Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode three of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode, as well as one of the seventeen future episodes in the series from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com. The conversation that you're about to hear took place in Toronto on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at the home of Cathy Vine, Executive Director of Voices for Children. Cathy and her team are thinking differently and working hard to turn knowledge into action. She describes the process as change facilitation, one that involves children and youth directly in the decision-making process, and creates open systems that support learning. She challenges us to create a true learning culture and to question our assumptions about knowledge and leadership. Her examples of how to engage in a shared search for answers, collective action taking, and the difficulty of translation, with the eventual and obvious need for relationships and trust does not only apply to work with children and youth but to all organizations. It was a privilege to talk to Cathy and I hope you learn as much as I did.
Cathy: My name is Cathy Vine and I'm the Executive Director at Voices for Children and essentially we're looking to improve children's lives in Ontario and we look for very creative ways to do it. Peter: Maybe say a little bit about what you mean.
Cathy: Essentially we're very interested in children as whole beings and we're interested in them from their birth or actually prior to birth and straight through into early adulthood. So we're interested in whole children throughout their development. Our commitment is really to turning knowledge into action. And so what we've done over the years is work with researchers to find ways to make their material more accessible to a broader public, by including service providers, elected officials etc, but I'll just use that term for now, so that we can help to push that knowledge into reality. And that's the approach we've taken for about 5 years now but very recently we started asking, how could we do this differently and we also started saying that if we really, ultimately want to see very much a changed society as a society that actually functions to support children's development, we're going to really have to stop focusing on transferring knowledge and start focusing on how can we use ourselves to facilitate change. Peter: Why?
Cathy: Because we were not going to achieve our goals. We absolutely were not satisfied to put the amount of energy that we were putting into translating knowledge, for lack of a better term, and pushing it out. We didn't know where it was landing. We didn't know what was being done with it and we just weren't satisfied with that being our role. We really felt, in some ways that there's a lot of knowledge produced and what we need to do is look at how can we actually help people put that knowledge into action and that was a different role for us. Peter: Okay. Can you give an example – like a concrete example of how this approach is working?
Cathy: We're still trying to figure out that approach and that continues to be a process for us and that's why it's so exciting I guess to be doing the work that we're doing right now. Let me give you an example: there's a policy that's being developed with the Provincial government that's intended to grant the Child Advocate new powers and this position is supposed to represent the interests of children. The policy was created 100% by adults. And so one of the roles that Voices for Children has taken with respect to this policy is to say, how can we help young people have a say in this policy? Ideally, if it were to be done all over again, we'd want young people at the table helping to craft it from the beginning. But because the first many steps have already been taken without them, we're looking for how we can involve them. And so we've entered into several partnerships with several youth organizations and we're actually working to open up the process to change the process and also plant seeds now for the future processes that will be used by the Government of Ontario to consult with young people when they make legislation that actually directly affects their lives. Peter: Talk about what you mean in terms of meaningful consultation Cathy: This is…it means actually bringing people together – let's say having us all at a table together and let's say that the decision making is done by the people at the table together and that the plan, the goals, the execution – everything is done in partnership and in collaboration. So if we're using an example that involves young people, they're central to the process – it's not an adult saying, “here, come on in, we want your two cents on this and thank you very much and goodbye” – it's actually about creating new ways that are inclusive from the outset. Peter: Do you think involving children and youth in this kind of process right from the beginning is going to affect the way that they learn? Not just as children and youth, but as adults – do you think it'll change their pathways in terms of how policy gets made? Cathy: Perhaps - I don't think we have any evidence about that but my hypothesis would be absolutely yes. And some of the thinking, I think that would support that is that there's a lot of concern about the lack of active participation in society, by adults lets say, about adult engagement in political processes for example. So one of the ideas is, is that if you actually involve people at a much earlier stage, where they can see what it means to actually be meaningfully involved and have a say, that that might be something that they would then grow up with, expecting to be a part of…with the skills in having those kinds of experiences.
Peter: These interviews are being done for the Canadian Council on Learning, which is really trying to better understand what works in terms of life-long learning and trying to support the processes of life-long learning. So when you think about the concept of life-long learning, what do you think it means?
Cathy: It's really about being open to new understanding, new possibilities, there never being one answer- there always being new answers. So I guess it's that openness that there really being an opportunity to continually re-think, re-shape, re-do, to imagine things that we haven't imagined yet. Peter: Okay. What do you see the link between life-long learning for instance, and this whole process of knowledge exchange and knowledge mobilization?
Cathy: What I would say is, we don't currently function in ways that promote life-long learning. We don't yet function in ways that promote knowledge mobilization in the way that I'd like to see it happen. And so I think there's a lot of work to be done to really turn ourselves around – change the way we do business and in doing that, create learning culture, learning society, learning organizations, so that we can actually learn and make use of what we learn. And I think that's what will really help us societaly to become life-long learners. Peter: Do you…when you think about a learning culture or an organization that is learning, do you have any examples of people that you consider who are actually really good that you're trying to either emulate or doing good practices that you see them doing that you try to bring into your own organization? Cathy: What I'm seeing are several individuals who get it and they're modeling that behavior, they're out teaching about that behavior and I'm following them around saying, “oh, now I get it”. And so I think I'm seeing some good examples and then every other place I look, I'm seeing closed shops. I'm seeing people who think that because they know it, they've got it and as long as they know it, nobody else needs to get it. Like I really see a lot of closed systems. I really see a lot of organizations that are focused on very discrete activities and I think they're really missing out on much grander opportunities. Peter: So how could you open them up? What is needed to support this process of collaboration of a co-construction, of ongoing learning and feeding back into the system?
Cathy: I guess there needs to be something within the environments that we're all working in or learning in that actually permits us to take in this information, to throw it around, to debate it, to decide whether it's something that we could then actually adopt for ourselves. And then somehow through the organization or the environment, have the means to then adopt it. And I think that's where one of the breakdown areas is, is that we go off to conferences, we hear great stuff but we don't have a mechanism in place when we get home then to actually help us really, thoroughly review and figure out, “do we want to adopt this” and then if so, “how are we going to adopt this”. Peter: Why don't you talk a little bit about the initiative that you have going right now? It's Kids Grow Ontario, correct? Cathy: Essentially Voices for Children and the Offered Centre for Child Studies set out to see if we could answer a fairly simple question: how are kids doing in Ontario? And what we discovered was, that question can't be answered because while there is tons of data being collected in every place that you can imagine and lot's of research being done, there is nothing in place that's actually helping to pull it all together, make sense of it and then share it out with a broader public. And I don't think I realized what the depth of the problem was until we actually started poking around trying to get answers to these very basic questions. And then when we went and talked to people about the knowledge that they were generating, we'd say, “ok what are you doing to help your organization and your system better keep track of how kids are doing?” The people that we spoke to talked about tremendous effort that they were putting into actually making some of those changes. They were going to change how they were collecting data - they were going to be far more connected to the people who were ultimately going to use that information. And lets say that was within the education area and then we might say towards the end of that meeting, “and how is your work relating to the work that's being done at this Ministry or that Ministry? Or yet another area to do with children's development”. And I remember quit poignantly, the person in one meeting looking at me aghast and saying “ oh we couldn't possibly do this with anybody else, it's enough just to get our own data house in order. And so while there's great effort being done within systems, there's no connection going on across the systems even though we're all talking about the very same children. So there's layers of challenges, but one of the other things that we learned was that so much good work is being done but there's never any plan from the very get-go to figure out who is it that is actually going to make use of this information? Who is it that wants this information? How could this information be helpful? And I don't mean to dismiss the efforts where that is going on, it's just that so often it isn't going on. That whole shared search for answers, that whole shared, “okay if we learn this, how can we collectively do something about this?” It doesn't happen in a mutual collective way, it happens where one party starts it and then one party says, “I've got the results for you, here you go”. And then the rest of us say, “well actually, we can't do anything with these results or actually, those aren't the questions that we're looking for answers to”. There's so many disconnects. In Ontario we talk about it being a really fragmented knowledge environment because there is so many things that aren't connecting. Peter: And so how would the collaboration that you're proposing or that is in development fix that? Cathy: I guess it would be different because we would insist that many, many of the players come together - so that the data collectors, the researchers, the administrators, the educators, the parents, the young people, would actually all come to the table and see if they could actually establish what kind of information would be important for them to know. And then people could go off and figure out, “can we find that information or can we set up the systems that would allow us to gather that information. Can we then bring that information back and again, talk about, “well then what does this mean”?
Peter: And what sort of reactions have you been getting to this?
Cathy: A mix of reactions – some people respond by saying, “oh no, no, no, but we've got it and don't worry, with the new health initiatives, it's happening” and I say, “and are you talking to education?” “Oh no”. So people think that they're already doing it, so one of our challenges is that we need to somehow help people see beyond the spheres that they're familiar with and then the other kind of reaction we're getting is, “do you mean we don't have a system in place? Do you mean we aren't already routinely sharing information?” Any parents that I talk to are stunned that this actually isn't already being looked after and looked after well. And then maybe the third set of reactions are absolutely it just makes sense – it really makes sense that if we don't bring the key people who are affected by all this together, and it just seems so simple really, that we don't have a hope of actually getting on the same page when it comes to then actually agreeing on what kinds of investments we should be making for children for example. Peter: Okay, who's joining in? In the material that you sent me beforehand you said that there's 500 people that have joined this network, I think is one way to describe it. Who are those people? Who are they…I mean you said that (they're) everywhere but can you nail it down to some specifics? Cathy: They are people who run daycare programs, they are educators in the school system, they are social workers working for Child Welfare, they are senior policy officials at different ministries. They really are a breadth of people who like the idea that we ought to be able to answer basic questions about how kids are doing in the Province and I think they like the idea of being invited to participate in that process.
Peter: Okay. And so what are the….the incentives are pretty straight forward in term of why are people would want to get involved because it makes good sense but what's going to support their involvement? What's the infrastructure that supports them to do this? How do you support those intensions in practical ways?
Cathy: I think that's why we're calling for what we call a high level and bottom-up solution. And the high level is where some of that support and that leadership has got to come from. No doubt you've been at as many meeting as I have where all the talk is about system integration, system integration, and yet we've got funding and policies that come from the least integrated source possible. And so I think if we can get a high level giving that leadership, showing that investment, and actually looking at what they can do to support communities and to support agencies within communities, to actually gather and begin to make use of information, I think that will absolutely make a difference. We actually try to mount more of a community development solution and we said, “why don't we all come together and build a network” and peoples jaws dropped because they said, “we cannot possible take on one more ounce of work – it's already too hard”. So we were asking them to do that much more for the greater good and they said, “we won't do it…you won't…this won't work.” And that's when we realized that there needed to be this higher level leadership and investment and a real, ‘we'll put our house in order and we're going to do this with an eye to actually helping you, on the ground, put your houses in order'. And so our hope is, is that really trying to come at it both ways. So we've got top-down – bottom-up but we also have…it's all happening in an exchange way. I think it's the only hope that we've got.
