean, that’s part of that bone knowledge mobilization repository, and that approach is that the more we know about each other’s work, the more we’ll recognize some of the similarities and themes, and how we can build things together collectively, but also some of the uniqueness of some of the solutions that need to happen. But a rural solution in in, in Halifax in Nova Scotia might be just as legitimate in a rural spot in Ontario or in BC. Correct. Right. And so wouldn’t it be great to understand that and then, as you mentioned earlier, have the time to actually do the analysis, the integration to see oh, what could I take from this these kinds of things? So it’s Yeah, knowledge mobilization, the resources for it, the culture of doing it, and building data into that are just, I think those are really, really important for this ecosystem as well for us to in a meaningful way.

Agnes Thomas 44:44
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and that is when we become so intentional in how we write.

Marco Campana 44:51
Yeah, what a great way Oh, I love it. Oh, it’s such a rich conversation. I always answer I always end with is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you want that you want to finish with or let people know either about the work that you’re doing or ideas that are that are floating in your head put you to forget you’ve had the teacher how you’ve had the IDI how you’ve had the researcher hat. Are there any other hats that you wear that you want to make? Sure we understand? No, I

Agnes Thomas 45:13
think we are serving humans. And I think that human element and the humanity and so when we are looking at humanity as a whole, it is a collective approach. It’s not one of us, it just all of us, right. And I think when we approach things, systems and processes and policies, that is a collective approach. And I think we are better and richer when we do that. And I think when we are less afraid of there is not what is there to lose. When we are less afraid of those power relations, I think we will be able to serve the humanity better as a whole. And I think for me, that is my kind of deep desire, even, you know, any conversation. This is not I’m an expert, I’m not an expert. Yet, what helps me stay on course is that our desire and our common goal of serving the humanity first. And so that comes from a collective intentional, fearless peace.

Marco Campana 46:14
I love it. That’s so inspiring. Thank you so much for this conversation. I imagine we’re gonna have more in the future. But I really appreciate you sharing your experience in your organization’s experience and perspective, I think there’s so much value for people to hear that who may not be on the same path yet that you are, to know that this is a place that they can get to, and how you’re approaching it is really also really, really useful and inspiring for folks. So thank you, Agnes, for taking the time today. Really,

Agnes Thomas 46:39
thank you what a privilege Marco. And you know, I tell you, that you what you’re doing is the right thing. You’re asking the right questions. I think we need enough people who are asking the question so things can move. And so great work, kudos to you. And let us know how we can support you in that as well.

Marco Campana 46:56
Absolutely. Thank you so much again, thanks so much for listening. I hope you found this episode interesting and useful for you and your work. You can find more podcast episodes, wherever you listen to your podcasts are also on my site at marcopolis.org I appreciate you listening and if you have any tips, suggestions, ideas or want to be interviewed or know someone who wants to be interviewed, please drop me a line through my website, or marco@marcopolis.org Thanks again.

View Details

Welcome to episode 39 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I speak with Ross McCulloch, Director of the Third Sector Lab in the UK, about Open Working.

Ross and his colleagues have created the Open Working Toolkit to help charities, funders and other organizations share their work openly. As their toolkit states “Great things can happen when something is made open… more people can reuse it, often cheaply. People can learn from it, even if they don’t use it. And there are almost always wonderful unintended consequences.” I love this project, and even just the idea of it. The toolkit provides a simple, practical, and replicable model for anyone to use. And it focuses on both organizations as well as funders. It starts with the idea of sharing what you’re working on, in the open. Just start. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The format doesn’t matter. But share a bit and share often.

Ross provides a great overview of the Open Working approach, where it came from and how it’s going now. We talk about the kind of effort it takes, what you should do if you’re interested in exploring Open Working, and why so many great ideas and initiatives focused on non-profit collaboration seem to be coming out of Scotland! If you’re wondering how to build awareness of your work, connect with others, and learn from your efforts, I think you’ll find this introduction to Open Working of interest.

Some questions we discussed:

• What is Open Working?
• How is Open Working significant from an organization perspective, from a funder perspective?
• How have charities and funders reacted to the idea of Open Working?
• What type of effort does it take? For example, according to a Catalyst article, Open Working Lineup folks coached grantees through six months of open working?
• An outcome of that coaching work was the creation of the Open Working Toolkit. What has the uptake been?
• What advice or suggestions would you have for folks who want to embrace and encourage Open Working in other places, such as Canada?

Some useful resources:

• Open working toolkit – This toolkit gives charities and funders the best resources for learning why and how to work in the open, share work and reuse work from others.
• Open working at Catalyst – Re-use other organisations’ work: assets and other useful resources created by charities, groups and agencies working in the open.
• Funding open working – Funders around the world are starting to be more transparent and ask that their fundees be open about their work so that the benefits of the funds are felt more widely across the sector.
• Opening Up: Demystifying Funder Transparency – This report explores how transparency can strengthen credibility, improve grantee relationships, facilitate greater collaboration, increase public trust, reduce duplication of effort, and build communities of shared learning.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation using Otter.ai. The transcript has not been edited. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.

Marco Campana 0:00
Welcome to Episode 39 of the technology and human services podcast. In this episode, I speak with Ross McCullough, director of the third sector lab in the UK about open working. Ross and his colleagues have created the open working toolkit to help charities, funders and other organizations share their work openly. As their toolkit states, great things can happen when something is made open, more people can reuse it often cheaply. People can learn from it even if they don’t use it. And there are almost always wonderful unintended consequences. I love this project. And even just the idea of it, the toolkit provides a simple, practical and replicable model for anyone to use. And it focuses on both organizations as well as funders. It starts with the idea of sharing what you’re working on in the open, just start, it doesn’t have to be perfect, the format doesn’t matter. But share a bit and share often. Ross provides a great overview of the open working approach, where it came from and how it’s going. Now, we talked about the kind of effort it takes what you should do if you’re interested in exploring, open working, and why so many great ideas and initiatives focused on nonprofit collaboration seem to be coming out of Scotland. If you’re wondering how to build awareness of your work, connect with others and learn from your efforts, I think you’ll find this introduction to open working of interest. Welcome to the technology and human services podcast. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about open working and can you maybe start by telling us a bit about yourself, your background and your work around the nonprofit sector in particular, open working?

Ross McCulloch 1:24
Yeah, so I run organization called Third Sector lab. And so there’s a team members here. And we’re really focused on a tape forget, and particularly within the charity sector, across the UK, we’ve got a small number of public sector clients, but 95% of the people we work with our charter is a lot of our work has shifted quite a lot since the pandemic. And we’ve actually really quite focused now on trying to deliver as much work as we can free at the point of service for charities themselves. So one of the things we found during the pandemic was people were reacting very, very quickly to digital, which was great, but actually a lot of the time that was coming with its own pitfalls, whether that was about safeguarding the service users, whether it’s about making the right technology decisions. And so we’ve we’ve kind of put quite a lot of work in that kind of a three strands of work that we’re doing as part of the catalyst, which is the wider UK Tech for Good network. So one of them is the current training program. So we’ve trained the relevant 5000 people, since the start of the pandemic working in third sector across the UK. And we run a workshop once per week. It’s our 90 minute format. And we previously bring an expert speakers to run training session where the queen is powerful for the sector as the powertrain and but what they’re certainly not is people coming along and just kind of listening a PowerPoint from the minutes with a lot of charities has given them access to someone who’s an expert in their field and they will ask the right questions. So we’ve had different ones recently on a building data dashboards and data analytics, we’ve had ones in SEO,

Ross McCulloch 3:03
a few really well received ones in accessibility with drill down specific tools like MailChimp and Canva. We’ve covered that can a really broad spectrum of digital and helping sector understand it’s not just you’ve spoken with before, where people become fixated and online fundraising and marketing. And that’s a core part of any nonprofit but actually seen this as as more than just those kind of small parts of what you’re trying to do. And the other work that we’re doing. We’re doing some work called Digital trustees, which we actually used to do pre pandemic as well as physical matchmaking events. And we’re loading them online. So once someone’s bid on those, anytime they can come along, and they did really simple is that basically zoom a bit of Heldens in for 60 minutes or a 5050 split between people in the tech sector who want to join J boards, and Charlie syndicate expertise in the board to asset one this morning, which we specifically ran with the YMCA network in the UK. So there was a bunch of local YMCAs some of them did amazing stuff with digital around youth works all the really cool stuff around a given particular younger people access to Raspberry Pi’s and running code classes, and really interesting stuff using augmented reality. But actually that recognition that they need strategically than their stuff that they’re really going to push the boundaries of what’s possible and often the best services because young people that are coming along to IMC every week. And then so we’ve kind of done the hard work of recruiting the people who come along with it everything from service designers to data scientists to web developers, they’re kind of cybersecurity specialists. And what is allowed a lot of guys to do is broaden their horizons in terms of what a digital trustee may look like. And again with stuff you’ve touched on, we tend to find that people feel with tech that digital trustee box but they’ve got a kind of IT specialist people at Microsoft reseller or they’ve got someone who works in online cons and that might be what they need. Actually, for a lot of organizations. If someone’s YMCAs today, you’ll be better served have services already.

Ross McCulloch 5:00
Get a scientist or someone who’s working in AI or augmented reality, to really thinking about who they push what’s possible as an organization. So we run them once a month, they’ve been really successful helping people start that journey and get digital embedded that much more strategic level in the organization. And in particular, if you look at things like the chatty digital code, which so EMR and her team have been working on one of the big findings over the last couple of years, there’s been a real lack of digital knowledge at the board governance level things like 65%, of boards, rank or a digital skills is very, very low. And actually, that’s a critical part and potentially, where you’ve got passionate staff coming aboard to investment or to make changes. But there’s nobody in the board champion that stuff, what does that look like in the future. And then the famous strand, which we’ll talk with you that we’re about today is around open work and reuse. And more recently, we’ve delivered a thing called Open working program, which is an eight week program to get fast tracked, is to work more transparently and more agile way. And we’ve got a fairly simple framework, which we can talk through in this call, and then draw on some of the resources, more than LeKan open working Toolkit, which we’ve produced in collaboration with cast.

Marco Campana 6:14
Awesome, and how did you come to this work? Have you always worked in the in the third or the charitable sector? Or is it something that’s kind of you’ve shifted away from somewhere else?

Ross McCulloch 6:22
So I’ve worked in the charity sector for over 15 years I was hated comes with a national charity prior to that. And yes, I was working working freelance, but we also, yeah, photo lab has existed for over a decade now. And we’re going to read the infancy of what this looks like. And it’s interesting that a lot of the stuff that we were banging on about for years and trying to persuade people have made it as soon as the pandemic humans like can a penny drop woman hat and people realized, actually, this isn’t an external, this is not a thing that will push them away and be explored in six months or 10, cut edges. It’s fundamental how people live their lives and 2022 and how to meet people’s needs. How do we broaden diversity for the services we offer, how important diversity in terms of our volunteers and our staff. And so getting people to think of it digital as more than just that social media marketing exercise, or just our own fundraising exercise, or the kind of the electronic tools that become an office and use or the server that sits in a cupboard and getting to think about it beyond that. So yeah, I find that quite difficult talking about the pandemic as a positive thing, because it’s just not. And so like, you know, although there’s the positive element old Chinese have taken digital Mercedes, I mean, that’s a massive tool for society and the people that they work with. So just, it’s definitely,

Marco Campana 7:43
ya know, I I’m totally along the same line to do, we had the same kind of, I guess, revelation here, in the sector that I work in was that there was a lot of organizations who, for years have have resisted digital service delivery, in spite of all the evidence, like in our case, for example, we have lots of evidence of newcomers being much more digitally literate, and with the preference, then even the Canadian born population, but it unfortunately, kind of took the pandemic for people to realize it. Now. I’m curious, because we were starting to see the flip side of people wanting to kind of go back to how things were, from a leadership perspective, and some organizations, but the frontline workers are like, no, no, this is we’ve always been talking about digital because they’re at the front line, they, you know, they’re they’ve been using their personal devices and their texting. And you know, because their clients demanded it. And so now, they, they recognize that this new normal is gotta be can be quite positive, even though we’ve also learned a ton about digital equity and digital divides in digital inclusion, which I think that’s kind of one of the positives as well is that we’ve realized that, yes, there’s a lot of people who are who can access this, but we also know that there’s a lot of people who can’t. And I’m curious, if you’re seeing something similar around that sort of, you know, people want to go back to how they did stuff, you know, pre pandemic, even though we’re not really out of the pandemic, can make an argument about that, but that they’re like, I want to return to the in person only, and not looking at it from kind of what we’re calling a blended, or a hybrid model where you kind of, you know, you mentioned that, you know, you start with the people you’re serving, and you figure out, you know, what they want and then you you know, figure out okay, so some of these are our clients that will want to access our services through technology, and some that will want to do it in person. So I’m just curious where that conversation is for your sector.

Ross McCulloch 9:25
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s really interesting. I think. I think there’s there’s just a huge variety. I think there’s also the nuances within it. So one of the things I think is probably the most interesting thing that’s come out of the pandemic, in terms of the sector and where it goes next is this notion of a charity being specifically for a local area was turned on its head really quickly and you asked economics and quite small channel is based in Scotland Erlich. We’re delivering our services online and this week, someone from Brazil joined a session that we had and or someone in Manchester joined us Action Group based in Edinburgh and Lee If this has never happened before, because the logistically it just wasn’t possible. And none of these channels were beloved and digital services. And I’ve actually spoken to quite a few small charities that were set up to, you know, no local area. And just specifically because of their use of digital. That’s who they were serving, it was never necessarily in the memorandums of article looked at taking the decision that was just geographically, that’s where we are. And they’ve now to sign on taking a strategic decision, say granola, which are anywhere we are a national charity, because we’d have a really good quality services, and actually, anyone can access them, it would be silly for us to just provide the community that said, I don’t think every child needs to do that decision, because lots and lots of charities are based in Baden communities for a very good reason. And I think that, for me has been one of the most interesting conversations has come over this is like what is which I didn’t realize the nature of that versus national data in inverted commas. And we’ve always thought of it being, you know, a huge course or brand with lots of staff split on all across country, but actually, you can be really hyper focused on doing something incredibly well. And the one that I always like, the chatty chin, and I always think actually pronouncing the name wrong, but the other relatively a small chat, I’m just gonna get a link that you can be up share with, with listeners afterwards. But they provide a lot of support to women, or even things like the events online sexual harassment, they had a really interesting partnerships with quite a small charity, but it’s kind of grown, like exponentially during the pandemic, chatty with a charity partnership with I think it was Bumble have also to check this was one of the huge dating platforms. And basically just because the retreating these amazing women led resources about staying safe and updated environment. And actually, the deep platforms like well, we don’t need to recreate this stuff, because someone else is doing and we can support them. And for me, that was like, wow, that’s really amazing, relatively small in terms of staff numbers, jadie, is able to kind of like do something at scale. Because they’ve been really clever about how they’re delivering that and really thought through like, how do people have the leaves, which are responsible, and word of women have these questions of how do we operate in that space? And that from easily just be so interesting to see more and more Chinese thinking of digital in that sense? That is not just, we will do our thing we’ve always done but no, we do it on Zoom. But actually, fundamentally, how are people living their lives? How do we fit within those digital spaces? And what’s the thing we’ve got a value to offer. And actually, the thing that’s interesting about that is that organization from the the way they approached it have a sort of wrinkle, to seen who runs the organization have felt like equal partners in some of their dialogue with corporate entities, the reality of that leave that behind closed doors, it just feels like it’s less of a differential relationship. It’s about both sides bring value to us. And that, for me is like watching the excitement in the sector and being able to see more of those types of partnerships come,

Marco Campana 13:01
I feel that that’s a perfect segue to the discussion about open working, because I assume it’s because that that small charity shared the work that they were doing that it then got on the radar of Bumble, and that those connections were kind of made is so I mean, that and yeah, what a great example of the impact that just knowing about something instead of replicating it, you actually work with the organization that’s created it and it raises their profile, it raises their work, but you’re also not duplicating the worksite. So I guess that’s a great, let’s talk about open working. So how did what is open working? And how did that sort of model come about?

Ross McCulloch 13:36
Yeah, so we we’ve been working in a space for a while. So I mean, I’ve been working in around charity comms for a long time. And one of the things that I’ve always talked about in charity comms is this notion that, you know, you may have someone who’s at the center or a team at the center, but their role is simply to facilitate columns that comes from your organization. And what I mean by that is not just you know, someone who works in frontline service emails, your 12 page PDF, and says, Make that a Facebook post this week, please. Actually, how would you empower staff who are either experts in the field? Or who are people doing the actual work that people are giving their charitable donations to? How do we empower them to tell their stories and talk about that stuff in a way that’s open and transparent, and been relaxed about it? That wouldn’t always go perfectly. And that is okay. So that’s some, I guess, third sector life have always spoken about. So we’ve been working in a space for well over a decade. It’s not always have a guess, a formalized approach from us, because it’s always been kind of woven into kind of how we talk about online cons. Gov. The UK have kind of led a lot in this stuff. So and we’ve worked really closely with Amazon called jails from Google that JL Collins handbook. And so jails was kind of one of the advocates within gov.uk about the need for their work to be transparent and open. and actually moving away from this narrative that I think hasn’t been that helpful in the charity sector, when it’s seen as being a very altruistic thing. Like, we’ll share our work so that other people can benefit from it. And actually, if you share your work and these your work better at positions you, as a leader in that space, if you share your work, your funder knows what you’re doing in a really open and transparent way. And they’re more likely to give you more money, people are more likely to give you donations, your border will let it understand what you’re doing. And so for me, it’s that a big part, I feel open work and as moving the narrative away from this is a nice thing, because we’re really altruistic sector. And we should really work in open because it’s very model important. And that’s an element of it. And of course, that’s key batch again, just understand that this is a huge competitive advantage. So if you can work transparently and open your differentiate yourself from everyone else as your fast track to collaboration, that’s your fast track to getting a broader staff team internally on board with what you’re trying to do. And let’s move away from, you know, giant PDFs that we give to our board before the meeting, no giant PDF reports that we give to our funders, or change chief exec updates that come in our newsletter internally for staff and audit, it’s how do we get people to engage with content and questions in an open and transparent way, but over a long period of time, and also, you have to do those reports, like your annual report and things, it becomes very, very simple, because you’ve written out your revenue over the last six months and your weakness through the work in open. So for me, that’s, that’s probably the big educational pieces, getting people to think this isn’t a nice to have as they if you can do this, well, you’ve got a huge competitive advantage. And it actually is going to save you time over the long run. And so yeah, I mean, when we get into talking like a program that we run some approaches and that kind of toolkit we’ve got as well. Yeah, before before

Marco Campana 16:49
we dive into that, I’m just curious, like, there’s a lot of benefits, obviously, from the the person who’s sharing the organization that’s sharing, one of the things that we hear about, from sort of the recipients of of information, I mean, we’re still dealing with creating a culture of, of sharing, and I’m hoping, calling it open working might be useful, in particular, being able to share the model and the toolkit, but we hear a lot from from folks, and especially frontline workers that they can hear about information, but they don’t have the time to reflect they don’t have the time to figure out how to incorporate that maybe into their own work, which I think is a benefit of open working as if someone shares something else, and I’m working on something, maybe I can use that tool, or maybe I can I’m working on something similar, and we can come together and create something bigger or better. Is that an issue that’s come up? When when you’re dealing with this with with organizations as well, that notion of like, yeah, it’s great that I can get it, but I don’t have the structural institutional time in my day to two, you know, really sort of sort of, you know, not just receive it, but also kind of analyze it and, and reflect on it.

Ross McCulloch 17:52
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest challenge that we face than trying to level up and working with teams and charities is cultural is not the logistical bit is not about actually being able to write orally, where do you publish early and the kind of technology that’s of its cultural and the cultural that might be, there is no time set aside in my organization for any form of reflection. It’s just like a culture of constant busyness. And some things that you know, depending on what channel you work in, if you work in a small, Frontline, chatty work in a very difficult area, this stuff can feel like a luxury. And I think it’s getting people to understand that, you know, yes, it’s not as important as the hot phygital oven and someone or the counseling session you’re delivering, but I can make those things better. And I think from the years well, culturally, there needs to be and again, speaking before about the need for kind of the job leadership, the biggest blocker that we found to be delivered some work through a kind of quite a major funder in the UK, and their grand holders came along and often come along, people run in with frontline projects. They weren’t necessarily chief execs or trustees. The biggest blocker was not the person in the room common didn’t work in the buttons. They got it, they could rate pretty well, we could ask the right questions. The big problem was the Bosco and all I don’t know, we should probably will maybe if you send me that, I will check it and we’ll publish it maybe on the blog later, or we don’t we didn’t work in the commons. I’m not sure we should really do that. Or if we talk about stuff and other charities will steal our ideas, we wouldn’t be able to do it. And that’s

Marco Campana 19:30
that’s like the constant. Oh, yes. The fear of our idea will be taken. Yeah, that happens all the time.

Ross McCulloch 19:36
Yeah, yeah. I think I mean, some things haven’t oblique it to boards and chief execs that you probably don’t have a huge amount of new ideas, and that’s okay. And actually, being vulnerable and transparent and open is much, much more powerful, and much stronger signal to send to your funders and your supporters than trying to squirrel everything away. And I’ve worked in organizations. I’ve done that before. I’ve worked in Oregon. stations that are culturally quite restrictive and tight. And so all that happens is there’s another organization who’s very open and transparent, and who talks to the media and uses their own channels to do this stuff effectively. And the other ones government comes in, and we want advice. They’re the ones that funders approach first. They’re the ones that journalists pick up the phone to. So that stuff is not a nice to have, we can move away from that narrative of trying to persuade people, but ultimately, only really practical terms, we need to champions and organization to get this stuff and have a simple framework to deploy it and understand that other people are doing it and the world hasn’t broken. But actually those organizations helps you to benefit from doing.

Marco Campana 20:39
So let’s talk about practical terms. Because you’ve, you’ve helped develop a toolkit, and you mentioned that you’ve got to actually coach people if I think it’s eight weeks now. And and so what does that look like? So someone so again, like someone in Canada is is hearing this conversation, they’re looking at the links that I share in the in the in the podcast notes. And they’re like, Okay, this is this is really interesting. So what does it take to really operationalize this and to to commit to it as an organization? How do you walk someone through that process?

Ross McCulloch 21:05
Yeah, so our I mean, our program, I can kind of talk about that. And then you can talk a wee bit about, I guess, what some of their stuff looks like with an organization. So already, the program is front loaded with some initial training to get people up to speed with open work and get them to grips with the practicalities of what this may look like for them and their organization. And so for example, we have an open working overview workshop, which I lead on. And, and that is really taking people through some of the core principles that are in the toolkit, and some of the more practical elements and helping people think through some of those cultural questions that they’ve got as well. Now, workshops, usually within minutes long, we also have a rating for the web workshop, usually run by Rosie McIntosh has done lots of work in this space over the years, given people whose skills that’s great, because that we’ve done, we’ve done quite a lot of kind of user experience work and less, and that’s one of the big fears is like, putting pen to paper for people as terrifying. And how would you give people the confidence to do that, which led people to know that, you know, going back and editing something later on, and that is okay, or actually getting a bad first draft is fine. But actually, some of the best open work is 70% finished and the rest of it as the question that you can’t quite answer, and moving people away from this notion that writing for the web as essentially an online version of a press release. And actually, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’ve also got a we run a master class, which I was tambul, who I mentioned who JL Collins handbook, and everyone who comes along to the open working program gets a copy of the handbook and the access token working toolkit open working toolkit is, is free and open source, anyone can get that on link. So we give people that I guess that kind of confidence and equip them early on. So we can frontline for all those workshops. running alongside that. We have, we can sessions every week, and they start from with one of our programs, we get people like we pretty much drop them in the deep end after they’ve done the rain for the way of workshops that we’re trying to allay those fears. But what we’re not doing is hypothetically talking, talking about open working, and then you’ll go back to your organization. And we’ll hope that you’ll do it, the way that you can do it is by doing it. And so one of the things that we get at the start is we get them to pick a topic to focus on. So we had someone from my local UK, who they were going through a website redesign process. So they were talking openly and transparently in the bank kind of audience for that was internal teams, but also their supporters. Were going through a journey of user testing that exists and say, we’re thinking about making some changes have been really open and transparent over an eight week period about what that incrementally looked like. Rather than just like at the end of eight weeks, dumping a report on on the staff and telling them what we’ve made these changes, it’s like staff can actually be part of that, that journey as well for people who maybe just got new funding, talking about how they’re implementing that some of the decisions are making them into launching a new project. So the program has been been really successful. But the kind of minimum commitment per week has been half an hour or so that the shortest treatment sessions happen are usually some tiny tiny template that can fit with a once a week and we find people can rate pretty good stuff. So we’ve got a we’ve got a medium I can set up sort of on medium a few people often work in toolkit or open working program, you’ll find it quite easily. We’ve we’ve given people a kind of shared safe space to do that stuff open and transparently equal some equally. Some people want to use their own charities blog. Culturally, we kind of found that like setting that up on our own space and letting them use that and then they didn’t have to spend lots and lots of thing getting that internal buy in before they were a part of it. And we’ve also encourage people to think about doing this stuff in different ways. So if someone a use Twitter threads to do it, so you’d started blogging, but also found that like, breaking everything down into like five things you need to do over x. So she works in a really difficult project on a kind of financial control and abuse channel, it makes them Glasgow. And she was using really effective Twitter threads to work and open a bit some of the work that she was doing some other people using Instagram to do it. And I think that’s one of the things is like the medium is not that important. So I think people get obsessed in the space of you have to read week notes, they have to work in a very specific format. And actually, for me, it doesn’t really matter a huge amount every week not so good vehicle because it provides structure, and it’s been clean. But if you’re more comfortable taking that format and doing a video on a piece of audio content, then that equally has made it as well, on next and up. And I think from you that regularity is the main thing, whether it’s be clear whether it’s fortnight, maybe monthly, I think that’s maybe maybe a too big of a gap between right and that regularity is really kind of key to what that looks like.

Marco Campana 26:01
Sounds like a really interesting model. Is that a model that you mentioned earlier that the charities and geographic boundaries, in particular, during COVID have exploded out? Is that something you’re interested in exporting? So for example, if charities here were interested in going through a process with with your organization to become you know, open working literate, as a whole put it? Is that something that you’re you’re open to replicating or sharing?

Ross McCulloch 26:24
Yeah, I mean, we, we’d be keen to work with Mod organization, right, because we’re in Cubase, that tends to be UK based charities that we work with. But yeah, we definitely be open to working with other people across the globe. And there are things, which I didn’t mention that as part of that. So we usually have a cohort of around about 20 people. And they’re also part of a Slack channel. And the big thing that we found was actually that kind of peer support is key to people giving each other feedback or, you know, in a session, we will say, Look, my dear friend, this week as x or I’m having this challenge, because my boss doesn’t want me to read this thing. Have you have you had this problem, how to get in this, and actually build in that kind of peer support community, and people become part of our collective open working program, Slack channel that we’ve got. So as those cohorts grew, they become part of a kind of bigger community in there. And I think globally, a lot of governments are doing open work, and it doesn’t seem to be happening, a huge amount the charity sector, or when it does, it’s not necessarily spoken about as open work. And it’s kind of still very traditional online comms, but it’s kind of needed more than to be open and transparent, it would be really nice to see, I guess I kind of collective terminology and stuff is quite important as well, I think like trying to destroy a lot of the jargon that’s been sitting around open working, because I think a lot of it’s quite unhelpful, and just getting people to understand some kind of core principles. And again, that’s where the manifesto in the toolkit is quite useful. And we kind of send shape that we create a big group of people through the catalyst. So just, you know, getting people to just start being intentional about your writing, using it as a tool to build relationships. And it also ties in you mentioned previously, I think the service recipes that the catalysts have got this notion of, if we want technology to be open, we want other people to learn from successes globally or UK wide, or in Canada, that only happens by working open and transparently. So you don’t, you can’t possibly know that Charlie’s had a really successful time of the youth council service and actually up, take that in time service and deploy it really quickly. Unless they have spoken about open and transparent. And I think that’s another big cultural thing is to really shift the juillet scale within the sector, we need to open work, and it’s the thing that’s going to make it happen, because otherwise, we’re kind of like everyone is trying to fund tiny pockets of activity over and over and over again, or we’re at the whim of technology companies are going to come and try and solve it for us. And actually, for me, the solutions are in the sector itself. And some things that will be an off the shelf commercial product that solves it might be a community based technology solution. But getting charities to understand that the real difficulty is understanding your user needs and the challenges people are facing, and then thinking about the technology that’s going to solve

Marco Campana 29:07
that my wheels are spinning. But I see so much potential in exporting this model globally into Canada, because we have this conversations in different ways here. But I think people are trying to figure out what’s the right way. So I love that for example, you have a community that keeps growing with each cohort that can support each other and build that out and be supportive. And I when I was reading through the toolkit, one of the things that just strikes me is that the practicalities like just start, just start sharing and like you said earlier, it doesn’t matter which format doesn’t matter which medium, but get into that habit of like just talking about your work talking out loud, you know, just thinking about it and not feeling like you have to have all the solutions because again, someone might read something and say, Oh, I have this other thing that I can connect to your work and we can build something up together. So yeah, I just I feel like it’s we’re ripe to bring it to bring your model to to Canada and to build that as well. Maybe hit you up later. For some of the links around your core, but I guess, in your training cohorts, are you open to having our international participants? And is that something? Or would you be more interested in kind of trying to replicate a model? Like, you know, in another country?

Ross McCulloch 30:11
Yeah, I mean, I probably make more sense to replicate the model. Part of it is just I guess, so we have a fully funded program that’s funded by UK funders. So there’s probably some restrictions around that stuff. And then about the GDPR stuff, and all the complications of that as well. But I mean, I think, I think it’s fairly easily replicated. And we’re not. And we’re not overly precious about it, you know, so the delivery and one of the things that we’ve been doing, actually, as we’ve been offering support organizations to try and deploy their own version of working program internally, so at the end of the last quarter, we ran at a meeting with the Chief Exec of one of the people who had attended and was like, This is amazing, the staff members come on this, it’s totally transforming the way that we use our comms channels, which had felt really stagnant and one dimensional. And it was just this kind of this moment of clarity, they were like, well, this is how we should communicate online. This is culturally what we’ve wanted to do for a long time, we’ve just not had the mechanism to make it happen. And what they are now looking at doing is kind of implementing a smaller version of that internally led by that champion, who now knows, you know, how to roughly pull together a good blog post, the rhythm of what needs to look like how they can support other members of staff. And so for that, for me, again, it’s another thing. You know, chorus of 20 are good. But again, how would you do this stuff at scale, and that’s one of the things that I’ve always been interested in, in the sector is that there is good support in individual organizations, and you need to make change and provide that something’s quite intensive support. But for this stuff to happen quickly, it needs to happen at scale. And that either means lots of delivery, or it means thinking about how you build champions within the sector and within individual organizations and sales to really make this stuff grow. Because what I don’t want is I don’t want like 20 charities come along. And now we’ve got 20 individuals and 20 charities who want to do or put work in, but actually, they’re fighting an ongoing battle culturally, internally to make this stuff happen. What amazing to see between the people that can pair me at that to 20 new people in their own organization. And that kind of snowball effect kicks. And as people move jobs, they keep that kind of culture and that approach with them. So that for me is like that, that needs to be a key part of it is how do we how do we make this snowball? And how do you grow

Marco Campana 32:24
up quickly? I wonder if you see any any role for funders? And that you mentioned, for example, that funders react well to this whole idea? What about them, making it part of service agreements, or contracts or grants or whatever you guys call them necessarily, but saying like, you will share your work. And here’s the model, you’ll follow with that? That’s a bit of a stick, but it might kind of help with that scale it so what’s your What are you hearing from funders around the ideas? Yeah, yeah.

Ross McCulloch 32:47
So I mean, we’ve been quite lucky here in Scotland to to, to Scottish funders have come on board and been part of the working program. So a William Grant Foundation and inspire in Scotland, as well. And we’ve also had conversations with some of the other funders based years, if you will, like the National Lottery, corner Foundation, edition, Scotland, Community Foundation for Scotland and a few others as well. And there’s, there’s an appetite for this stuff. And what I don’t think I don’t think open working feel feels to the kind of funding space, and not necessarily as if it’s a proven thing. Because accountability of public money, or money that’s been donated is really critical. And I totally get that. So that’s a really tricky thing to scare off. And what I guess what I’d like to see is maybe like, is there an approach where you could kind of chip away that we’re not a support and build that into open working. And over time, there’ll be this shift where everything can be much more open and transparent. And we’re giving people the vehicle to do it, rather than necessarily mandating it, but also still having a very rigid, formalized structures. And then it’s just yet another thing for that charity to do. So for me, it only works in a mandated we have some other stuff as and if this other stuff is there, all we’re asking guys to do is yet another onerous thing, oh, that’s what it feels like in their head. But one of the things we did with the last cohort as we prioritize that kind of group of funders that we’ve worked with, we prioritize grant holders in those funders. And there was like clear message to those grant holders from the funders that we think this is a good thing. And that for me is like that’s that’s a powerful starting point. Because a lot of the things that that in itself is not there. We talk about openness and transparency. But we don’t often go well, here’s the way you’re actually going to do or here’s what we’d like you to do. And that’s the kind of messenger and if we can start people on that journey, that’d be really powerful. But I think you’re right, and funders are the critical bit of all of this, because if if a funder saying to you, I’m gonna give you money, the reporting process is actually not very big at all. And then do you one Google doc at the end of it, but what I’d like you to do is I’ve linked to rate open and transparent Like every week or fortnight about this, we’re going to give you some genuine support didn’t get happen, that was incredibly powerful, don’t think it’s in abundance, as well as like, they are all struggling to, you know, to have really good content to communicate the impact that they’re having. But now suddenly, you got, you know, 30 charities who are working in the open and talking all the time about the difference are making with the money that your grant has given them. That’s, it just feels like a new beta. And that moves those funds in a space where they become curators for that open content, rather than thinking like we need to kind of get all this stuff entering people we’ve given money to is actually stops happening. It’s good. It’s happened open and transparent.

Marco Campana 35:40
Yeah, I can think I’m thinking about, you know, a foundation that just pulls in a bunch of RSS feeds from these blogs that just show up on their site. And it’s like, impact impact impact of the work that we’re doing, it doesn’t it’s no more extra work for them. They don’t have to just go through and just still, you know, have quarterly narrative reports and things like that, because the narrative is just constantly screaming to them. sounds really interesting. I love it. I love it. I feel like I’m gonna follow up with you. And I want to bring this to Canada in some meaningful way. So we’ll have that discussion in a different form. But is there anything about open working that, that I haven’t asked you about that you think, for people considering it that they should know more about it? Or, you know, again, like the first step is just take the step that’s, like, practical, you know, share one thing a week and do and don’t feel compelled to to make it perfect. But is there anything that we haven’t necessarily talked about that you think would be important for folks to know about the approach?

Ross McCulloch 36:31
Yeah, I mean, I think I think, for me, giving yourself giving yourself regular and to write badly, initially, just as important. So, you know, some people would come along, a cohorts have never written anything like this before, they will never written kind of a formal reports, some people are a bit more confident. But giving yourself that ability to rate some fairly average content initially, as Okay, people I mean, like, you know, by the end of the weeks, people are writing really good, coherent stuff that is SEO friendly, that, you know, ask questions builds community, and it doesn’t take long to get to that point. And the other thing for me is just going back to that cultural bet, like if you want it to stick in work to work, how do you get buy in from senior people know, the buyer may be my Chief Exec is going to commit to that. And they’re going to do it as well by inmates simply be, the chief exec shares the blog post that you write once a week as a junior member of staff so that other people can, can see it. But that that cultural bet, where leadership, gets this stuff and sees the value, and it’s built into those values of openness and transparency, I think is really important. And that, for me, is critical. And yeah, I think keeping, keeping an eye on some of the really good work that’s happened and as part of the catalyst network, and the UK, because some other interesting stuff going on. So I’ve been doing quite a bit work with a CDO, they have a monthly call called digit shift where they bring together and people who are doing interesting stuff in the technology space, we’ve got one this week actually, specifically focused on community tech. So there’s a big one of the funders has committed, like 400,000 pounds to kind of a support and community technology. So we’re grassroots organizations have created their own tech solution, then how do we bolster that? How do we share what that looks like? And then within that, like, you know, that only works if those Community Technology organizations are working and open so that other people can build on it and work with each other. And so I think that’s one of the things that isn’t to be like and Pandemic was kind of less than a definite pre pandemic was missing. And is this notion that, yes, open work is important, or getting a digital trustee is important, or thinking of a digital service library, but they’re all part of a much bigger ecosystem. And we all need to be thinking about how we work with each other. And I think that kind of the global work and stuff has never really happened a huge amount part of that against culture. You mentioned before, you know, in the states have such a heavy focus on fundraising and philanthropy. And that’s when people think of it digital assets. And that’s when a lot the kind of chat goes but I’d be interested in like, how do you how do you play music and amazing project that’s happened and deliver digital services in Canada? And how does someone in Britain learn about that and deploy that really quickly? What does that look like in practical terms?

Marco Campana 39:23
No, I love it. And I mean, I have to ask, it’s like, there’s something cultural about Scotland, because there’s your work. There’s SCV Oh, there’s the more collective which works on Digital Champions, which, by the way, there is an organization that’s bringing them in to Canada to teach about Digital Champions, so that it’s starting to kind of happen. What is it about your culture that makes this openness in this sort of collaboration happen that that we could learn from?

Ross McCulloch 39:45
Yeah, I mean, I think another another one, I guess dimension as well as connecting Scotland seven was lucky enough to be part of the strategy group and that right at the start of the pandemic, and that’s poor. I mean, like, I mean, maybe not now in terms of scale because Scotland’s a small country, but certainly when that that started, that was probably the most ambitious Digital Inclusion Project from any government globally. It was certainly the quickest response, I think to that. And the premise behind that was was basically given data devices and basic digital skills to people who are disconnected for a number of reasons. And the scale of that has been hourly phenomenon through some of the workplace if you’re a little more collected, Scottish government have been doing all of that has worked, because grassroots community organizations taking ownership. So basically, people apply to a fund to have, you know, advice to get in Digital Champions training, to get access to unlimited data. It’s not done by like, a centralized, a person or organization who’s deploying it as leader. And I think for me, that’s one of the things we’re Scotland’s quite powerful as the third sector isn’t necessarily always dominated by these kind of colossal charities. Actually, most of this stuff has been delivered by volunteer aid, long run organizations. And there’s some amazing stuff happening digital in that space. There’s a closer proximity to government than probably that, as the rest of UK turns approximately to Westminster and decision making stuff can happen more quickly. And yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know what the magic formula is. But I think people people talking to each other and not being too precious about their work as well. And also trying not to duplicate work. So I mean, but you’re talking about work like that we don’t deliver anything that is around basic digital skills, or Digital Champions work, because an organization like that does it incredibly well. And a CBO is really skilled at doing things like the amazing tools of like digital audits for charitable organization, digital skills audits, we’re not trying to deliver that work, because they did incredibly well. And that, for me is like that, that ability to kind of move really quickly. And I think a lot of a lot of the sector is unfortunately still bogged down by governance, even if we put a kind of shady label and processes over there. It’s like decision making takes far, far too long. And that’s Steve looked in JSON, or impactful happen quickly.

Marco Campana 42:14
Yeah, there’s there’s a cultural impediment right there, obviously, that we need to work that way. We have that here as well, for sure. The governance and the auditing and things like that. It just yeah, it takes away from the ability to be flexible and nimble. I love it. I love this conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. You know, it’s been great. And I feel inspired. I want to, you know, like I said, I’ll follow up and we’ll figure out a way to bring you bring you in your model to Canada because I think we’re right before it. I think there’s some of us who really think that this is the way to go. But I really appreciate you taking the time today to have this conversation

Ross McCulloch 42:43
going. Thank you.

Marco Campana 42:44
Well, thanks. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you found this episode interesting and useful for you and your work. You can find more podcast episodes, wherever you listen to your podcasts are also on my site at marcopolis.org I appreciate you listening and if you have any tips, suggestions, ideas or want to be interviewed or know someone who wants to be interviewed, please drop me a line through my website, or marco@marcopolis.org Thanks again.

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Welcome to episode 35 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I speak with Meenakshi (Meena) Das. Meena is working on a number of interesting areas around nonprofit technology, but what I wanted to focus on in this conversation is her work around Human-Centric AI.

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Welcome to episode 34 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I speak with Tim Lockie. Tim has developed a new way to ensure that nonprofits factor people in their technology plans and that's what we talk about in this conversation, along with a healthy dose of how and why you should become better at making decisions with your own data.

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Welcome to episode 33 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I speak with Miyuki Fukuma about sector technology development, the need for tech human resources in our sector and how we can actually afford those positions, technology sustainability that impacts how technology is funded, digital communication, and a good chunk of time on accessibility.

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Welcome to episode 32 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I chat with Marium Vahed about how service design and innovation thinking can be brought into a nonprofit service setting.

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Welcome to episode 31 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I chat with Aletheia Délivré about service and human centred design.

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Welcome to episode 30 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I chat with Cybersecurity professional Kassia Clifford.

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Welcome to episode 29 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I talk with David Phu from Nonprofit Video Comms, a nonprofit video and communications consultancy.

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Welcome to episode 28 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I’m chatting with Whitney Loewen the manager of E learning and special projects at The Immigrant Education Society in Calgary. I reached out to Whitney after discovering their Newcomer Introduction to Classes Online project, or NICO.

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Welcome to episode 27 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I’m chatting with a few folks from the Somerset West Community Health Centre in Ottawa about their experiences with digital equity and virtual care. On the line with me are Sue Merrill, Manager of Quality Improvement, Planning and Evaluation, Lisa Vadeboncoeur, Digital Equity and Virtual Progamming Project Assistant, Magda Osman, Community Health Promoter.

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Welcome to episode 26 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I'm chatting with Omar Yaqub of the Islamic Family & Social Services Association in Edmonton. Omar and his team are re-envisioning a modern intake system for the social services sector that leverages technology, including machine learning and predictive analysis. You know, the promise of tech - prompting you with questions or suggestions as you use technology. On the surface it looks like a tech project, but it is much more than that.

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Welcome to Episode 25 of the Technology in Human Services Podcast. In this episode I'm chatting with Anesh Daya, Edupreneur, ESL Disruptor, and Chief Innovation Officer of On the Spot Language, an Experiential Language Learning Program that guides and coaches English as a Second language learners to become independent language learners.

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Welcome to Episode 24 of the technology and Human Services podcast. This episode is recording of a panel I moderated recently focused on measuring virtual service delivery for the newcomer Strategy Group. Manjeet Dhiman from ACCES Employment was on the panel along with Jason Shim from Pathways to Education Canada, and Lawrence Murphy from Worldwide Therapy Online.

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Welcome to episode 23 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this conversation I'm speaking with Dave Montague and Carrie Moody from Findhelp Information Services in Toronto. Among other things, they manage the 211 service in the Greater Toronto Area.