UBC Partnering in Research Conference + Stories of Partnership: Be The Change Earth Alliance, False Creek Friends and UBC Sustainability Hub

Akuzike Limbanga: Before I begin, I’d like to do a land acknowledgment. And so we are here today on the unceded land and the ancestral land of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish nations. And as we talk about stories of partnership, I would like to continue to remind us of the importance of that and the importance of relationships and reciprocity for impact. 

And today we invite you to listen to our stories. We’ve had a lot of time practicing this and a lot of years of practice, and unfortunately, we won’t be able to focus on our projects in detail. And instead, we’ll focus on our collaboration. We’ll be focusing on two different partnerships. So the first partnership is between UBC Sustainability and Be the Change Earth Alliance. 

And the second one is False Creek Friends and UBC Sustainability. And I am Aku. I worked with sustainability, as the Wake-Up lead for the past two years. We only have an hour for this session. If you guys have any comments or questions that come up, please just save them for the end. 

We’ll be happy to stay over and chat. But I don’t think would be taking any questions just because of the time frame. I’m going to be passing it on to Caroline to introduce herself. 

Caroline Beninger: Hi folks, my name is Caroline. My pronouns are she/her and I’m from Be the Change Earth Alliance. Typically I’m the grants and education coordinator. Currently I’m the interim executive director. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with Aku for the past two years and the Sustainability Hub to deliver one of our educational programs, Be the Change 

Earth Alliance is an environmental charity based in so-called Vancouver that operates across BC to provide education, and we are really looking forward to sharing some of our lessons from working with Sustainability Hub. 

Mutuma Caelan: Hello, hello. My name is Mutuma and I use he/him pronouns. I’m a current student at UBC pursuing a major in human geography. And I’m very passionate about social climate and epistemic justice. I’m fortunate enough to have spent the last year and this upcoming year working as the environmental justice lead over at the Sustainability Hub, and liasing very closely with data and False Creek Fan Society. I will pass it over to Zaida. 

Zaida Schneider: Hello, everybody, I’m Zaida. Zaida just means grandfather in Yiddish. I don’t use the personal pronouns, but I do talk about intersectionality. So, I’m an old guy. I’m an old white guy. I’m a secular Jew. I’m anti-Zionist, and I represent this organization here today called False Creek Friends. We are a placemaking initiative that is trying to develop relationships between a natural entity and the human heart. 

That’s what our job is to do. So, we are trying to create a special relationship with this water body called False Creek. The marine environment of it, which has had zero kind of official interest in it, there is no one body that is shaping its future or is concerned about it, there are 21 government agencies that sometimes get together if there’s a crisis, but nobody is thinking about its future. 

So what we do together is we try to develop that sense of connection, that sense of kinship, and we essentially do that through scientific investigations, partnerships with academic researchers, we do it through our relationships and building on traditional wisdom, and we also do it by promoting cultural activities that drive home this idea that we are connected to the Earth. 

We are connected to the oceans, and we have our own little sliver of the magnificent Salish Sea that we can protect and make our own. And I’ll pass it to Kshamta, who is one of our directors at False Creek Friends as well.  

Kshamta Hunter: Hi, everyone. My name is Kshamta Hunter and I sort of wear two hats at the University of British Columbia. I’m a staff member with the title of Manager of Transformative Learning and Engagement with the Sustainability Hub at UBC. And I’m also an instructor in the Faculty of Education and, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. 

I had an amazing privilege and honour to work with all four of these amazing people and both of these amazing organizations in the last 2 or 3 years, and we have had the privilege to really do some amazing work in the communities as well. So we’re going to dive right into this conversation, and we’ll start with this question of, how did we start these partnerships, how it has evolved in the last few years or months, and what are some of the changes and how we have adapted to some of those changes and how we have evolved with those changes as well? 

So I’ll share a little bit about both of these partnership involvements. So I was connected to Zaida by a colleague of ours. And it’s always like you see a connection and you see an alignment. And sometimes other people see the alignment, and it’s always nice. Then when people see the connection, they make the connection. 

So I would urge you, if you see connections between two organizations or two people, make that connection because you never know when and where that connection is going to take you. So that connection was made, we connected and we really dove into understanding how we can work together, how we can align some of our goals. 

So I’m going to, in a bit, pass it to Zaida to share a little bit more. But I will also just share Be the Change Earth Alliance has been working with Sustainability Hub for many years. And that relationship existed for a couple of years before I was brought into that relationship. So again, there are different dynamics and different perspectives that we will share here today. 

So I’m going to pass it to Zaida first to kind of share a little bit about how do you think this relationship has evolved in the last year? I remember many of our conversations, many of our ups and downs and figuring out, okay, we had a whole list of ideas that we wanted to do, and we went with the idea at the very bottom of the list, which wasn’t even on your radar. 

And then we were like, what about podcasts? And then you were like, really? So we kind of went for that. So do you want to share a little bit about that? 

Zaida Schneider: Yeah. I just wanted to go back to what you said about relationships because like, this is really so key, especially for all of us here who are, you know, this is called, you know, Partnerships in Research, right? That’s the name of your gathering today. And it seems to me that these partnerships are really based on, a kind of investigative question, which is what do we want to accomplish and what do we want to accomplish together? 

So already there’s the beginning of this kind of theory of change that we discover in working with one another. And it can be a really iterative process. In other words, we make mistakes and the mistakes are a learning opportunity. And, you know, there’s this traditional thing like calling Kshamta, Mutuma, you know, it happens. 

We do make mistakes. But out of that, if we can derive the learning, then guess what happens? The relationship deepens. So just to get back, we have tried so many different things and we made a list and Mutuma will hopefully talk a bit more about that, and I thought that one of the things that we could do was create a podcast, but we’ve got the sustainability ambassadors that we had connected through UBC. 

And I put it low down on the list in my mind because I thought, here we’re talking about students. They have an agenda to accomplish. And it’s so interesting that because in the academic environment, it’s very transactional in a sense, in that you have to do something as an academic that is acknowledged as your personal work. 

But now there’s another connection, which is to the larger community. So I thought, not fair to the students to make them work on a podcast that’s for our benefit. But it turned out that the ambassadors really liked that, and I wish I could show you how it’s going. Mutuma is the host of one of our podcast. 

When this is all over, I’ll share you a trailer for it. It is just fantastic, you know, and that will reach other people and deepen this chain of connection. So that’s my answer. 

Kshamta Hunter: That’s great. That’s great. I feel like I should give you a bit of a backgrounder in terms of how I’m working, and how UBC is working with these two organizations. So I run a program called Sustainability Ambassadors Leadership Program at UBC. And the way it works is that students want to work with community partners. 

They want to work on real life issues in their communities. And that’s the purpose of this program as well. So we connect with community partners, and these students then work on the projects with community partners on these real issues. So hence, there’s a team of 10 or 11 ambassadors who worked with Mutuma. Mutuma leads that team in terms of mentoring and guidance. 

And here’s the connection to Zaida. And the ambassadors work and support the work of Falls Creek and Be the Change Earth Alliance as well. So that sort of gives you a bit of a context, but, Mutuma, I’m going to pass it to you to build upon that from the student perspective. Being sort of in the middle of this academic institution which has these goals and perspectives and frameworks and, sort of expectations in some ways, and then also working with the community partner that has certain goals and expectations as well. 

How do you manage the relationship, and can you share a little bit about your experiences as a student? In the in the past one year. And you’re coming back. So I’m hoping that experience was good. 

Mutuma Caelan: No, yeah. For sure. I think it’s definitely an interesting position to be in where you’re sort of at that midpoint of the institution. The ambassadors, myself being a student, but also then the entire community that surrounds False Creek and all the sort of members that are active participants in the work that Fox Creek Friends is doing. I think on a personal level, I really struggled with the idea of hope, especially just looking at so many of the stuff that are happening in the climate crisis politically, socially, culturally, internationally. 

And I think this year working with The Hub, but also working with False Creek Friends has been super instrumental for me. And understanding that hope is not passive, but it has to be actively cultivated. And I think that a lot of the work that The Hub and also Falls Creek Friends is doing has been so important for me. 

But I think also subsequently the ambassadors in having a space where they can cultivate that hope and actualize some of the ideas that they have. I think it’s difficult sometimes to balance the different perspectives that are equally important in that role, and sort of highlight where, and sort of picking up on ones I had mentioned, those mistakes that are sometimes happening and inherent to this kind of work reveal those areas where change needs to happen. 

I think we’ve been successful and are continuing to sort of attempt to be even more successful by recognizing that change is required in a lot of this work, and sometimes it’s necessary to keep things moving and to keep things streamlined. Just for context, we started working together about this time last year, and since then there have been a total of six huge pivotal changes that we’ve made to the project. 

I think a lot of the times I felt as though it was indicative of wrongdoings on my end, and I was a bit nervous, sort of coming up to the end to some day and being like, did I mess this up? And is this going to, you know, be extremely consequential? But I think it’s also those moments that have really allowed me to see how these partnerships are reciprocal and balanced. 

The transparency, the kind and sort of care based approach that’s utilized by myself, the ambassadors by these two and everyone else, really supports in just establishing that feeling of reciprocity. So, yeah, I hope that sort of responds to, to your question. 

Kshamta Hunter: It definitely does. And I really resonate with this idea of care, and you call them errors or mistakes, but they are the ones that form those, you know, crevices and, and where the light kind of shines through. What is the saying that I’m kind of trying to think about the crack that the light shines through.

Zaida Schneider: The Leonard Cohen song, you know, there’s a crack. A crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light gets in. 

Kshamta Hunter: Exactly. So I think those adaptive changes are really necessary in these kinds of relationships, and they make the relationships more unique and deep as well. And you brought up this idea of hope, and that connects really well to Be the Change Earth Alliance’s project. And it’s all very much based on hope and hopeful conversations and scenarios, especially for youth, and especially in K-12 settings with the students. 

Maybe I’ll, I’ll hand it over to you, Caroline, to maybe describe a little bit about the project and then maybe kind of dive a little bit into the relationship that we have formed in the last two years. 

Caroline Beninger: Yeah. Thank you, Kshamta. So the project that we do with Sustainability Hub, and with Aku, and previously with the Climate Hub is the Youth Climate Ambassadors project. And the real goal of it is to encourage hope, help youth develop their climate stories, and feel like they have a voice in the face of such a daunting crisis. 

And the reason that this partnership with Climate Hub to Sustainability Hub is so important to Be the Change is that it allows us to bring this messaging and all of these programs to youth from youth. What we always talk about is that this is by youth for youth, it’s peer to peer. We want to be able to connect with students in schools through people who connect with them, through people who are similar in age and who they can see themselves in more. And I do want to rewind a little bit and talk about the relationship that we have and the relationship that we built, because we’ve been through many transitions over the years. Kshamta said that this relationship predates her time with Sustainability Hub. 

It predates my time with Be the Change Earth Alliance. I think we’re five, six plus years along now, and originally the relationship started because someone worked with UBC Climate Hub and then came to be the executive director at Be the Change Earth Alliance. They fostered this relationship, they developed this program and we have been through so many changes. 

The Climate Hub no longer exists. We have really struggling to get volunteers and consistency for delivering the program. And luckily, Climate Hub connected us to the Sustainability Hub and helped us reinvent what this program could look like and what this collaboration would look like, because we knew the work was so valuable and we were coming across all of these roadblocks. We had a lot of changing staff on our team, a lot of changing and staff on the climate hub, then to Sustainability Hub. 

And I’m really so happy to see that this project and this meaningful work has endured it all. And I think it relates to, you know what Zaida and Mutuma were saying about change, and care, and fostering those relationships. I can also say that Aku and I were both together through the transition from Climate Hub to Sustainability Hub, and we had to really work on communication and our relationship through that to make sure we both knew what was happening. 

There were many times where we had crossed wires, where, you know, someone gave Aku direction and then left our organization and we didn’t know what she was doing. Or she was transitioning into the Sustainability Hub and the wonderful Sustainability Ambassadors program, and we didn’t understand what that is. We relied so heavily on keeping up with discussion and communicating and telling each other when we were not understanding what was happening. 

And even though those changes were really difficult to surmount, to pass, I think it’s just given us such a deeper relationship and it adds had so much more meaning to the work, which we’re really, really grateful for. 

Kshamta Hunter: Yeah, I know I totally, completely agree with that. And I think, you kind of brought up this idea and maybe I’m picking it up from your from your words here is that a lot of these community organizations, there is not much capacity, and there is a lot of transition that happens. So how do we make sure that there is some historical perspective on these projects? 

And how does that continue and how does that move forward. So, maybe, Aku, I’ll pass it to you because I think you kind of really struggled with that a little bit at the beginning. And I was like, how did you do this in that first year when I wasn’t there? So I would love for you to maybe share a little bit about your struggles and that transition phase, because that happens a lot and especially in small organizations. 

Akuzike Limbanga: Yeah. So I’ve now graduated and at the time I was starting my role, I was starting it in the middle of second year. And so at the time, it was like my first, serious job, like, outside of serving. And it was something I was I’ve been very passionate about. 

And the university is very passionate about, and I’d heard about I heard about the Climate Hub so many times and everyone I talked to at the Climate Hub was like very dedicated and really wanted to do the work. But we just had so many problems, like funding problems. The year that I started was actually like the last year of the Climate Hub. 

So it was very, very sad. And a lot of like transition. And so looking back at all of that, I would say that a lot of the issues that I was struggling with, I thought that, as Mutuma said to, were personal and in some ways, I think that made me a little bit embarrassed. And every time Caroline would reach out to me, I would just be like, oh, I don’t really have much to say to you. 

And even like with like my mentors at the time, we didn’t really have much that we would talk about and they would be like in the background trying to do as much work as they could. And I would be a little bit on my own and a little bit scared about the work that I was doing. 

But actually, with time, I became much more comfortable. And a lot of that had to do with both Caroline and the person who was in my role before me who tried their best to continue to work on YCAP. They tried their best to, even though they weren’t getting paid, and they had entered a whole new role and they had a lot of responsibilities on their own, and they really wanted to see the vision that they had started at the very beginning of climate I would wake up, through. And it’s that form of resilience that we’ve seen, like in all of these organizations, that people want to see their dreams come to fruition, even if they can’t be there for it. And so I think that was very inspiring for me and a lot of people that I worked with. 

Same thing with the fact that we relied on volunteers, but a lot of those volunteers were there because of the relationships that existed before that. And when I stepped into that role, I couldn’t be the person that they knew before. And so we definitely lost a lot of volunteers. But at the same time, we made new relationships along the way and met new volunteers. 

And I do hope in my heart that those volunteers stay on for the next time. But it is not something that happens often. And so what all the scrambling is trying to say is that resilience has really been what made YCAP be what it is. It is just the dreams of many people that have come and gone that continue to give it strength and that has really been what has provided hope. 

And what has allowed us to reach out to so many students in the past couple of years. I think in the last year we were able to reach out to at least 300 children in schools across Metro Vancouver. And that wouldn’t really have been possible if so many people came in and left and tried to do the little that they could in that time. 

Zaida Schneider: Yeah, I just wanted to go back to a word you use that I think is really important, Aku, and that is resilience. And I think we all have to acknowledge that we have a major structural problem in creating resilience in our social enterprises and in civil society. We have a rotten ecosystem where all of us kind of have to compete with one another in a sense, to be successful. 

There is an opposite form that we seem to have abandoned in the past, which I call comradeship. That we develop these connections amongst ourselves, and that’s where the resilience comes in. We have to reinvent that. We need to reinvent human resilience and social resilience so we have sustainability. I mean, that’s what real sustainability is because I know as a small NGO, I’m competing with all the other conservation NGOs for funding. 

They become my enemy. How does that make sense? I mean, it’s sick that we compete amongst each other. Oh, I’ve got a great idea, but I’m not going to share with anybody. And it happens, especially in the academic environment where the reward structure is so piss poor. It’s just terrible. It’s sick. So if we are going to create research partnerships, we really have to figure out a new kind of system for doing it. 

We started to work with this organization in the United States called, the Climate Democracy Initiative. And those are three really interesting words, especially the democracy part of it. You know, which we know is under threat everywhere in the world. Who’s going to create that for us? Governments are not going to do it, you know. So this is really the hard work that I think that’s ahead in creating these partnerships. 

And again, I don’t know how to do it. I mean, I’d love to hear your ideas about how we can do that, but it’s something that we know we have to invest in. 

Kshamta Hunter: Yeah. And I think grants like CUES are making those spaces where we can form those partnerships and work collectively on community action. So I completely resonate with you. But I would also say that what I heard in this conversation here, is that a lot of this work is driven by passion, by personal passion, by collective passion. 

And there’s a lot of hope that’s driving it as well. Maybe it’s defiant hope. But it is there and it’s very encouraging. And before I pass it to Caroline to continue this conversation, I would also say this importance of reaching out, I think ,Aku, you brought this up, that it’s really important to reach out, even, like small actions of a quick email or, 

Hey, Aku, how are you doing? You know, like a quick check in at the beginning of the meetings really makes a huge difference. Especially when you’re thinking about building those caring reciprocal relationships as well. So, yeah, with that, I’ll pass it to Caroline to continue. 

Caroline Beninger: Thank you. That’s a great pass off. So one of the things that we really wanted to focus on and bring out in this discussion was practical lessons on how we build these reciprocal relationships and how we keep going past all of those difficulties, and the changes that we’ve both expressed happened in our partnerships. And, you know, we’ve already mentioned these ideas of care and reaching out and just trying to communicate. 

And we have had quite a few perspectives from us as the representatives of nonprofits, but I’d love to pass it to Mutuma, potentially, to start off this conversation and speak to what it has meant to you or how you have built these reciprocal relationships and nurtured it across all of these difficult roadblocks. 

Mutuma Caelan: Yeah. For sure. I think it’s definitely one of those more tricky things to achieve just because, yes, I’m Mutuma and I’m representing a whole cohort of ambassadors, 12 people that have 12 opinions and perspectives and all these different lived experiences that then inform how they would like to see the relationship shaped and work. 

Then, of course, there’s the site from the Sustainability Hub and False Creek Friends, as well. And so I think, of course, feedback and ongoing communication and all these almost conventional ways of achieving that mutuality and reciprocal nature of those relationships have been useful. But I think something that I’ve been really intentional with this past year has been advocating for student involvement in research and engagement in these fields as an intellectual and institutional asset, as opposed to just this extra-curricular burden that the university and these academic institutions are responsible for funding and making space for. 

I think by recognizing the importance in the value of young people’s perspectives and being very grateful to Zaida amd Kshamta for recognizing and being receiving of that, it sort of almost made it a nonhierarchical relationship where because they understand that we are important and we have important perspectives, they then sort of legitimize our role and our positions in those institutions and in that work. 

And so I think that’s been a very key part in sort of maintaining and establishing that reciprocity within our relationships. I think also recognizing that, like Zaida mentioned, we’re not competing with each other. We have the same goal of addressing the climate crisis, addressing social crises. And so by recognizing that there’s no point in sort of sticking to these super rigid systems or guidelines that could then impede on the work that we’re doing, has been super helpful, I think, in my experience with working with both the Sustainability Hub, but also with False Creek Friends. Yeah.

Caroline Beninger: Thank you, Mutuma. With that, then I think I have to pass it to Zaida to share your thoughts on what Mutuma has shared. And if you could specifically speak towards this idea of the nonhierarchical relationship. I think that’s a really cool idea. And also how you support the youth voice, if you will, and make sure that Mutuma and the other sustainability ambassadors felt like their voices were respected and heard and really uplifted in the work. 

Zaida Schneider: Yeah. Thank you. Well, Mutuma has just been such a fantastic partner, and, I’ll use a word, I’m really fond of him. I mean, there actually is this kind of grandfatherly love that is developed when you get to know somebody really, really well. And, you know, it’s so hard because we feel that there’s this entropy that’s kind of always dragging us down. 

You know, we don’t have the resourc, we’re not smart enough. But one thing that I’ve discovered, and especially through watching, Mutuma work, is that if we just make the resolution that we’re not going to give up, you know, we’re just not going to give up. I mean, it’s really, really a simple kind of self-affirmation. 

We just keep going. We just keep going. We just keep going. And I think I’d like to tell a story, if that’s okay about my first introduction with the CUES Grant. I just love the idea of applying for a grant. And so I thought, I’m going to break down this idea of having competition amongst all the other people who are applying for the same grant and get five conservation NGOs to apply for the CUES grant, and they’re all interlocked. 

Each one of them would be a component of it. And I remember talking to Shayla, where is Shayla Walker, there she is, hi, Shayla, she was she’s the manager of the CUES Fund. And I told her about this great idea. We’re all going to get together and we’re going to do it together. It’s going to be fabulous. And that we didn’t get the grant, we didn’t get the grant. 

And I was the really crushed. I was really disappointed. And I wrote her an email. So I thought I would be a very big boy about not getting the grant. So I wrote hello, Shayla. Of course, we were disappointed that we did not get the grant, but I wanted to also say how rich our experience has been with a range of UBC students and scholars 

as a consequence of our application for CUES support. We clearly have benefited and now are intertwined in a network of wonderful allies all pulling in the same direction. Now, I didn’t believe any of that when I wrote that letter. 

But it’s turned out to be so true. It’s just amazing how just manifesting it, fake it til you make it, you know? And you just keep going. We all have to commit to that here, you know? We just keep going. So I’d like to ask everybody here what their strategy for keep going is. 

You know in the conditions that we all face right now, anybody. 

Kshamta Hunter: Can I just add one thing though. So you wrote that similar email to me because I was one of the UBC partners who did not get the grant. And, and so Zaida writes an email very similar to this, saying that, unfortunately we did not get the grant. But, you know, we will continue this relationship. 

And I believed every word you said, and that’s what kept me going. I’m sure you believe every word now, and that’s what started this relationship. Even though we did not get the grant, we wanted to keep the work going and we did. And and now we successfully actually did receive the grant. 

So it did work out at the end. 

Caroline Beninger: Yeah. I mean, to echo kind of the trials that Zaida spoke to and also the question about how you keep going, I do want to go back to the fact that the Climate Hub that we started our relationship with no longer exists. You know, it’s an example of how the funding sometimes stops. Things don’t work out, and how important it is, but how hard it is to keep going. 

And luckily, Aku and I were both able to transition over, and Kshamta has made that move to the Sustainability Hub so wonderful. But there are so many times when, like you’ve said, multiple times, Zaida, that you have to just keep going and you have to try to build those relationships and convince yourself that you believe in the relationships you’ve created, even if you aren’t sure how they’ll keep going. 

There is that element of passion and hope that we’ve talked about and I don’t think that it’s fair always in the nonprofit space that we are expected to have passion and the place of wage or financial freedom and things like that for our organizations to keep going. But obviously there is a place for it. 

And that’s the reason that we still exist and that these partnerships still exist. And I would love to maybe pass it back to Aku again to hear about how we nourish those reciprocal relationships and are able to go through those changes because, as we’ve already said, Aku had a really difficult time facing those transitions. 

Akuzike Limbanga: Yeah. So, I think just like coming back to the volunteers. So, for YCAP, we want to go to schools, across Metro Vancouver and deliver workshops on climate anxiety, climate change, and just speaking about what young people can do to get involved and how they should not actually believe, like the doom narrative that to me have been fed for a very long time. 

And to do that, we rely on a lot of volunteers and none of those volunteers are paid. It is actually a very new thing that we now offer honourariums to the volunteers. And so, as Caroline said, while there’s a lot of passion, it is just very unfair to expect, like, sometimes there are workshops in Surrey or Coquitlam, and expect a UBC student to find themselves Surrey during the middle of the working week to perform these workshops. 

And so we did struggle with volunteers for a very long time. And really, I think one of the things that did in some ways make that process a little smoother was just trying to actually cultivate friendships. And so, as I said, a lot of the volunteers that I was starting with were brought in by the previous person. 

And so when I was starting, they didn’t know me and they didn’t really have that relationship with me. And in some ways they didn’t feel as obligated to do the work. And that was very fair. I did not earn that respect. I did not earn that trust. And I had to start from scratch. And then, likewise, in the past two years, we’ve gotten some really good volunteers and those volunteers have actually become friends. 

And I think that’s one of the more important things, trying to cultivate friendship out of the work that we’re doing. And same thing with, Caroline. Caroline and I have actually just become friends because of how many workshops we had to do alone. And so, yeah, I think one of the practical lessons I’ve learned is to not treat this as work, even though it is work, to try and think of it as something a little bit more than that, a little bit bigger than myself, and in some ways to try and show that to the people that I’m working with and trying to have like a relationship with that. I’m not trying to think of you as like a coworker, but, I’m trying to build something with you because I really do care about what I’m doing. 

Caroline Beninger: Thank you for speaking to that, Aku. And we’ve talked a lot so far in this session about building and maintaining these relationships, and we’re coming quite close to the end. So I want to pass it to Zaida to prompt us along the discussion a bit more about how we sustain the relationships specifically related to funding. That’s something that’s come up multiple times through this conversation, but I think we can get into it a bit more. 

Zaida Schneider: We’ll all start off with another story that is really, really fresh. So, if you have a really compelling idea and you’ve shared it successfully, and you’ve started to build a network of people who really like the idea and it’s reciprocal because it ties into what they want to do, then we’re actually building a new kind of reward structure, and that sends out a kind of field of energy. 

So just last week, one of our advisors to False Creek Friends told us that he had just got an NSERC grant to study the ecosystem of False Creek. This is a really big grant. And it came about because this wave of slow incremental progress starts to condition how the grant providers see the world. 

You know, it’s kind of like a back end. It’s like we’re getting to where the grant people, the philanthropists, where we start to resonate with them as well because they see this slow momentum. You know, it’s like, I grew up in Colorado in a mining town. So there were trains coming in and out of town all the time, loaded up with ore. When a train is stopped and it’s loaded up, it has tremendous inertia. 

I mean, it’s almost unbelievable what it takes to get the train going. And if you’ve ever been at a train platform where they start applying that pressure, you hear this chunk and the chunk is where all the couplings go tight, how the cars kind of handhold to one another. And then the force is starting to be applied, and that train just begins to crawl out. 

So the partnerships are a way of manifesting this energy. It’s not just us any longer. Right? So it really, really helps. In everything you do, the more of these relationships, that is like these couplings coming tight. It makes the noise and it’s heard and, well, this is my theory of change. I think I’m I’ve talked way too long. 

I’m supposed to pass it to somebody else. Timekeeper. How are we doing? We’re okay. Anybody have any suggestions or conclusions that they can talk about, Mutuma? 

Mutuma Caelan: Yeah. For sure. I think, like you’ve both mentioned, we’ve unpacked a lot of different content from cultivating hope, and sort of understanding our own approaches towards building those reciprocal relationships rather, and so I think just to wrap up the session today and to conclude everything that we’ve discussed, I’d really like to hear, from everyone in the circle, from everyone in the group. 

If you have any advice or pieces that you would want anyone that’s watching this and hearing some of this content, in terms of your own approaches and how they can sort of set up these reciprocal relationships with community partners. Should we start with Aku, if that’s okay? 

Akuzike Limbanga: Yeah, I can start. Like I said, I started this during second year, and now I’ve graduated, and so I’m no longer in this role. So I have been thinking about this for quite a bit of time. I think I’ve got like two pieces of advice. The first one would be to have fun because you’re just not going to be doing whatever you’re doing for the rest of your life. 

It’s not a life sentence. So definitely keep that in mind. Have fun, build relationships. Take time to appreciate the spaces you’re in, the rooms you’re entering, the people you’re meeting. And then the second piece of advice I have is that, looking back at it, there was so many conversations that I had, so many different topics or points of collaboration that I wanted to do with very different people. 

But it just never happened because I always felt like I had so much work to do. I had so much to focus on. Just being a full time student and having this job that also felt like a full time job and going back and forth. I’m during the workshops and dealing with 12 ambassadors. 

It really felt like there was never any time to do anything. But really if you do by the grace of the universe find time, I think that you should be very willing to collaborate and reach out to those people you said you’d want to do something with. It’ll make a difference when you’re looking back at it. 

Caroline Beninger: I really agree with that. Time scarcity is so common. I know in academia and also in nonprofit spaces, it’s easy to put off these discussions that we want to have to put off reaching out to people, building these relationships, because obviously you do have to invest time. And as we’ve said, that doesn’t always pay out straight away. 

For example, if we’re talking about funding, we have the CUES grant now. We’ve been lucky to have it for a couple of years, but there were many years before that where we ran YCAP without CUES or without all of the funding that we wanted. So things don’t always pay off straight away, but they do in the end. 

I really recommend people keep going to try and build these relationships and these partnerships. And all of you in the audience, I don’t know where you’re coming to this conversation from. If you’re looking to create these partnerships or find collaboration with community. But I really encourage you, if you are, to just reach out to different organizations or to people that you’re interested in, even though we have this time scarcity, I know that my organization, Be the Change, we never shut down these discussions. We love to create new partnerships and collaborations. That’s where the energy comes from. That’s how we keep things moving. And we create programs that are more meaningful. We connect to our community better. You know, there’s no downside to these partnerships in the end, even if it does take that effort. So I really, really encourage you all to think about how you can connect with community more and to take the step to reach out. 

Kshamta Hunter: I think I’ve realized in my work that the traditional and colonial notions of working in academia are always in conflict with community engagement values, so you’re always fighting sort of an uphill battle. Two tools that I have that work for me is sort of this notion that I’ve mentioned before of this defiant hope. It’s kind of being persistent and almost stubborn about things. 

And I always tell my kids, like, don’t be stubborn. But I’m like, maybe I should learn from you. So, you know, we need that. We need that in this space. We need those characteristics in this space to keep going. And the other thing is relationships. Really building those relationships and working on those relationships rather than the end goal. 

I mean, end goal is always important, too, but I think relationships take it further and are sustainable because they are what will center all this good, good work. 

Zaida Schneider: Thank you. I have to give a pitch right now. This is sort of a commercial, so please visit our website. FalseCreekFriends.org, visit BeTheChange.org. Sign up for the newsletter, do you have a newsletter you can sign up for? Yeah. So this is how we create these connections. 

As you go in and do something more powerful than just taking out your recycling. And I just also wanted to thank, first of all, this is just a brilliant gathering. I’m not just talking about this room, but this idea that we can actually think about what is the connective tissue between civil society and academia. 

What is it that we want to learn? So I just want to thank everybody who’s been involved in this brilliant organization. And thank you guys. You’ve been really attentive. I’ve been looking at you. We’ve all been looking at you. You’ve all been right on the ball. So I think we should give all of ourselves a big round of applause. 

Mutuma Caelan: Yeah. Thank you so much for that, Zaida. And thank you all for your responses as well. We are coming up to time for our session today. So just to echo words Zaida had mentioned. Thank you again for listening, for being attentive. We hope that our own stories and experiences will shed some light into your own respective journeys with community engagement. 

And like Aku mentioned at the beginning, we do have the Whova app where you’re able to put in some of those questions and we’ll hopefully be able to get back to you with those. But yes, have a great rest of your day. And thank you so much again for coming in and connecting.