Episode Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Introduction to Diana Chan McNally
Elizabeth McIsaac: In many ways, Diana is the ideal person for discussing how to advocate for change from the front lines. She's a frontline worker. She's an advocate. She works every day with people who may not be able to stand up for themselves or may not be heard. If you're not personally acquainted with Diana, you've likely seen, heard, or read about her in the media. You could say she claims a special place in the landscape. She's a unique kind of trusted expert. She's somebody who can humanize people who are unhoused based on her intimate knowledge of their situations and also understands the bigger implications and the required policy asks.
During the summer last year, the refugee shelter crisis came to a head here in Downtown Toronto. Diana has played no small part in bringing attention to this issue and getting action. If you've seen her in the media, you might recall that she chose a small detail to highlight the situation, namely people with trench foot in the summer. "This is not 1919," she told the CBC. “We're not at war.”
Just this past January she applied the same pressure again. The detail this time was how to stave off frostbite. Both times she chose these details and she helped us understand graphically the effects on people when governments abdicate their duties and how their inaction brought about the situation we're in.
So, Diana Chan McNally — a Policy School alumni, I'd like to add — is here to share how she does what she does, how to advocate for change from the front line. Diana, welcome and thank you for being here.
Diana Chan McNally: Thank you so much. What a generous introduction and thank you all for being here today.
1. First Good Idea: Be Bold. Don’t be afraid of advocacy.
I just want to start with my first idea, which is to not be afraid of advocacy. To be perfectly honest, I actually used to be afraid of advocacy. As a kid, both of my parents were high school teachers and both were also members of the union, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation or OSSTF. For those of you who remember the '90s, you might actually remember that this was the time of former premier Mike Harris' cuts to education.
Both of my parents were on strike and my school was effected. My dad would take me to rallies with him and we would march together. I remember the vibrancy and energy of those strike actions. It's very burned into my brain. Now, that said, somehow along the way, I actually changed my mind about civic actions like rallies. I thought they were vulgar. I know.
Right now the rhetoric is that protest is uncivil, uncouth, and not a charter protected right, which is useful to make people believe if you want to actually suppress dissent and make the public think that civil disobedience or public dissent of most any kind is somehow uncivilized. So, honestly, I was not involved in politics at all and actually really strongly self-identified as someone who hated talking about politics until I started working in the field that I work in now, which is homelessness services. I started almost 10 years ago in 2014.
During that period of time and until 2019, an active understanding and interest in how everyone I was working with was systematically excluded in political participation never was much more than thoughts in my head or a conversation with a colleague or maybe a Facebook post.
But in 2019, I went to go work for the Toronto Drop-In Network. So, on my second day of work, my boss essentially threw me to the wolves and made me depute to City Council. It was my second day of work, which I had never done before. It was on a topic that at the time I didn't know much about, which was the fair Fare Pass.
I had to learn overnight what this thing was and what it is we were asking for and then depute for five minutes to city councillors. Needless to say, I was, excuse my language, scared shitless by having to do this. Former Councillor Mike Layton asked me a question after my deputation and it was actually a friendly one. It was a leading question actually, to try to get me to confirm what he also wanted to push at council, but I was just sweating bullets, trying not to sound completely incompetent, which I think I managed to pull off. Although I think since then I've gotten a lot better.
This is all to say that I actually really do know what it's like to be scared to advocate for change, at least at an individual level. I always wanted to take a backseat and not be very directly involved.
But since I was thrown headfirst into this advocate work, and I've said to my old boss, Susan Bender, you created a monster and she'll laugh and it's true. For me, there is no actual going back. When I was only working frontline with people who aren't housed, basically, I was applying bandages to a problem that was persistently getting worse.
But I discovered in becoming an advocate, this complementary work to push back on those systems and policies that were worsening the problem while still remaining directly tied to the issues on the ground as a frontline worker. Now, none of us has limitless capacity to throw money, resources, labour, your entire emotional wellness into a black hole where those gaps in the social safety net happen to be.
Pushing back is also about making care work sustainable for you, knowing that you have agency and ability to help change the conditions that create the poverty that surrounds you every single day. So, organizationally, I know that agencies have chilled significantly around advocating for change. I know this is really coming out of the Stephen Harper years, when our agencies were told that if we spent more than 10% of our budget on political work, and that was never really defined — it was very amorphous — that we were all under threat of being defunded. If we actually spoke out, we could potentially lose that government funding.
Many of our funding contracts today and I know when you contract with the City of Toronto for example, they still include clauses stating that you cannot criticize the government funder as a condition of that funding. So, I understand the context that we're coming out of where organizationally we've been told you will be threatened with losing your funding if you speak out, but I have to say for some of the EDs who are maybe here, some of the managers, materially, our work is getting so much worse, significantly worse. It's completely unmanageable. You know this because you can't retain the staff. The need and the condition of the people that we exist to support is getting far worse on a daily basis, and that is not going to change on its own.
The money that we need to operate isn't increasing proportionately to meet that need, not in the slightest, so you know how bad it is. At some point, the funding that we receive isn't worth the insurmountable issues that government expects us to manage in their absence, instead of legislating solutions and redistributing resources that would actually solve those problems. Being an advocate is not something to fear, especially at this moment. It's something that should be embraced, understanding that our work just isn't viable anymore. Frankly, our work shouldn't exist at all.
We only exist because of those gaps in social safety nets. Our job ultimately is to put ourselves out of work and a great way to do that is to be an advocate.
2. Second Good Idea: Be real. Break down the barriers between frontline praxis and systems change work.
Elizabeth McIsaac: How do you think about bringing that experience, that frontline work that you've just described so graphically, how do you bring that into your advocacy? How do you keep that there?
Diana Chan McNally: Continuing to work frontline really allows me to stay connected in this very, very real way to what is happening in the moment on the ground and to be able to contextualize that at both the macro and the micro levels.
Take the failure of the right to housing, for example, so the complete non-existence of a service or program to address a particular need. What I see on the ground can connect to those certain gaps either at very macro level or at the micro level. It allows me to be very nimble in my advocacy. I can see immediately what's happening and be able to turn that around into a public conversation far more quickly than if I didn't have that actual connection.
I'll also say that working frontline and having that knowledge also — not to be like, "Oh, look at me" — but it makes me credible in a way that can't be replicated and that's the truth. We're often seeking out frontline voices. Not so much in my sector, and I'll get into why that might be, but doctors, for example, ER doctors, nurses, especially during the pandemic, were the voices that we were seeking out because of the credibility that they were lending to the conversation that others simply did not have. I'll tell you a bit of a story.
Over the past several months, I've been working with African refugees and part of why I got involved is that I'd never seen anything like this before. People by the dozens were abandoned on the street; hundreds were without any resources whatsoever. Myself and a small group of volunteers — Lorraine Lam was among them — started to raise money. We had intended to raise $3,000 and that was just for water. It escalated to over $80,000 for any kind of emergency aid. Whatever people needed, tents, water, blankets, food, shoes, menstrual supplies, clothing, we would buy that for them and actually arrange these kinds of drop-offs.
It’s not as though people have been treated very well when they're on the street, but I had never seen a situation where even water was something that was not being distributed to people. It was completely egregious. So, I stepped in for months unpaid to be able to address the situation. Lorraine basically handled the supply drop-offs, and what I was doing was a lot more of the "political work." Speaking with politicians, co-organizing press conferences, engaging in media work, working with a lot of other groups, — and there are many groups working on this, especially Black-led organizations — to try and amplify their voices and ensure that they also had resources and funding in order to do the work that they needed to do.
For months the federal government refused to take any responsibility. They would deflect at any chance they were given, to say, this is especially a provincial priority. This is something the province should be doing, but ultimately, refugees are federal responsibility. I was trying to use my frontline perspective in a strategic way. I would speak to the realities on the ground, things like trench foot, which I did see, things like frostbite. We were extremely worried that people would start losing fingers and toes because they don't know what frostbite is. They've never encountered this kind of cold where that could even happen before.
I would speak to those realities that I was seeing and use that as a point of pain for federal MPs, to make them look both callous and out of touch, which quite frankly, given the situation, that's exactly what they were. I used that to help rally public opinion and also create public pressure. So, those small details, points of pain, are going to push somebody and create negative public perception or perception that they should be doing something.
Now, that said, it took a very long time to finally push the feds to a point where they did take responsibility and it wasn't solely me. Obviously, there was, again, so many people involved in this.
A week before, however, the feds finally committed $143-million to the City of Toronto for refugee relief. This happened in late January, early February. I had authored an op-ed in the Toronto Star, which was written from the perspective of a frontline worker. I built on the messages that I had been communicating for months now: people had been abandoned, politicians were choosing partisanship over people's lives, and the federal government must take responsibility for the thousands of refugees in Toronto shelter system and on the streets. Those were the primary messages that I wanted to communicate through that frontline lens.
What I learned afterward — and I laughed because I take a certain schadenfeude in this — a certain former liberal Toronto MP had planned to write a counterpoint to the op-ed that I had written in the Toronto Star about how there were no refugees in the Toronto shelter system. But if you're going to make a statement like that, you have to know, you have to have that frontline experience. You have to be on the ground to make a statement like that and make it be credible. He capitulated, partly because if it were a war between my word and his word, my frontline experience made me far more credible than him.
That wasn't the reason why we got the money. It was months and months and months of build up, but it certainly didn't hurt. Using that frontline perspective really is something that I did to cause pain to make sure that that money did flow.
Elizabeth McIsaac: You create a powerful visual, but you're also taking it away from a theoretical policy debate and making it about very real lived experience, people's lives. You can point to those people and it becomes very tangible.
Diana Chan McNally: Exactly. I think that was really important, because they wanted to talk about the bickering between levels of government, but there was a very real consequence to this that they didn't want to talk about. They knew they couldn't win if we brought that to the forefront of the conversation.
I went to policy school. I'm very acquainted with making policy arguments, but ultimately the saleable argument I could make was not a policy one, it was frontline-driven.
3. Third Good Idea: Be smart. Have tangible, achievable goals you can win.
Elizabeth McIsaac: So what's the win that you're looking for in all of that?
Diana Chan McNally: It really depends. In certain situations, when I’m advocating around a particular issue, I tend to structure my work around, "What can we feasibly win? What is the context we're operating in? What or who are the barriers? What resources do we have? Who are our allies in this situation? What's achievable in that entire mix?"
A lot of the time — this is my criticism of the left and I say this is someone who's obviously sitting toward the left — we tend to think in very big statements like, “Housing for all.” Yes, obviously yes, this is absolutely what is needed, but what we're very bad at is structuring a path to actually getting there. So, you have to be very pragmatic about this, and we have to work incrementally.
We're not going to get to a point where housing for all is going to suddenly appear unless we have a plan to actually get us to that point. I know that can be extremely frustrating, because working incrementally, when so much is going so wrong right now, does not feel great. I understand that you want to be farther than where you are, but from a pragmatic perspective, we need to set goals and targets that are achievable in order to realize those big ideas. There is no housing for all without realizing that people need shelter right now. We need rights and protections for encampment residents right now. Until that housing is built, there has to be a pragmatic plan along every step of the way.
When I see those goals and targets being reached or sometimes not at all, that's what I look for. It's never a straight path. Even if you have this grand plan to get to where you want to be, there's going to be curveballs all along the way and you don't always win everything that's needed when you need it.
4. Fourth Good Idea: Be strategic. Build “inside” and “outside” strategies for systems change and understand where you fit in.
But being an advocate does mean you have to be able to play the long game and to stay the course and adapt even when there's challenges and there's disappointment. Another thing that I also look for are shifts in public discourse. There's no winning unless you can effectively bring the public largely on your side.
That's something the left also doesn't understand, because we exist in our echo chambers. But we aren't trying to reach people who aren't already in agreement with us, which is problematic. You have to start to reach out to people who may not even be acquainted with these issues at all, but to make them passionate about them or make them care or at least have an opinion that might actually be onside with you. It's a real feat, however, to get there. For instance, however, and there were many, many, many people reiterating this message, so evicting encampments only creates harm in the absence of safe, decent housing and shelter.
I've noticed recently actually very ordinary people — not people who are political — who are concerned about encampments, and instead of making outright demands that they be removed — “Just get rid of these people. Throw them away. Who knows where they go? It doesn't matter.” —, they’re saying, “We need to make sure that these people can safely go indoors.” Safely being a key word here.
I've heard some politicians who weren't initially onside starting to say it too, and that's a win and miles away from the overall sentiment that we saw in the City of Toronto in 2021 when we had these very militarized encampment evictions in the city. That's a win that we managed to shift the discourse that far, that it's not just about remove these encampments.
It's about, "Do we actually have some better alternative for people?" because that's ultimately what they need. It takes a lot, a lot and years to shift discourse or to make any wins a lot of the time.
I'll offer a little bit of something that I've learned in doing this work. Moral demands don't work.
Appealing to someone in power on the basis of morality goes absolutely nowhere. Similarly, personally attacking someone and their reputation also doesn't work. It can feel cathartic and you might get a little bit of pleasure out of that, but it can also exacerbate a political situation or shift the focus from the actual outcomes you want into an interpersonal fight, which is not a productive thing to do.
Same with believing, sadly, that facts and evidence alone can be persuasive. They aren't to a lot of people. Some people don't care at all about that. Even if you care about it and it makes sense to you. Politically, people are ideological and they're not persuaded by these arguments.
Arguing that something is morally or ethically correct or evidence-based isn't a surefire way to create political change. It just is not, and this is what I've learned. It's not wrong to use these arguments, but they rarely work on their own.
So what do you do? Create leverage. I learned this in my brief time when I was working as a legislative assistant at Queens Park.
Progressive politics is not about claiming moral superiority, which is a mistake that we make all of the time on the left. It's about advocating for better outcomes — tangible, real outcomes for people using a moral lens and that usually means using negotiation. In negotiation, what you need is leverage. So, in the case for advocating for refugees, I used my frontline credibility as leverage. I also used sensitivity around partisanship as leverage.
I worked with coalitions of many civil society organizations and leaders to create that leverage. Of course, City Hall eventually was on side and having a whole other order of government is also a form of leverage.
5. Fifth Good Idea: Have fun. Make time for joy; even if you can’t make much time for rest, celebrate the wins.
Elizabeth McIsaac: So, we've gone through the ideas, starting at the beginning: don't be afraid of advocacy, be bold, be real, break down the barriers, react to the actual experience, be smart, have these tangible, achievable goals, be strategic. How do you protect yourself in all of that? That's a lot going on. By the way, you're still dealing with very life and death issues on a daily basis with people.
Diana Chan McNally: How do I protect myself? It can be very exhausting, but I want to be clear, at least for myself, I can only speak to my own experience. It's not the actual work of supporting people that I find hard. It's watching people who never actually have anything materially improve in their lives, which is through no fault of their own obviously because of the horrific conditions we actually create for them and expect to suffer through indefinitely. That's the stuff that actually burns me out is watching day-after-day people's lives never improving, because we never give people the resources to actually get there. So, I actually find doing advocate work is energizing in itself.
But it gives me back that sense of agency to actually make a real difference, real change systemically. Many of us feel deprived of having that agency, especially when you are on the front line. So, I actually consider doing this work a form of self-care.
I hate using that word. I have a lot of crankiness about the word “self-care”. Of course, we need to take good care of ourselves as much as we can, but we can't put the onus on each individual to take full responsibility for and control over their personal wellness. It's obviously just not up to each individual person alone. So, glasses of wine, a massage spa day, even if you can afford those things which are sold to us as self-care, they're a reprieve and not a solution to the reasons why we feel so awful. That's capitalism.
Our focus should be on collective care, which in the absence of care from the state does mean mutual aid, which in my opinion actually is the most radical thing that we can engage in. That said, it's hard to find that collective care because we're very hyper individualistic in our society and we are very resistant to this idea that we should be taking care of each other. We can't necessarily afford the forms of self-care that are marketed to us, but you can still find joy in your work, outside of work. So, in my work, since especially I started doing this advocate work, I've met people who are just an absolute joy, people that I will know for life.
I love being with them and not just necessarily in the context of doing this work, but they're bringing positivity to everything they do, and we have amazing relationships and care for each other.
I also find joy just taking a walk. I walk home every day from work, which is about six kilometers, but it's a good way for me to clear my head and it's free. It's very helpful to do.
Maybe you see my records behind me. That's my thing. When nothing else is really giving me a lot of joy in the moment, this is what gives me joy is music. I will say to everybody, try and find that thing that buoys you, whatever it is. I also understand some of the caveats of being able to afford certain things because that's a reality.
But everyone does need that thing that brings light and joy into your life when very little else does. I think in my five good ideas, I mentioned even if you can't make much time for rest, I get that because I'm probably talking to fellow frontline workers. If you're working frontline in homelessness services, you probably have at least two jobs. I know I do. So, it's not possible to afford to do this work without having some side hustle or something else that you're doing. So, the rest part and the time part I know are extremely limited, but finding something that gives you joy, even if it's not you taking a nap. It's a way to rest your mind and your soul because you're finding that joy and it gives you a similar feeling and allows you to actually decompress for a moment. If you can't sleep, find something that makes you happy.
What do you mean by “mutual aid”? And is how our society taking care of frontline workers?
Elizabeth McIsaac: That's great. Thank you, Diana. That was so honest and was just packed full of ideas. Before we leave the last one, I mean finding joy and finding the thing that is right for you that regenerates you and that thing that is so important. But you also referenced, I think in two different ways systemic issues around this. You talked about mutual aid and I'd like you to just break that out a little bit. What do you mean by mutual aid? And then you also spoke quite directly to the conditions of work. How are we as a society, as our social systems and structures actually taking care of decent work conditions for those who are providing the work that you're providing?
Diana Chan McNally: Well, they're not. We're not being taken care of at all. For those of us who are working in the fields, especially if you’re unionized, you've been capped by Bill 124 for four years almost, which is to say a lot of people actually just left the sector entirely, because it became unaffordable again because of that burnout.
Not necessarily from working with people who, to me, it's a joy to work with people all the time, but again, to see the level of need. More and more people are not having the support you need to be able to continue to do that care work in a good way. This is another reason why organizations need to start to advocate for the conditions that your workers are existing in, because the reality is that it is not acceptable.
This is because again, we don't value care work. This is true of nurses, this is true of teachers, this is true of PSWs, ECEEs, people like myself. This kind of work is wholesale devalued, especially at the political level. So, there's no money coming in for these programs and I'm very fundamentally aware of that, which is why we need to start to advocate again, not just for the people that we're supporting, but we can't even do that work if we don't have staff anyway. So, you also need to be advocating for your staff and pushing back against this idea that it's acceptable for someone to make $21 an hour to do some of the toughest work that exists.
To your point about the mutual aid, so the mutual aid has always existed, but the pandemic I think really clarified this new iteration of mutual aid where people who couldn't necessarily afford to cook, people were creating meals for each other, redistributing resources. If you needed something, there was a network you could connect to and potentially someone could help you get that thing or support you. That stuff is incredible. We have community fridges now, for example, which are somewhat entrenched. And yes, that's still emergency food, but it's food by the community for the community. What better way to push back against the state’s failure to take care of us than that we actually start to create these kinds of systems ourselves that are creating community care.
What are the best ways to help marginalized people become advocates?
Elizabeth McIsaac: So, you've talked a lot about it. Your life is focused on supporting people who are most vulnerable in attaining a dignity for themselves in a better situation. What are the best ways to assist people who are vulnerable, who are marginalized to find and use their own voice in support of self-advocacy and advocacy on behalf of others?
Diana Chan McNally: It’s hard for people to have enough stability to start to consider political and systemic contexts. If you're focused on survival, that's always going to be the first thing that you're concerned about. So, how do we get people into spaces of stability when we don't have a lot of resources to be able to do that? So every day you can ask somebody, "How can I help? What would be helpful right now?" Everyone's going to say housing. I don't have a lot of ability to get that for people. Here and there, I am able to house people, but honestly I know people who have not been able to house a client in years at this point.
Those are the kinds of barriers that we face to getting people the stability they need to rest and start to address in much more tangible ways what's actually happening and creating these systems that oppress people so horrifically. That said, we have the Toronto Underhoused Union and they're doing really cool work. It's for people who are currently unhoused, people who have been recently unhoused or have any life experience. It's a way of creating that mutual aid support within that union and using that support network as a way to actually advocate.
They come to All Saints where I work and we host their monthly meetings. That's another interesting point for organizations as well. How are you working in solidarity with your communities? Are you giving people space for things like this? Could you give people space for things like this? That would be invaluable, I think, because there's very few places that allow these very on-the-ground grassroots movements to thrive in our agency spaces.
How do you evaluate the impact of your advocacy?
Elizabeth McIsaac: It's a call to think about physical space, other resources, other assets that are attached to the organization that can be useful and part of the overall advocacy.
I'm going to go to some other questions that came in advance and I want you to go back to understanding when you've had impact, but how do you personally evaluate the impact of your advocacy, not in terms of outputs? I think you talked a bit about this.
It's smaller steps and so forth, but when you think about impact, how do you reconcile that or how do you do that evaluation either for yourself or for your organization and communicating that to All Saints and having them understand the value of the time that you spend doing the other things with media, with politicians, and so forth?
Diana Chan McNally: I'm not sure that is understood. It is not interfered with and I will take it, but I think, broadly speaking, our sector does not consider that kind of work as actual labour. You might only see me on television. You might see Lorraine here and there. Sometimes you'll see Greg Cook.
It's pretty telling that you are only seeing three faces most of the time, because this isn't considered, again, labour. It's always something that you should be doing on the side of desk or on your own time when it does ultimately benefit everybody, including the organizations that are apprehensive about being involved or supporting frontline workers. Don't be afraid of people like us.
We can be assets to your agencies. But I will say on a personal level, because we don't have that, it's actually caused a lot of problems for me in my own life finding work, because cowgirls like me, maybe we're hard to control or that's the mindset that exists. It has limited my job prospects, which is a risk that people should be aware of, because we don't have the kind of environment that's very supportive of folks like me. Now I know that wasn't what the question was about, but evaluating for myself, again, it's very amorphous sometimes to be able to be like, "This made a difference." But again, if I'm starting to see especially public discourse change, that's when I start to be like, "Okay, this is actually something that made a difference."
Sometimes it's something very concrete. Suddenly, you got that funding in when you weren't sure that that funding was going to come in. Otherwise, it's hard to know. If something changes, we get new services, new programs. Something. Some resource. That's a way of evaluating the metric. I think personally, I'm always just focused on the next thing that I often don't even consider evaluating whether I've been effective or not. I often don't even watch my own media clips and that stuff. I don't know, it seems a little distasteful to review it, but I don't know. That's a terrible answer.
What has been your most memorable moment?
Elizabeth McIsaac: No, it's a hard thing to do. Nobody likes to watch themselves on video or on the radio or listen to themselves on the radio.
What would you say has been your most memorable moment? You've had so many moments. Since you started working the front lines and out of everything you've done, what has been your most memorable? What has really struck you, has either motivated and inspired you to do more or just really held you as a touch point for you?
Diana Chan McNally: My most memorable moment, I think that would be working on some of the encampment policy stuff that I was working on in 2021, especially. We were at a point where the public narrative was all over the place, but largely folks in the city were just not on side with encampments existing, because there was nothing else that was even remotely okay for people to actually access.
There was a point after these horrific evictions, and then it was just me going to a park with some other advocates as well as some people who were living in encampments and then just coming up with a set of policy directives for the City of Toronto.
I don't know why I decided that would be a good way to do things, but I had already been writing policy for our entire sector on COVID protocols, because we didn't have any protocols. Our sector was left out of everything government was saying and doing. It became my job to actually do that work. I had to have a very crash course in how to create policy, but I learned a lot from that. It really sticks out in my mind because governments are also lazy. It's something that sticks out for me, because if you just give them what they need, sometimes they'll just take it and do it directly. In this case, that didn't actually happen.
We had about five councillors who supported the policy directives that we created. They weren't actually implemented, but they did inform policy in a very indirect way. But subsequently, I've actually written motions for councillors to be like, "You know what? Instead of saying you should do this, I'm just going to do it for you. Here you go. Would you like to implement it?" It really strikes me as this turning point where it's just like, "Oh, you can actually sometimes get things done because people don't want to necessarily do it themselves, so you can do it for them."
How do you make your frontline advocacy work become seen as legitimate? How important is it to have allies in positions of power?
Elizabeth McIsaac: So navigating those hierarchies and those bureaucracies. How do you navigate power structures and hierarchies that legitimize some people's knowledge over others? Some have found frontline workers are often denigrated as naive and not focused on the big picture. Then following on that, how important is it to have champions and allies in these positions that will create space? I think you just talked about building alliances with councillors and leveraging their influence. But has that been a struggle for you and how have you navigated that?
Diana Chan McNally: Oh, absolutely. Again, working frontline, especially in our field, I don't think we're very respected as workers and certainly not as people with any intellectual capacity to consider the big picture, which is fundamentally incorrect. Most of us are actually very good at seeing those big pictures, because we see at the micro level all of this happening every day and we can connect it in a very direct way to what's actually missing. It galls me a little bit. I try my best to push back on that and demonstrate in a very real way that we can think and we are able to connect these things to actual policy that exists out there.
These kinds of service gaps exist. How do we change that narrative? That's a tricky one. Again, our work is just not valued, and that is true at every possible level. Political participation is included in that. Also, when it comes to things like research, we are often not involved when people do studies, research around what is happening in terms of homelessness, for example, we are often the voice that is left out. They may talk — not nearly enough — to people experiencing homelessness. They may talk to people higher up in management, executive director levels, but oftentimes the frontline voice is left out when we are the ones who can make those connections between what happens on the ground and what is happening elsewhere.
All I can do is try and model that we're not incompetent. We know what we're talking about, and that's the best I can do. But I would love to be able to create more space for people who can speak to these issues, because it shouldn't just be me and Lorraine Lam and Greg Cook. We need to have more voices, because I think the more that we have, we can push back against a lot of public narratives and very unfortunate narratives when you have multiple people speaking to the same things.
Organizationally, that means that we have to be able to lift people up, give them opportunities to speak. Can we have an advocate bureau in our agencies for example or committee? Can we support people to get media training? What does that look like? Again, I leave that to you, but those are just a couple of mechanisms that could exist to bring more of these kinds of voices, my voice for example, into the public sphere.
What if someone wants to do advocacy, but risks their relationship with their employer or funder?
Elizabeth McIsaac: Frontline workers are often inspired by the work that you're doing and others like you, that you can have that voice, but they don't always know how, and how to be seriously considered in doing that work. So, do you have any advice for someone who is wanting to be more of an advocate in their role, but perhaps may feel the risk internally from their own organization or their funder? Do you have any advice or ideas there?
Diana Chan McNally: Realistically, not all organizations are going to be onside with giving people the ability to speak very publicly about what they're seeing. Again, I get the fear. I don't think it should exist to the extent that it does, but I do understand it. If you do not have support within your organization, there are groups out there that are looking for people just like you.
The Shelter & Housing Justice Network, for example, in Toronto, absolutely join, because then when you're joining other people, you don't necessarily have to be at the forefront yourself. If you're worried about visibility and that impacting your job or your life negatively, somehow you can work behind the scenes with these kinds of advocate groups around issues that you're passionate about.
They can also provide a screen for you. So, it's not directly Diana Chan McNally working for All Saints Church Community Centre. Maybe it's Diana Chan McNally working with Shelter & Housing Justice Network. That becomes the shield because it's an external group. Look for those opportunities wherever it is that you are, and if they don't exist, try to find like-minded people and start to have discussions about what you would like to see.
In terms of getting people to take you seriously, that's a bit trickier, and I'm very well aware of that. I think I got a little bit lucky insofar as I was pushed directly into doing this work. I'm not sure if I hadn't had that forced on me as a condition of my work that I would've been taken as seriously as I am.
But what journalists look for is someone who's easy to talk to and well-spoken. They want sound bites that are juicy. I'll put that forward to you as well. If you're working with a group, you're issuing a press release, somebody invites a journalist, consider the key messages that you want to communicate and really consider what is going to make a really juicy sound bite for that person to want to include in their article or their news program.
Establishing good relationships with journalists is important. I'm somebody who has pretty good relationships with a lot of journalists who will often now come to me first around these issues. Again, also because there are so few people doing it. So it's not because I'm so great. It's because we have few people doing it because of the conditions of our work. But that said, if you try to build those relationships, then you can become a voice on these issues as well, if you're comfortable with being highlighted and it's okay with you in terms of the risk.
How do you apply a racial equity lens to your advocacy work?
Elizabeth McIsaac: This one is more of a comment, but I think that you'll have a perspective on this. Self-advocacy doesn't work for BIPOC communities, and this is someone speaking from experience. You've talked about the credibility of being the frontline worker and doing the advocacy, but all of these experiences are intermediated by race, by gender, by identities. So, can you speak to some of those layers?
Diana Chan McNally: I'm someone who presents extremely white, and that works to my benefit. For a long time journalists would ask me very ambiguous, weird questions about what my ethnic background was, where I had to clarify at a certain point that yes, I am actually mixed race, but I am extremely white-presenting. That worked to my advantage, sadly, because of the systems that we exist in. When I was working with African refugees, in particular, it was important that I was not the primary voice in the room talking about this, because it's not my community directly.
It was just a situation I saw that was extremely horrific, and it was important to elevate the voices of those who were directly impacted, which were folks from Africa, either newly-arrived or who had had experiences as refugees and were now helming organizations themselves. This is not work for you to do, but it's work for us to do, who do have that privilege and platform to be able to use that to lift other people up, which unfortunately we don't see enough of. That's the honest truth, but how to motivate people to do that and to be cognizant that you don't necessarily have to be the person talking.
In fact, you shouldn't be the person talking a lot of the time. That's maybe where I can start doing a bit more on my end as well, so that we can actually bring voices of people who are not heard to the forefront. That's not a great answer. It's just a recognition that it is very unequal.
How can people in positions of power or privilege amplify voices from the frontline or peers with lived experience without tokenizing them?
Elizabeth McIsaac: It is unequal, and I think the onus is on those who do have access to those conversations to step back and create other space and not take up the space. As Maytree, we're conscious of that. How do we not take up where we shouldn't be and not just take it up, but actively identify where there's capacity and where to build capacity to do that work and to have that voice because it's so incredibly important. It speaks to a question someone else was asking. How do those in positions of privilege or power help amplify the voices of the frontline or peers with lived experience in a manner that doesn't tokenize them? I think that's a big part. It's the “how” as well.
Diana Chan McNally: I do want to add a comment there about the tokenization, as well. So, one thing that I'm really sensitive about and I'm also someone who did experience homelessness as a youth to the point where I was in and out of children's aid and I actually lost custody of my own child because of it. I don't talk about that a lot and not because I'm overly sensitive about it, but because I recognize that we often put the onus on people experiencing bad situations to just re-traumatize themselves by telling the same stories again and again and again. Why do we need to do that in order to understand that someone's a human being who has human rights that should be upheld and respected? I don't like that because I just think it's completely unnecessary.
It perpetuates this idea that you have to be deserving, because you've gone through just enough that only because of that you require or deserve certain resources. Around the tokenization, it's also just building people's capacity to go beyond being told, "Can you tell your story to people and humanize yourself to them even though you are a human being?", but to build that political knowledge.
When I am working with people, I stay away from that stuff, unless it's something someone really wants to share. It's not obligatory and it should never be obligatory.
What are ways people can get started in advocacy?
Elizabeth McIsaac: There's so many different ways we can advocate, and you've talked about some very strategic ways of getting right in there and working with councillors and leveraging opportunities. What are some of the more everyday things that people can access or start with, like petitions and letter writing? You started by talking about holding a placard and showing up at the rally. Are those at all valuable as well? Is that the way to get started and to build confidence in having a voice around public decisions?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, absolutely. I will say though, with petitions, great, absolutely no problem. Especially if someone like a politician is getting just inundated with the same petition, they will be obligated to respond, but it is actually better to call. It is actually much better to write a personalized email. Even if you have that form, for example, you might want to customize it, because someone will be obligated to actually respond to you individually if you do that. Again, I know this from working inside Queen's Park. There are levels that how seriously you take certain kinds of engagements. Petitions, yes, but usually, someone will reply in bulk to everybody who sent it.
It's not a personalized email that you're going to get in response. So, personalize it, call if you can, show up to the office if you can, those are really good ways to start to step it up. There are organizations that are also trying to build capacity for people. So, Progress Toronto does trainings around deputations, for example, understanding how City Hall works. I'd like to see more of this education expanded. Maytree does some of this too. No, am I wrong?
Elizabeth McIsaac: Well, yeah. We have Maytree Policy School and a couple of other ways that we help grantees, but there's room for more.
Diana Chan McNally: There's a lot more room for this kind of stuff. It's a good way to get started, though. Also, to look at who is creating these petitions? Is it like TTCRiders or who is it? If you like what you're seeing, it might be somewhere or someone that you want to reach out to and be more directly involved, but it's a good start and it does help. I know oftentimes with people asking me about petitions, they're like, "Does it even matter?" If everyone's sending them, you have like 20,000 people sending it, yeah, it starts to matter. It's actually about the bulk. That starts to put pressure on people.
How do you build your competencies?
Elizabeth McIsaac: It's getting voices heard in different ways, and there's a lot of different ways to do it.
You've touched on this question a little bit. They're saying that they're looking at your CV and you've got all these degrees and that's great and cool, but I think you've just touched on how do you build your competencies? It doesn't have to be through a degree program. It can be, but how do you balance that when you're in the thick of the work? That's maybe more of a personal question. How do you manage your own career path when you're trying to do both things?
Diana Chan McNally: I don't know that I am. I think I'm just managing it a little bit. Yeah, I have a bunch of degrees and none of which are applicable at all to what I'm doing. So, it's there. That was an entirely different life, although not entirely. I think whatever your background is, there are skill sets that you can bring to this work. This is why community work is great and you can leverage that into other things.
I used to be a graphic designer and I used to be a teacher. Those are communications roles. Graphic design is all about distilling content down to its most singular forms and communicating that visually in a very clear way. Being a teacher is being able to teach concepts in a very clear way using plain language.
Even though really I don't do these things anymore, they do help in terms of knowing how to communicate things effectively. I often think like a graphic designer or a teacher about what's the best way to actually take these messages and put them toward the public.
That's my particular background, but whatever it is you've done, you can contribute in some way. Rallies, for example, often have people who are playing music. If you're a musician, that's something that you can contribute as well.
What are the skill sets that you can bring? Are you a carpenter? Do you have really great skills building things? We often need props and signage and that stuff. So, consider what it is that you already are good at and can do and how can you translate that into this space, because all skill sets actually are very valuable in the work that we do.
Elizabeth McIsaac: Before you give your final word, I just want to say in the Q&A box there's a wonderful thank you from the African Center for Refugees in Ontario and Canada for the hard work that you've done.
And an invitation to see if you would ever want to get into benefit design work at the macro level. All kinds of stuff that I think people want to pull you into their work, because you're so great at what you're doing. But do you have a final comment on the role of the advocate?
Diana Chan McNally: It's a bit of a tangent, but I feel like I should touch on this because we live in a world of social media as our mirror world. To reference Naomi Klein, a lot of people think that just being active on something like Twitter, social media more generally, is in itself enough. It is not a replacement for hitting the streets and having conversations with people in real life. Online discourse and whatever sentiment that you're seeing out there is never indicative of what people actually think or how they feel in the real world. It is always extremely distorted.
I have a lot of Twitter followers for some reason. I guess they like what I'm doing. The secret, however, is that everyone thinks that if you have thousands of followers, that's an important voice. It's not necessarily true. If we looked at the Toronto mayoral elections there are certain candidates who had massive platforms, who got zero votes, these are not related at all. But if you are someone who has some social media platform, it technically isn't important, but people in real life will see that and somehow mistake that you're important because of it, if that makes any sense at all.
Take organizing on social media and social media campaigns with a grain of salt. Take it with a big grain of salt, but you can use that platform to command respect from people in real life. That's my secret, too. It doesn't actually really matter. Whatever it is that you say online, it doesn't really have a huge impact on things, but other people believe that it does. Does that make sense?
Elizabeth McIsaac: That's a great place to finish off. Thank you.
