Impact Report: 2020/21

Message by Executive Director

March 16, 2020 is forever etched in my mind. It was the day that SFU began our pandemic lockdown. It was also the day that the staff and faculty of the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue demonstrated their capacity to step up and step in to serve our communities and support each other.

To support young people navigate their health, social, and employment needs we created wegotchu.ca. Wegotchu is a one-stop resource centre and FAQ digital platform. In a time of uncertainty, this platform aimed to ease anxieties of local youth with specific regional answers to questions about the pandemic and local support including mental health resources.

To support young people in employment needs Pivot 2020 was created as a national youth employment program. Pivot employed 1200 young people across Canada to research urban issues and gave youth meaningful work with the aim to interact with their local communities in a safe way.

To support transit and movement of city residents in Metro Vancouver Moving in a Livable Region worked with Translink and Vancouver Coastal Health to launch a website that helps residents safely navigate options for moving around during the pandemic.

To support curiosity and ease social isolation we launched Distant, Not Disengaged, a weekly, experimental online community in partnership with SFU Public Square and CityHive. This community seeked to use the learnings of disruptions to normalcy to be a catalyst for improving equity and empathy moving forward.

To support SFU’s dialogue and COVID-19 response, recovery, and resilience COVNET was launched as a COVID-19 Resilience Network which brought together people to collaborate on solutions to the current moment.

To support protection from pandemic increased malicious cyber activity Paul Meyer continued to propose accountability in relation to the norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace to protect the health care sector and vulnerable individuals.

To increase the impact of the Semester in Dialogue program the Semester In program expanded in the university, facilitating SFU departments and faculties to incorporate a semester-long, cohort-based learning into their curriculum. 

The Semester In program ran Semester in Podcasting with a group of a group of students learning weekly from prominent Canadian journalists. 

To support students in further development and recognition of dialogue skills the Centre has three student awards established through staff donations: The Sylvester Family Award at the Centre for Dialogue, The Den Haan Family Semester in Dialogue Student Award, and the Staff Award for Future Dialogue Practitioners.

To foster greater conections among students and ignite new relationships we launched CAMP, a three-day event for first and second-year students that inspired creativity, dialogue and mutual support.

To foster alumni engagement we recruited and created an alumni advisory group that worked with the Centre to co-design and deliver CAMP and to support online programming through the pandemic.

To expand students' complex thinking skills Diane Finegood taught the course Complex is not the same as complicated to raise awareness in the value of shifting from complicated to complex thinking. 

To expand students' dialogue and engagement skills Paul Meyer taught Inside Diplomacy: A Practitioner's Perspective as part of the SFU School of International Studies program. Students gained skills in negotiation and attentive listening in enabling diverse actors to reach agreements.

To support SFU faculties the Centre partnered with various SFU departments to collaborate and deliver dialogues on a topic of their choosing. This included a partnership with the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies on a dialogue titled “Passing the Torch” with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr. Shirin Ebadi.

To meaningfully advance public safety and build relationships, the Social Enterprise Team worked with Dr. Bonnie Henry and the Office of the Premier to convene faith and spiritual leaders to address the challenges posed by the provincial health orders and inform solutions based on the specific needs of their communities.

To integrate public voices into climate decision making the Social Enterprise Team supported Environment and Climate Change Canada and the federal government’s Net-Zero Advisory Group to inform plans for a multi-million dollar engagement budget.

To support social resiliency and connectivity the Social Enterprise Team facilitated 23 representatives from community services, health, arts, education, faith, businesses and other sectors to support City of North Vancouver’s response during and beyond COVID-19. 

To enhance resiliency through the pandemic recovery Clean Energy Canada launched a Resilient Recovery campaign, which brought together a chorus of voices from across the clean energy sector to call on governments to support a clean and resilient recovery.  

To support businesses in recovering from COVID-19 the Social Enterprise team facilitated 10 virtual meetings for the Burnaby Economic Recovery Task Force with 15 senior representatives from local government, major employers, small businesses, non-profits, labour unions and post-secondary institutions to develop a coping strategy. 

To support systemic change and build capacity in governments and practitioners, the Centre launched the Beyond Inclusion: Equity in Public Engagement guide to over 3100 participants. The guide was the culmination of almost two year of focus groups, community dialogues, literature reviews and peer reviews..

To explore trauma-informed engagement practices the 2021 Bruce and Lis Welch Community Dialogue engaged researchers, government decision-makers, the public and our staff on how to develop trauma-informed practices with Dr. Karine Duhamel, Director of Research for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

To further internal learning about how the Centre will approach work with an anti-racism lens the Centre held all-staff dialogues on anti-racism to challenge ourselves to rethink policies, culture and processes in a multi-faceted way. This is a long-term internal process to deepen individual and collective thinking about systemic racism.

To inform urban planning processes with an EDI and Decolonization lens Fellow Ginger Gosnell-Myers fielded regular media requests and was featured on: CBC Early Edition, On the Coast, Daybreak North, The Guardian, The Economist and The Tyee. 

To further decolonization work at post secondary institutions Robert Daum and Lindsay Heller collaborated on the development of BCIT's first-ever, comprehensive diversity and inclusion surveys for students, faculty and staff, including quantitative and qualitative dimensions.

To co-create community-based knowledge with youth the Pivot Data Hub was developed by over 1100 youth providing employment to each of them virtually during the pandemic. 

To strengthen youth education on civic engagement CityHive continued programming that will inform and improve the next session of CityShapers. 146 participants took part in cohort programs and 2,600 participants attended workshops and events.

To expand democratic teachings to an online community across Canada the Strengthening Canadian Democracy Initiative collaborated and presented in a number of prominent programs such as the Massey Dialogues, Ryerson Leadership Lab and DemocracyXchange. 

To unlock future democratic engagement processes we evaluated the Neighbourhood Small Grants program’s relationship to democracy. The report shares knowledge about how participation in community activities aligns with participation in democratic processes and attributes that can lead to more engagement. 

To alleviate social isolation and build capacity for neighbourly support and mutual aid Hey Neighbour Collective (HNC) brought together housing providers, non-profits, researchers, local and regional governments, housing associations, and health authorities to experiment and learn together. 

To push forward progress on climate solutions Renewable Cities established a regional Low Carbon Cities (LC3) Innovation Centre with City of Vancouver, Metro Vancouver, and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities with a $21.7 million endowment from the Government of Canada.

To advance urban climate policy solutions the Union of BC Municipalities' Special Committee on Climate Action added sustainable land use planning as a signature BC initiative, based on recommendations from Renewable Cities.

To accelerate regional climate innovations Renewable Cities acted as an engagement lead and senior strategist on Carbon Neutral Metro Vancouver to explore policy options in land use, transportation, buildings, waste, industry, agriculture, ecosystems, aviation, rail and marine. 

To accelerate the transition to clean energy Clean Energy Canada conducted original research, published reports, convened stakeholders, and engaged in other efforts to advance policies that reduce carbon pollution and grow Canada’s clean economy. 

To develop strategic climate responses, the ACT team’s Integrated Climate Action for BC Communities Initiative rapidly advanced the co-creation and uptake of integrated adaptation and mitigation. 

To share the capacity for writing and storytelling Mark Winston was appointed as the SFU Library’s inaugural Non-Fiction Writer in Residence. 

To share the story of the Centre’s origin and development the Centre interviewed Dr. Jack Blaney, whose vision transformed SFU from "the university on the hill" to the accessible multi campus community embedded institution of learning it is today. 

To strengthen an online presence the Centre launched a new website to champion the many activities of the Centre and better tell the story of how dialogue has a positive impact on creating change.