When I read this question, initially, my mind went specifically to the social impact efforts that we’re trying to mobilize. So I began my role with the Calgary Foundation in 2017. And since then, the mandate hasn’t really changed much. The way I explain it is, I was tasked to facilitate a change process, and try to find ways to mobilize the work of reconciliation and now racial equity from a systems change perspective. So definitely, more around the social impact equity lens is what I would call it. But I’m not sure that people should be, and so I’m very critical of current systems and infrastructures. Like all systems, I’m of the belief that gone are the days when we should expect Indigenous people to adapt or to assimilate into the dominant culture and the same for racialized individuals who have been negatively impacted by history. I’m now challenging our systems to think of ways that they need to shift and change that creates a newer infrastructure, newer organizational culture, that allows those communities, that society would call vulnerable or oppressed, the chance to thrive and the chance to grow and experience a sense of belonging within our systems. So there’s a need for systems change, there’s a need for all systems to sort of try to embrace an understanding around decolonization. When I think about sustainability, I don’t think that those things should be separated, I think we’re so conditioned as a society to draw upon these silos. So when I talk about pursuing a sustainable future, I’m also leaning on the wisdom and the knowledge of Indigenous people and their experiences, their connection to land, their understanding of biodiversity conservation and sustainability in and of itself. So when people are talking about social impact when it comes to equity, and then they’re talking about, you know, the conversations around sustainability, I think those things should go hand in hand. So although we don’t have like a specific focus on sustainability, the mere fact that we are talking about systems change and shifting our practices in a way that sort of allows, and has everyone feeling a sense of belonging, regardless of their social location, or their backgrounds. To me, you know, is one in the same conversation. I’m not interested in approaching any of this work in a silo. I think we’ve historically done that. And it hasn’t really made any progressive changes that we need to happen.

I come from the children and youth serving sector, and it’s where the majority of my past experience would lie. I’ve always had a desire to lean on my life experiences, though. So whether it was being in a frontline position where I’m supporting a young person who’s at risk of dropping out of school, or at risk of harming themselves or getting into bad things, or if it’s a leadership position, or structuring and designing programs that support staff in those in those programs, I always lean on my own lived experience being raised on a reserve, being raised with impacts of intergenerational trauma, and for a small moment of my life being a part of the system. So I’m a child of the system for a very short period of my adolescence. But all of that has really helped to sort of ground me in the work that I was doing to support young people and their struggles and their challenges. I feel like there was something there was a strength in that, that somewhere along the line, people would notice this need for a level of lived experience when it came to the conversation around reconciliation specifically from an Indigenous perspective. And so I never claimed to know the answer on how to move forward with reconciliation; I never say this is what you need to do. But I am learning a lot. And I do know that as a society, we are missing so much context and sense-making behind how historical events really shaped the current infrastructure of how we operate as individuals and as organizations. I know that there’s this big gap of knowledge that’s missing. So what I began to do, as I transitioned from my past experiences into the current work that I’m doing right now, because I did a lot of intentional design work of sense-making behind that history, and how it impacts the current state that we are sort of grappling with. So that’s where I come from, sort of that lived experience. And now my focus, my main focus, is, like I said, trying to facilitate change for a settler created organization that was built off of power and privilege, and trying to find ways to guide understanding and then ultimately, some changes for reconciliation and racial equity from a system perspective. I’m literally trying to shift culture of an organization is how I would explain it.

I was working for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary. And for the last three years that I was with them, I was seconded by the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada. So, what we were doing in Calgary was we were redesigning our programs in a more culturally relevant way that supported young people and staff on this notion of wellbeing for the young people that we were meant to serve in their families. And so I leaned on where I come from and the Blackfoot Confederacy Teachings and my elders there. And that’s sort of how we structured the Iiyika’kimaat Program at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary. All of a sudden the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, so this larger umbrella, heard about the good work that we were doing, reached out, and asked if I would be interested in a secondment. So then the last three years of my time at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary, I was seconded to support the larger Canadian movement, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada movement, take a deeper dive into understanding about reconciliation. So this is a this is at a time where the Truth and Reconciliation 94 calls to action where all of that work was going on and the Truth and Reconciliation Report was just about to be released. So I agreed, I was passionate about that, because I’m also the child of two residential school survivors. I began to be sent off to these experiences that have these spaces that were being held by residential school survivors themselves, the TRC. And I just became the sponge, and I sat there and I listened and listened and listened. Then I would go back to my regular job at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary and simultaneously in my regular role in the Boys and Girls Club of Calgary, we were also being sent off to learn about brain development and brain architecture, because we wanted to build a strong case to our funders around supporting after school programs. There’s a time in the day that that’s referred to as critical hours. And these critical hours are typically the hours between 2pm and 6pm. And the reason why they called critical hours for young people is because it’s typically the time when parents are still at work. Young people have don’t have a lot to do unless they’re involved in extra-curricular activities. But there’s a portion of the young population who just doesn’t have access to that for a variety of reasons. So in those critical hours, it’s easy for them to experiment with negative things in their life. So it was important for us to really build a case behind what we were trying to do, which was engage them in our programming, engage them in these positive life experiences.

Imagine this, let me try to paint this picture for you. So here I am being sent off to take a deeper dive around the narrative of my own people, my own Indigenous ancestry when it comes to residential school systems. What that meant, the atrocities that occurred there, pretty much the life experiences of a young Indigenous person in between the ages of five and 15. So that’s what I’m learning in my seconded role, then it come back to the work and I’m being sent off, and I’m learning about brain development for any young person, and brain architecture. And then I pieced those two things together and I’m like ‘holy crap, why aren’t people talking about this more?’ and so that, that became my Impacts of Intergenerational Trauma, which is a tool I designed back in 2012, that I began to mobilize at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary with all of our staff that became this onboarding piece of learning that all of our staff had to go through. So we began to do that for the last 3 years that I was there and once we were facilitating this competency, all of a sudden the organizational culture at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary began to shift. Our non-Indigenous staff, non-Indigenous young people began to understand the need and the significance of providing culturally-relevant programming from an Indigenous perspective. Then I became really passionate about it, about it about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and that just sort of engaged myself in any opportunity that I could. Then in my last year, I became so focused on systems change for reconciliation, that my other work, my other part of my work at the Boys and Girls Clubs in Calgary was suffering because I became so focused in this other area. I recognized that with my boss at one point, and then all of a sudden lo and behold, here comes this job posting from the Calgary Foundation. It’s a senior level position with the main focus being on systems change for reconciliation. It was almost like, my, my whole path in that last 3 years had prepared me to try to step into that then. So I went for it and had a few conversations with the Calgary Foundation, ended up getting the role, and started that work in 2017. So that’s where the transition happened for me.

Even now, I’m not even sure if this is what I want to do for the long term. So I’m one of those people who went who’s gone my whole life, not having sort of a clearer picture of where I want to be. For me, it’s sort of been my life experiences that have led me to one opportunity after another. So I can’t say that I had this sort of clear epiphany, somewhere along my life to be like, I want to impact change for my people or reconciliation, but what I began to do was notice the injustices that were happening specifically for the Indigenous community, and then the injustices that were happening for racialized communities, that became my passion. The moment I became a father, back in 2011, all of a sudden my views shifted and that surfaced a couple of realizations. The first realization was that I was raising a human being to enter into this world. Then I reflected on my own life experiences, which weren’t very good. My life experience was rooted in discrimination and shame. It was rooted in racism, it was rooted in trauma. And that’s not the life that I wanted for this young life that I had helped to bring them to this world. That’s the first realization. The second realization was my social location. I’m an Indigenous person. This life that I had helped to bring him to this world was a daughter. So this is a person who’s going to be, if she chooses, an Indigenous woman one day. And that was a very terrifying thought for me, because, well, Indigenous women are not prioritized. There’s literally 1000s upon 1000s, who have been missing and have been murdered, and like, no one just really cares or is doing anything about them. So I became really aware of these injustices and I became passionate about trying in some small way to impact some sort of progressive change that helps move the needle towards a world where this young person didn’t have to experience the same level of all of those atrocities and adversities that I have had to overcome in my life. And that’s what has really led to my passion here.

Oh, tonnes. There are tons of misconceptions. My advice to young people wanting to get into the social impact world is advice that I have gained from lots of other people that I’ve worked with. Leaders like Chris Archie, and Jessica Bolduc, and Edgar Villanova, who talk about this notion of patience and grace on yourself. Because of the change that we’re trying to shift and the work that we’re trying to move forward, it’s not easy. It’s hard work, but it’s also heart work. And I’m finding and coming to learn that sometimes it really doesn’t matter what we do, what kind of progressive changes we make, or processes that we develop, we’re always going to face some level of criticism. So I’m really trying to be patient and kind with myself, I’m trying to get away from that criticism that emerges for the things and the efforts that I’m putting out into the world, and just to stand strong in these efforts. But I feel like for there’s a lot of literacy that comes with the work of sustainability, and with the work of anti-oppression and racism, that you have a lot of work to do to create some understanding. And it’s unfortunate that we have to be in this place. But I just try not to let those limiting beliefs get in my way of being strong in my joy, being strong in the love and the passion that I have for a better role for younger generations.

The beauty of being at a senior level leadership position is that it does require a lot of you. I find myself supporting the organization at many different tables; in the grant making table, in the donor relations table, so supporting a lot of this stuff. And so how I try to treat my work is from a broader perspective, what is the broader impact that I’m trying to make? My typical day or week or month would look like asking ‘What are the spaces that we are trying to facilitate for change?’ There are a few spaces that we’re trying to facilitate for change. We have a community practice group that we are facilitating. And it isn’t just me doing this alone, I have a really strong team of colleagues who help to support. So that’s the other beautiful thing about working at the Calgary Foundation is that the work that we’re trying to do isn’t just siloed to one person. Although that’s my specific mandate, I don’t feel alone in doing this. So we have a lot of spaces that we’re trying to facilitate, and we have recommendations out of this racial equity audit that we’re trying to move forward. I’m looking at it more from a broader level. The conference that I was involved in over the last 3 days, is going to help to add to my own knowledge mobilization of impacting transformative change for the philanthropic sector in the Calgary Foundation, it’s going to inform our processes moving forward, it’s going to inform how we work better with charities who identify as Indigenous led, or charities who want to do work with Indigenous communities. This conference has increased my own knowledge capacity, and although it was a 3 day conference, I’m looking at the broader picture of the work that we have to do. I try to maintain typical 8:30 to 4:30 work days, and sometimes it requires more time of me, which is okay because I also incorporate that balance of my own family. My involvement in my daughter’s life, I don’t know if it’s typical for a father and daughter to have this close relationship that we have, but we’re very close. It’s important for me to be an Indigenous father and be very active in her life. I feel like historically, through the processes of assimilation and colonization, that bond between family members has been disrupted to a certain degree, and I want to change that. So I definitely try to keep work in between Monday and Friday 8:30 to 4:30, while keeping my weekends and my family time focused on my daughter, and I’ll even tell my staff that as well. Make sure you guys unplug, don’t do any work. I know we have this stuff coming. And so we have learned a way of planning through our involvement at the Circle, we’re members of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. One of the lessons and the tools they’ve taught me, which is now a tool that I incorporate with my team is seasonal planning. So me and my team do seasonal planning. So we look at each season, fall, winter, spring and summer, and that’s as far as our looking glass will go. We know that we have other things to focus on throughout the whole year, but taking that approach really alleviates a lot of pressure off of myself and my team to be working towards deadlines and to be pressured by this notion of time. That’s a characteristic of white supremacy, time, and I try to just get us to focus on what do we have to focus on in this season. We’re learning a lot about harvesting, and all that kind of stuff. So that really helps to for us to maintain that work life balance.

The beauty of being at a senior level leadership position is that it does require a lot of you. I find myself supporting the organization at many different tables; in the grant making table, in the donor relations table, so supporting a lot of this stuff. And so how I try to treat my work is from a broader perspective, what is the broader impact that I’m trying to make? My typical day or week or month would look like asking ‘What are the spaces that we are trying to facilitate for change?’ There are a few spaces that we’re trying to facilitate for change. We have a community practice group that we are facilitating. And it isn’t just me doing this alone, I have a really strong team of colleagues who help to support. So that’s the other beautiful thing about working at the Calgary Foundation is that the work that we’re trying to do isn’t just siloed to one person. Although that’s my specific mandate, I don’t feel alone in doing this. So we have a lot of spaces that we’re trying to facilitate, and we have recommendations out of this racial equity audit that we’re trying to move forward. I’m looking at it more from a broader level. The conference that I was involved in over the last 3 days, is going to help to add to my own knowledge mobilization of impacting transformative change for the philanthropic sector in the Calgary Foundation, it’s going to inform our processes moving forward, it’s going to inform how we work better with charities who identify as Indigenous led, or charities who want to do work with Indigenous communities. This conference has increased my own knowledge capacity, and although it was a 3 day conference, I’m looking at the broader picture of the work that we have to do. I try to maintain typical 8:30 to 4:30 work days, and sometimes it requires more time of me, which is okay because I also incorporate that balance of my own family. My involvement in my daughter’s life, I don’t know if it’s typical for a father and daughter to have this close relationship that we have, but we’re very close. It’s important for me to be an Indigenous father and be very active in her life. I feel like historically, through the processes of assimilation and colonization, that bond between family members has been disrupted to a certain degree, and I want to change that. So I definitely try to keep work in between Monday and Friday 8:30 to 4:30, while keeping my weekends and my family time focused on my daughter, and I’ll even tell my staff that as well. Make sure you guys unplug, don’t do any work. I know we have this stuff coming. And so we have learned a way of planning through our involvement at the Circle, we’re members of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. One of the lessons and the tools they’ve taught me, which is now a tool that I incorporate with my team is seasonal planning. So me and my team do seasonal planning. So we look at each season, fall, winter, spring and summer, and that’s as far as our looking glass will go. We know that we have other things to focus on throughout the whole year, but taking that approach really alleviates a lot of pressure off of myself and my team to be working towards deadlines and to be pressured by this notion of time. That’s a characteristic of white supremacy, time, and I try to just get us to focus on what do we have to focus on in this season. We’re learning a lot about harvesting, and all that kind of stuff. So that really helps to for us to maintain that work life balance.

So I can resonate with a lot of the pain and the harm that has been caused. There was an announcement 2 days ago out of Williams Lake First Nation on 93 potential grave sites and children’s grave sites that they found at St. Joseph’s Residential School. So when those things happen they’ll sit with me and I have to pay extra attention to my own mental health in those times. I noticed that in this last year there were a lot of verdicts that were being decided upon in cases that mattered to my colleagues from the Black community. People who we work with or people functioning in everyday society might go to work, come home, watch the news, see that. Unfortunately, in the work of social impact sometimes when you’re a person with lived experience, it’s not that easy to shut it off at the end of the day, because you’re still impacted by that. So first of all, I pay really close attention to those external factors that are happening and I try to amplify those stories and connect it to the work that we’re doing, not with just my team, but with everyone at the organization. So when the disputes between the Mi’kmaq fishermen were happening in Nova Scotia, I amplified that story and I said, ‘Hey, guys, this seems like it’s happening over there, but it has a lot to do with the change that we’re seeking here because it’s about discrimination, it’s about no equal rights for people of these ancestral lands and territories. So we’re learning a lot about land acknowledgments and the importance of them. How can you amplify the story and what’s happening to the work that we’re doing here?’ So I try to, I try to call my colleagues in to a lot of that stuff. But the hardest part is facing those demons and facing those life experiences that are happening and unfolding right before our eyes in society that still have a direct impact on who we are as racialized individuals. Those are very heavy days. Also, because we’re a funder, the days where we’re identifying so much need in the community, but we don’t have as much capacity or resources to meet the need. So we have to have really difficult conversations sometimes and let people know, ‘sorry can you come back next round?’ so those are tough days as well. Just not being able to support the community as much.

I don’t know what’s next. I’m not really I’m not satisfied with the work that I was called to do in 2017. Although we’ve experienced some incremental change when it comes to reconciliation and racial equity, it’s not like I’m feeling like, ‘oh, yeah, we’ve reconciled, systemic racism is eliminated here,’ it’s not like that. I’m not satisfied with where we’re at right now. So what’s next for me is to continue this work of shifting, facilitating, and learning about what it means to change the system, and then increasing the knowledge capacity of those people that I work with closely and in the organization. Like, who am I to think that I’m the only one who can do this work? I’m taking a collective approach and from my own traditional Blackfoot teachings, that’s how we always functioned. There wasn’t one leader calling all the shots, you know, our people engaged the collective diversity of everyone. And so I’m not satisfied with the change that has happened, and that’s what’s going to be next to me for the foreseeable future anyway.

The first one is vulnerability. You have to be okay with being vulnerable, and being in spaces where other people are vulnerable. A lot of times people try to separate leadership from empathy. I think you can be an empathic leader, and for me, one of the key skills is understanding and being welcome to vulnerability. The second one is to be open to constant learning and growth. I never want to be in a position of my life where I feel like I have arrived just because I’m learning something all the time from professional colleagues, to the people that I work really closely with, to even my own family, and that has really helped me to grow. The difference is I’m not being extractive when it comes to that knowledge; I’m not going through these lessons that all these people are teaching with me and then having it just sit within my own increased understanding. To me that’s very extractive. What I’m trying to do is mobilize the things that I’m learning; I’m trying to share them in the places and the spaces that I’m invited to, and I’m trying to incorporate them in the change that we’re trying to create. And then I think finally, humility. Just being humble in the work that we’re doing. Find something that you’re passionate about and don’t feel pressured to curate your life experience or your educational path to what that passion is because if you’re passionate about something, it’ll emerge naturally. So vulnerability, learning and humility.

I wouldn’t necessarily dissuade anyone from pursuing further education, but I’m also really critical about the educational system in and of itself. It’s another system, I believe, has a lot of work to do to change. My advice would be for people who are wanting to get into the world of sustainability or social impact, to find an area of study that would most align or would parallel with this area that they’re passionate about and I think that could give them some knowledge. I think the education system might be becoming a little bit more open to the work of social impact. I can confidently say that everything I’m doing, the systems change ideologies that I have, and the experience, and the tools that I’m facilitating, that are supporting my systems change work in my role right now have not come from post secondary education. So every time I’m guest lecturing at the university, or in front of a group of students, I always tell them, ‘Don’t let formal schooling interfere with your education, because you’re going to learn so much after that.’ Just don’t be confined to schoolling as the one path that will lead and support the change that you seek. Everything that I’ve done has come from outside of formal schooling.

I value kindness. There’s a Blackfoot word that I have been taught growing up which is Kii maa pii pii tsin and the English translation is kindness for all things and all people, and that’s a value that we as Blackfoot people are raised with. So I really value the kindness and generosity that I see in the people that I work with. I value leadership, not in a formal sense. I don’t think you have to have a special title to be a leader, but what I try to do is identify and uphold the leadership qualities and everyone that I work with, regardless of the positions that they hold. So kindness, leadership, generosity, and humility.

I’m not sure that I would have done anything differently. I feel like everything that I have had to go through and endure, although might have been challenging and tough, has really helped to support me in this work that I’m doing for change. I didn’t grow up with the best life. Right now, I have come to terms with a lot of life experiences. I’ve had to do a lot of healing with those around me and in my life, and I have done that healing and that healing continues, but I wouldn’t regret anything that I have gone through just because it has helped to shape the person that I am today. For young people growing up I would say not to be too hard on yourself in any kind of situation. And that there are many times in your life that you’re going to fall. I remember being a younger father and my daughter was learning how to walk and she fell and scraped her knee a little bit. Of course she cried and she was in pain, and my initial reaction to being a first time parent was panic. And then I learned a lot from that particular situation, because I thought to myself ‘Geez, Tim, are you gonna react this way, every time she falls? She’s gonna fall a lot of times throughout her whole life, and you can’t have this reaction because she’s not going to know how to deal with those times when she does fall.’ So for young people, I would say, you’re gonna fall, you’re gonna fall many times in your life, but be kind when that does happen. For me, it doesn’t really matter how many times you do fall, what matters is that you get up each time. And that you learn from any of those mistakes and you just continue to move forward.