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Joel Harnest
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, ENGAGEMENT AND SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
Pronouns: he/him
Email: jharnest@sfu.ca
Joel joined the team in August 2024, leading the Social Enterprise team and supporting clients in strategic visioning, process design, implementation and facilitation of public engagements.
By trade and by passion, Joel is a trusted facilitator and convenor of dialogue and community engagement. With equal comfort and care, he is adept at facilitating a room of 200 community members and stakeholders, as he is doing a deep-dive debrief with a key informant interview.
Prior to joining the Centre, Joel worked in the not-for-profit sector including the BC Hepatitis Network Society and QMUNITY – BC’s queer, trans and Two-Spirit resource centre society. He has worked on public engagement files with the City of Vancouver, BC Centre for Disease Control, Yukon Territorial Government and Burnaby Intercultural Planning Table, among others.
Joel has been living on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations since 2013, and grew up on Haudenosaunee and Tyendinaga of the Mohawk Nation lands, more commonly referred to as Ontario. He is a white, queer settler with British and German ancestry, the youngest of 4 brothers, proud uncle and friend, and favoured son ;)
Get in touch to learn more about Joel’s experience, and to discuss your upcoming engagement initiatives!
What is your role at the Centre for Dialogue?
I am both honoured and humbled to lead the Centre’s Social Enterprise team, which focuses on consulting services. In this role, I collaborate closely with a team of seasoned dialogue practitioners. Together, we design effective processes and brainstorm innovative strategies to help our clients achieve their strategic objectives for engagement initiatives.
What does dialogue mean to you?
To me, dialogue represents a vibrant and evolving space where communities—regardless of how they define themselves—come together to share experiences. This space serves as a rich foundation for community building and mobilization, as well as for healing, storytelling, sense-making, truthtelling, conflict transformation, grieving and planning for the future.
Tantamount to curating and holding this space is actively interrogating and redistributing power and privilege within any given room, and carefully designing spaces to invite in diverse and often marginalized perspectives, to create stronger and more resilient outcomes and solutions.
What is a common assumption you'd like to demystify?
One prevalent misconception I actively work against while designing and implementing dialogue engagements is the myth of competitive binary thinking: that there are people (or ideas) that are right, and people (or ideas) that are wrong. I often think about and reread a bell hooks quote: “whenever we love justice and stand on the side of justice, we refuse simplistic binaries. We refuse to allow either/or thinking to cloud our judgment. We embrace the logic of both/and. We acknowledge the limits of what we know.” (Teaching Community)