WEBVTT
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Hello, I'm Professor Kate Bird, and this is the Power Shift Decolonising Development.
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Today, Dr.
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Nompilo Ndlovu and I are speaking to Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, an activist, lawyer, humanitarian, and founder of SeeChange, an organisation which seeks to impact humanitarian organisations to shift to a more community centred approach and decolonise the sector.
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We talk with Rachel about her Community First pilot project, implemented with MSF, which co created health strategies with affected communities in several countries and its community centered approach and its work with Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic region, where they have created an open source framework and co create TB and mental health initiatives with the local communities.
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Listen on for more, and don't forget to like or share.
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To receive practical resources on Shifting Power, do sign up via our website, devhubuk.
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Scroll down on any page and sign up.
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Look forward to seeing you again.
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Bye for now.
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Welcome to the Power Shift, Decolonising Development, the podcast series seeking to bring together thinkers, practitioners, and activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools for practical action.
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I'm Professor Kate Bird, a socio economist and director of the Development Hub.
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Today's co host is Dr.
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Nompilo Ndlovu.
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Over to you, Nompilo.
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Greetings, I'm Dr.
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Nompilo Ndovu.
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I'm a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa.
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I'm an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa.
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Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation.
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My PhD focused on mass violence, memory, and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe.
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Back to you, Kate.
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Thanks, Nompilo.
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Today we're very excited to be talking to Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, an activist, lawyer, and humanitarian who's been working for many years leading positions for Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders.
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Rachel founded SeeChange in 2018 and works to impact humanitarian organisations to shift to a more community centered approach, contributing to decolonisation in the sector.
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SeeChange and MSF cooperated on a successful community first pilot project in which MSF teams with co created health strategies with affected communities in several countries.
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SeaChange also uses this community centered approach in its work with Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic region, where they support TB and mental health initiatives that are co created with the community.
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For more on Rachel and her work, click on the show notes below this episode.
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And back to you, Nompilo, for our first question.
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Thank you.
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Okay.
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Rachel, can you tell us about your past work in the humanitarian sector?
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And what led you to establish SeeChange?
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First of all, thanks very much for having me on your podcast.
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It's really thrilling to be here and to meet you both.
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I guess I'll start with what led me to establish SeeChange.
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In one word, I would say disillusion.
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So to kind of reel that back a little bit, when I started in this work in the early 1990s, there was no such thing as a humanitarian sector.
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And so I never self identified as a humanitarian.
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We were a bunch of volunteers that were helping people who were facing emergencies.
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It wasn't considered a career.
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It wasn't a career path.
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There was no salaries.
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So I mean, that has its pros and its cons, but just to make it clear how different it was then than today.
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Today, now, of course, it is a career, it's a profession, it's an industry, and with that we've brought together lots of structures and hierarchies and policies.
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And really, when I look back on those 30 odd years, the only thing that I see that's the same is really the principles, the same principles that we had at the beginning, those humanitarian principles.
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And even some of those today are engraved out, especially when we see what's happening in Palestine and so on.
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So nowadays I'm tending to call myself more recovering humanitarian.
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And it's really this questioning of the system today that led me to found SeeChange.
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So as you mentioned, you know, I work with MSF in various leadership positions, notably before and after and during the genocide in Rwanda.
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And I was head of mission, regional humanitarian affairs director in Latin America.
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And I also worked a lot on access to medicines issues.
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And then I left for a period of nine or so years, where I worked with a student organisation.
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I was raising three sons at the time, so it was better suited to my lifestyle that I needed.
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And then I came back to MSF in 2013 and really went at a much higher level on the international board of directors.
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So the overall steering and direction of the organisation.
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And I mentioned that time period because during that time, I've really witnessed the transformation of this humanitarian system.
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In some ways, I saw how the industry changed for the good.
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I mean, there were a lot of important things that have been done, but I've also seen how it's become increasingly disconnected from the reality of people and communities on the ground and how it's been perpetuating this sort of charitable model, um, really, which is at the heart of this problem of coloniality.
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So perpetuating that charitable model on communities are extremely sophisticated, just as an example.
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I mean, communities in Kenya cottoned on to telehealth way before any humanitarian organisations did.
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But we had this system that doesn't really allow that organic growth from the communities to translate.
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It's very much this top down approach run by more and more bureaucrats and supervisors that are sitting at a distance more frequently now to the communities.
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And so after spending these six years on the international board, there was a lot of things going on in the world in terms of the migration crisis, in terms of the attacks on health system in Afghanistan and Syria.
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And then the Ebola epidemic, which broke out at that time.
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I really got to see how difficult it was for an organisation the size of MSF to really make the changes and the moves it needed fast enough.
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Because when we look at the world today, we see these cascading humanitarian crises, we see what we're facing in terms of the climate emergency, which is accelerating, the increase of number of people on the move, forced to leave their homes because of environment, war, conflict, and plus our global situation in terms of conflict today, which is in a terrible state with the Sudan, with Syria, with Palestine, all of these issues going on.
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So I decided that if I really wanted to look at the how of making the change, because I think a lot of people understood, yes, it's a colonial system, it's anchored in a colonial structure and mindset, there is racism, there's social injustice, people were talking as if they knew why it needed to change.
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But then they would say, but it's okay, we'll just make some little tweaks around the edges, and then we'll all understand that, and then we'll just get on, and it was just business as usual.
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And for me, it was in this how that we really needed to change, and that was why I founded the SeeChange initiative, was to look at how do we actually implement decolonial practices?
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How do we truly centre communities in a way that honours, respects and builds on their capacities, their strengths, their historical knowledge, their cultural knowledge?
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And how do we together learn how to do this differently because what we're doing now doesn't work.
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It's clear what we're doing now does not work.
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We have to change.
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We have to change.
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We cannot carry on like this.
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We are not able to face what's going on and in fact what we're doing and I think that Palestine for me is such a red line.
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What we're actually doing is perpetuating those colonial structures by not being able to speak out as humanitarian organisations.
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Clearly, since the beginning about the genocide in Palestine, in Gaza, we have become unwitting accomplices to it.
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And it's really problematic.
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So humanitarian organisations, need to take this moment to reflect.
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So what I'm trying to do now with SeeChange is see how to do that.
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It's interesting because as I was thinking about, well, what could I do to, you know, where could I work?
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And, you know, your mind always goes to the Global South and that's our traditional stomping ground, if I can put it that way.
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And actually I just, I'm new in Canada.
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I'm not a Canadian by birth.
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But I moved here about 20 years ago, and I'd never heard about this crisis that's going on inside Canada, which is this epidemic of tuberculosis amongst the indigenous peoples, especially the Inuit in the North of Canada.
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And when I heard that there are 300 now, it's actually since COVID, 600 times more likely to contract tuberculosis than any non indigenous Canadian born person.
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I said, well, this is ridiculous.
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We can get rid of this.
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We can change this.
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So I started to work.
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It was Stephen Lewis who was the former Special Representative on HIV AIDS and who became a very big activist as well around tuberculosis in more recent years.
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He'd come back from the North talking about the cultural genocide that was happening in Nunavut, which is the province in the North, and saying, you know, that these issues were not just simply medical issues of tuberculosis, but actually structural issues of embedded racism, embedded colonialism.
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And this was the result of Canadian colonialism, which is ongoing.
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And so as I started to work with different communities, you know, just to give an idea, it's 25 communities of around 35,000 people in total over a 2 million square kilometer area.
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Everything is accessible only by plane.
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There is no roads at all.
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It's an incredibly, uh, we would call it very remote.
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The Inuit don't think it's remote.
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They think it's perfect, but from our Southern perspective, we see it as remote.
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And so the working with these communities really brought home how these issues that they're facing, whether it's health, we're working on tuberculosis and mental health.
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You could not look at these individually.
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You had to see them in the context of the historical trauma, the impacts of colonialism, the impacts of racism and the ongoing colonialism, which is the case with countries like Canada, Australia, Aotearoa or New Zealand, these other countries where the indigenous peoples are still ongoing active colonialism in the very sort of traditional sense.
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So that's what I've been doing.
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And, you know, the idea was not to start an organisation because I'm anti growth in organisations because I think now, you know, we've also as organisations become victim to the capitalist structure of just continually growing, bigger is better, bigger is beautiful, and I'm much more, small is beautiful, keep small and humble and limited and keep the growth on the ground with the communities.
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So It's an initiative to try to demonstrate ways that you can work differently and what that requires to do that.
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Thank you, Rachel, for giving such, such detailed context.
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Yeah, it's such brave work that you're doing.
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Just a linkage to that.
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You work directly with communities and you strive to influence humanitarian organisations and policymakers.
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What is the connection between your work with Inuit communities in Canada and the broader humanitarian policy work?
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Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
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Aside from the fact that the first time I went to Nunavut, the conditions that I saw people living in were probably some of the worst conditions I'd seen anybody live in.
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And I have been in a lot of environments, as you both have, where living conditions are pretty poor.
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So if you take a context like a community up there in the North, it's minus 40 degrees, minus 50 degrees, minus 60 degrees.
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Very, very poor housing, poor heating, people living in poverty, not having enough money to pay for everything they need, living 17 to 18 people in a house, and there's nothing there.
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Um, you know, they were forced into communities in the 1950s.
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Originally, they were nomadic people who traveled the land in very small groups, and now they've been sort of forced into these larger communities, which goes against their cultural ways of living.
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So the environment, so that was the first sort of, direct connection is how that kind of neglect and structurally created poverty was the same here in Canada, in the North, as it is in other countries that I've been in, whether in DRC, whether in Kenya, whether in Djibouti.
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So that was one thing.
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The other part of it for me was really the fact that communities in the North are not directly involved in their own response to their health crises.
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The response to health crises is brought from the outside.
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There are no humanitarian organisations up there, it's just the government.
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And so the government makes the decisions about the policy and then it goes to implement those in the communities.
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So for instance, a TB response is 25 people from southern Canada landing in a community, not speaking Inuktitut, not knowing the culture, coming to deal just with TB, and taking over the whole community, which is usually between 500 and 1, 000 people.
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So you can imagine the impact that that's having.
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And the community's not engaged, so they're very passive.
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So they sit, they wait, the intervention's done, they half listen, then the intervention's finished, the people all leave and they go back to normal.
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Back to where they were before, actually.
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And so this for me really exemplified again, how this lack of community engagement is something that I've seen throughout the humanitarian industry.
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And that is a very direct mirror of the two, which is kind of shocking when you're in a country like Canada, when you think super rich country, everyone's sort of active, engaged citizens.
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It's actually not the case, which is the same in many other countries as well.
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You know, you get your global statistics about the country and everything looks fine.
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It's when you start to look in the fine print that you realise what kind of structural inequities are existing inside the countries.
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So that structural inequity has been a really coinciding factor.
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I know you've already started to speak of some of the issues or just challenges that you faced, including working with people that have remote access and using internationally developed hybrid solutions where there's room for just local developed initiatives as well as structural injustice, but can you describe to our listeners any additional challenges you have faced working on community centered approaches to health crisis in Canada?
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And why is it particularly important that you take a decolonised approach in this work?
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Some of the challenges faced in Canada, I mean, there's on two sides, I think on the one side, on a very practical side, as I was mentioning, working in the North is incredibly difficult and it's incredibly expensive.
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It's probably the most expensive air miles in the world.
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Just to travel three hours North and three hours back by plane is around 5, 000 Canadian dollars.
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I mean, I could go to Zimbabwe and back a couple of times for that money.
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So nobody goes to the North.
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And the remoteness of the communities, etc, etc, makes it very complicated to work.
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One thing.
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Secondly, is I think the colonialism is ongoing in Nunavut.
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So people are under the yoke of colonialism.
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And so a lot of that colonialism becomes internalised as well.
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They're in a system which gives out money for everything and keeps everyone at a certain level, but it's not a system that encourages social entrepreneurship and development and all this kind of thing.
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A lot of their traditional ways of life have been completely destroyed.
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For instance, Inuit traditionally hunt over vast areas of land and they use Inuit dogs that pull the sleighs and they go off with their hunter and they go off for days and come back.
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Those dogs were essential because they understand the ice, they know where the ice is thin, they know where the animals are and they lead the hunters to where they need to go.
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So in the 1970s the Canadian mountain police went in and killed all the Inuit dogs.
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All of them, they were slaughtered.
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And so people were left without dogs and instead they were given skidoos with some petrol.
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Well, skidoos go wrong, mechanical problems, no garage, no spare parts, takes you at least a month, two months to get your spare parts, petrol runs out and you need money for petrol.
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Whereas the dogs, you fed them from the hunt and these are wild animals, so you understand how that has completely disrupted their way of living.
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So these people have had those traditional ways taken away, but very, very recently this colonialism, they only came off the land in the 60s and 70s.
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Before then they were living as nomads.
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So their experience is only 50 years old.
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So it's very interesting and difficult to work, to find ways to collaborate.
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So that's very challenging.
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But we've learned so much from it because they have very clear ways of working and they create those spaces that then they demand that you walk into.
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And so that's been a big learning experience.
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The other side of the problem is really then the political side of the problem, the Canadian government side of the problem.
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There is no political will really to change.
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If you go back into the 1950s, 1940s, there was clear statements from the Canadian government that they wanted to beat the Indian out of the Indian.
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They put all the indigenous children into residential schools, forcefully took them away from their homes, parents didn't know where their kids were.
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When they got to the school, hair was cut off, were not allowed to speak their local language, they had to eat the food they were given, Western food.
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The same thing happened around tuberculosis, people were forcibly taken from their homes if they were positive for TB, children were taken away from their mothers, young children two years old taken away from their families, brought to the south of Canada, put into TB sanatoriums, where again, they were denied the right to speak Inuktitut, they were not allowed to play, many of them report that they were chained onto beds for two years, awful, awful stories and a lot of these children and young people who went to these sanatoriums, either they died there and their parents never found them and never knew what happened to them, or the ones that did go back were seen to be white, seemed to have taken on all the airs and graces of the settlers, of the colonials, and so they were not accepted easily back into their communities.
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So those people went back extremely traumatised.
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All of this to give you a picture of this intergenerational trauma that is going on and how the government has really not done anything about that but just continued to act.
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So billions of dollars are poured into the system in Nunavut.
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There's no lack of medicines, there's no lack of medical staff, but they're all medical staff from the South.
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Inuit themselves have not got to the level where they can even get into university because the education system is so poor in their communities.
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So to get a full education, they have to come to the South.
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They have to leave their families and Inuit communities are extremely family oriented, the bond is so strong that when you take a young person out, they become lost.
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I mean, we recognise that from many environments.
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So that is really one of the challenges around that here has been that lack of political will in Canada, the historical bias against the communities themselves and that people don't believe that the communities can actually do it.
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It's really that I know better.
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You know, I've got my science, I've got my hospital training, I'm a medical doctor, I'm a this, I'm a that.
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I know better than you.
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And up till recently, indigenous peoples were seen to be wards of the state.
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They were not even recognised to be able to vote or have those rights.
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So that's a status going on.
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The other part of it is the way that the system works in Canada is it's government to government work.
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So it's government of Canada working with the territory of Nunavut.
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And so there's a bias to working with a government, which is also based in a colonial approach.
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The government's a colonial embedded structure.
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It's not about individuals being bad.
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The individuals are all great.
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It's just the system is coded to work in a certain way, which is not to work with the communities, but to work for the communities, on the communities, above the communities.
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So that, you know, I guess in the end of the day, it's this power imbalance and this structural inequity, which is really creating the difficulty.
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It sounds like quite a challenging environment.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I don't even have anything else to add.
00:19:59.963 --> 00:20:01.055
Kate, over to you.
00:20:01.909 --> 00:20:02.772
Thank you so much.
00:20:03.246 --> 00:20:11.900
Rachel, you're talking with such articulacy and passion about the situation that you're confronting there.
00:20:11.900 --> 00:20:20.272
I mean, what I'm hearing from what you're saying, earlier on in the conversation, you were talking about people being compromised and complicit in genocide in Gaza.
00:20:20.746 --> 00:20:29.981
And I absolutely recognise what you're saying, not just within the humanitarian sector, but within my own part of the ecosystem, which is global development.
00:20:30.573 --> 00:20:33.827
And I recognise the trends of complicity and silence.
00:20:34.355 --> 00:20:49.228
And I've come to think of the global development sector as being a distorted market in which power, positionality and fear of loss of status and livelihood make all of us complicit, particularly white people from the minority world.
00:20:49.299 --> 00:20:59.090
And, I think we're complicit in letting run the system of structural racism and white supremacy, which underpins coloniality.
00:20:59.573 --> 00:21:04.064
And you're talking at the moment very fluently about current coloniality and race.
00:21:04.090 --> 00:21:10.945
But earlier in the conversation you talked about there being a shared understanding across the sector that change is needed.
00:21:11.231 --> 00:21:33.432
And I might have misunderstood that or be overemphasising your apparent feeling that there's a consensus, but I come across many people who don't ascribe to the need to have a kind of root and branch change and to transform the global development and humanitarian sectors.
00:21:33.549 --> 00:21:38.105
I mean, I think there's actually a huge range of understandings and resistance to change.
00:21:38.713 --> 00:21:52.596
And I'd like to hear your comments on that, but I'm going to link to my next question, which is that in a previous conversation, you told me that getting people to take decolonisation seriously and to raise funds for decolonised action is really difficult.
00:21:53.478 --> 00:21:58.005
Do you think that the kind of the statement that I've just made links to that difficulty?
00:21:58.040 --> 00:22:09.391
And I wonder if you can unpick that a bit from your own experience of trying to raise funds, but also trying to create change both within the Canadian setting, but also more widely in your work.
00:22:09.391 --> 00:22:12.090
Yeah, thanks for bringing that clarification around that.
00:22:12.090 --> 00:22:16.855
Sometimes I think I move into rarefied circles because all the people I talk to are all into decolonisation.
00:22:16.873 --> 00:22:24.573
And so we're speaking the same language, but I agree with you that it's not even across the industry, whether it's the emergency side, which is what I'm involved in, or the broader global development side.
00:22:24.573 --> 00:22:40.055
Um but what I do think is that there is the trend towards talking about decoloniality is much more accepted than it was, and there's an acknowledgement that there's something, that there's something that needs to be addressed.
00:22:40.055 --> 00:22:42.228
I think that no one can ignore it anymore.
00:22:42.237 --> 00:22:43.873
However, they can try.
00:22:44.382 --> 00:22:49.046
I think that it's a little bit like what we did with feminism.
00:22:50.608 --> 00:22:58.108
As long as you put in your grant one little line about, yes, we will adopt the feminist principles and we will make sure that women are involved and there's gender equity.
00:22:58.472 --> 00:22:59.555
That was enough.
00:22:59.746 --> 00:23:01.263
We just put the little words in there.
00:23:01.590 --> 00:23:04.145
I think the bit the same is happening with decolonisation.
00:23:04.163 --> 00:23:08.582
Everyone is sort of putting the words in and speaking the right language, but they're not walking the talk.
00:23:09.000 --> 00:23:11.608
And that's where this sort of between the why and the how.
00:23:12.159 --> 00:23:14.250
Why do we need to do it, and how we need to do it.
00:23:14.487 --> 00:23:17.040
I think the understandings of why we need to do it are different.
00:23:17.040 --> 00:23:22.269
I think there's some people who just say, well, we'll need to do it because everyone's talking about it and we have to show goodwill.
00:23:22.540 --> 00:23:26.823
Then there's people who say, no, we need to do it because we fundamentally need to change the system.
00:23:26.823 --> 00:23:28.450
I think that's where the division comes.
00:23:28.778 --> 00:23:39.173
I think there's a lot of people who believe we can just make some little tweaks, put a bit more DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, have a few more black faces on the boards, have a few more regional offices.
00:23:39.454 --> 00:23:40.981
Then, you know, we're going to be good.
00:23:41.191 --> 00:23:45.154
And that kind of makes sense from a financial perspective and an operational perspective as well.
00:23:45.382 --> 00:23:46.818
And that was what we always wanted to do.
00:23:47.219 --> 00:23:50.400
But this is just lip service and this is very cosmetic.
00:23:50.654 --> 00:24:03.836
I absolutely agree with you Kate is that the fundamental understanding of how this system needs to work to change and pivot totally, this is not accepted by many people.
00:24:04.108 --> 00:24:08.663
One of the lines that I heard so often was, if ain't broke, don't fix it.
00:24:08.691 --> 00:24:09.781
We are doing really well.
00:24:09.781 --> 00:24:11.009
Our results are really good.
00:24:11.009 --> 00:24:11.909
Our metrics are great.
00:24:11.909 --> 00:24:13.055
Why do we need to change?
00:24:13.055 --> 00:24:18.719
This is something that I heard ad nauseam, so I think there is that sort of conflict.
00:24:18.719 --> 00:24:23.972
I think we have to be very careful of people who say, well, this is just being politically correct.
00:24:23.972 --> 00:24:27.950
So if you want me to use those words, I will, but it doesn't actually go really deep down.
00:24:28.923 --> 00:24:32.395
So why is it very difficult for it to be taken seriously?
00:24:32.432 --> 00:24:33.686
I think exactly what you said.
00:24:33.704 --> 00:24:35.377
People do not like change.
00:24:35.568 --> 00:24:36.932
People like the status quo.
00:24:37.340 --> 00:24:38.404
They're good where they are.
00:24:38.404 --> 00:24:39.459
They're getting their salary.
00:24:39.459 --> 00:24:44.614
They're comfortable in their jobs in Geneva, in London, in Montreal, wherever it is, they're comfortable.
00:24:44.814 --> 00:24:46.650
They've got families who are dependent on their salary.
00:24:46.650 --> 00:24:50.505
It goes back to my very original comment that this industry has changed.
00:24:50.832 --> 00:24:52.987
It didn't used to be a profession or a career.
00:24:52.987 --> 00:24:54.114
Now it's a profession.
00:24:54.132 --> 00:24:57.678
I think the word humanitarian professional is an oxymoron.
00:24:57.950 --> 00:24:59.231
It doesn't go together.
00:24:59.558 --> 00:25:01.413
Humanitarians, we're all humanitarians.
00:25:01.755 --> 00:25:02.963
We all care about our neighbors.
00:25:02.963 --> 00:25:07.364
If my neighbor falls over, my elderly neighbors, I'll go and help them as a humanitarian act.
00:25:07.537 --> 00:25:11.663
We've completely lost ourselves in this dilution of really what we're doing here.
00:25:12.145 --> 00:25:18.682
And I think that is a big cause of, and a big reason why this decoloniality discussion is so critical.
00:25:18.990 --> 00:25:22.919
It's because we need to rethink the whole damn thing, because it's gone.
00:25:22.936 --> 00:25:24.000
It's got lost.
00:25:24.163 --> 00:25:25.046
It's got lost.
00:25:25.428 --> 00:25:30.490
And it is just reproducing and perpetuating everything that we don't want.
00:25:30.709 --> 00:25:47.686
And everything that when we started in our more idealistic years of saying, I want to do this because I really want people to be able to take care of themselves and be able to survive and get through this idea of saving lives that is so kind in my corner of the complex industry.
00:25:47.858 --> 00:25:50.086
Saving lives, this is done with.
00:25:50.704 --> 00:25:52.478
This is not about saving lives.
00:25:52.478 --> 00:25:57.586
This is not about that I'm going to go somewhere and save, which is what we were thinking in the 90s.
00:25:57.641 --> 00:26:03.031
We were going there to bring technology, medicines that were going to help to save people's lives.
00:26:03.314 --> 00:26:04.568
We're in a different world now.
00:26:05.614 --> 00:26:08.614
So I think the white fragility is a big cause of this as well.
00:26:08.623 --> 00:26:23.404
Many people that I've spoken with feel I've dedicated my life to working in Africa, I'm not racist, I've done everything that I can do, I've lived with people, I've lived in the community, I've got down and dirty, don't call me a racist.
00:26:23.432 --> 00:26:29.632
So there's this very much this fragility that as white people we have and I know because I've had to deal with that.
00:26:29.868 --> 00:26:37.222
I'm a white woman with massive privilege and I was able to do all the things I did because of the color of my skin and because of the background that I'm from.
00:26:37.478 --> 00:26:41.913
And I recognise that I've been able to do the things that I've done because of that.
00:26:42.231 --> 00:26:49.441
And it is very difficult and very confronting to say, I'm a racist, I've got privilege, all of these things.
00:26:49.441 --> 00:26:50.558
It's very, very hard to do.
00:26:50.558 --> 00:26:51.105
So I get it.
00:26:51.195 --> 00:26:52.096
I get that it's hard.
00:26:52.096 --> 00:26:53.368
It doesn't mean we don't do it.
00:26:53.413 --> 00:26:54.259
We have to do it.
00:26:54.840 --> 00:27:05.769
And it really challenges this privilege that many of us have, many people looking like me have, in our industry where we are the ones living in Europe, where the headquarters are and where the power is.
00:27:06.186 --> 00:27:30.763
And so to do, to really enact or to work on decoloniality, we're basically putting ourselves out of a job, which is what it should be, but no one wants to put themselves out of a job because as I said, the children are now dependent on the income and the house and the mortgage and got the big, you know, 35 million dollar office in the middle of Barcelona or middle of Geneva or whatever it is, you know, there is a whole infrastructure around this.
00:27:31.519 --> 00:27:39.428
I think also, one of the things that I've learned from my personal experience is how bad I have been at listening.
00:27:40.209 --> 00:27:44.818
And when I talk about listening, I don't just mean hearing the words, but hearing what's behind those words.
00:27:45.346 --> 00:27:54.391
We are not educated like that, as part of the settler communities, the colonial history to really care or worry about what other people say.
00:27:54.391 --> 00:28:00.472
What matters is what we think, what we say, and to break that and to learn to listen and truly listen.
00:28:00.472 --> 00:28:10.118
So listen to what you're saying without thinking, right, what am I going to say next, but rather really listen and take the time to take that in, we're not willing to take that time to listen.
00:28:10.118 --> 00:28:15.308
If we want to work in communities, if we want to work in decoloniality, we have to listen.
00:28:15.873 --> 00:28:17.327
We have to take the time.
00:28:17.709 --> 00:28:19.673
That means that the results are slower.
00:28:20.064 --> 00:28:21.737
The results are not linear.
00:28:21.827 --> 00:28:23.064
The outcomes are not linear.
00:28:23.346 --> 00:28:25.599
We have to embrace different ways of thinking.
00:28:25.855 --> 00:28:39.472
We have to embrace more circular, more the idea we have amongst some First Nations here in Canada of the seven generations back and the seven generations forward that every act you take is affecting seven generations back and will affect the next seven generations.
00:28:39.781 --> 00:28:49.808
These kind of thinkings, principles like Ubuntu from South Africa, you know, these ways of being, we have to start to absorb them and start to be able to take them on.
00:28:49.808 --> 00:28:52.228
And I think people find that very difficult to do.
00:28:52.564 --> 00:28:55.537
So decoloniality is no small feat.
00:28:55.799 --> 00:28:57.719
This is not a lip service, a set of word.
00:28:57.719 --> 00:29:26.564
It challenges the entire way that I think as a human being, as a white woman, that my organisation thinks and as a bigger organisation, whether it's MSF or care, whether it's a university or whether it's an UN institution, it is going right down to the core, challenges completely the way we think and people that's a lot of work and that's where people's patience runs out.
00:29:26.882 --> 00:29:28.428
Especially in the emergency world.
00:29:28.827 --> 00:29:35.700
Because I hear a lot from people, I love what you're doing, it's great, it's so good for all that kind of like, development, chronic, all that kind of work.
00:29:35.990 --> 00:29:38.246
But you're never going to work in an emergency, you realise that.
00:29:38.618 --> 00:29:40.691
And I'm like, the emergencies is probably where you need it the most.
00:29:41.555 --> 00:29:44.000
Because who are the first responders in an emergency?
00:29:44.200 --> 00:29:47.127
It's not you sitting in Geneva with your emergency crew.
00:29:47.263 --> 00:29:49.855
It's the communities on the ground that are picking up the pieces.
00:29:49.864 --> 00:29:51.055
They're the first responders.
00:29:51.299 --> 00:29:55.663
So, yes, you should go there and take the time and understand from them how they want to do it.
00:29:56.191 --> 00:29:56.481
Thank you.
00:29:56.481 --> 00:29:57.919
I really liked that response.
00:29:57.972 --> 00:30:07.627
And I think your point about learning to listen properly rather than listening as we often do as white people for a cue to speak, is a really important point.
00:30:07.636 --> 00:30:15.712
And I also really liked what you were saying about, taking a pause and being patient and learning to benefit from circular learning.
00:30:15.712 --> 00:30:18.115
So, learnings that come from other cultures.
00:30:18.688 --> 00:30:22.260
And I think historically, the minority world has been really poor at that.
00:30:22.269 --> 00:30:31.233
And I think we really could benefit not just from integrating Ubuntu leadership into our professional practices, but much, much else besides.
00:30:31.369 --> 00:30:32.196
So thank you for that.
00:30:32.760 --> 00:30:38.025
I hear from our previous conversation that SeeChange has produced and piloted a set of tools.
00:30:38.470 --> 00:30:42.060
Now, we do love a tool, and I'd like to hear more about your tools.
00:30:42.405 --> 00:30:57.420
Because I think things that are practical, that help us to do stuff, I find very encouraging, because sometimes when we're stuck, knowing that somebody's piloted an approach and they've found it to work can be very encouraging.
00:30:57.655 --> 00:31:02.001
So can you tell us a little bit about your tools and how you came to develop them and how they work?
00:31:03.884 --> 00:31:21.515
Yes, I like a good tool as well and I realise that you know you can't go anywhere without some tools because people need something very physical and concrete to grab onto to say okay because as we were saying before a lot of people are talking about community centered work you'll see patient centered approaches but the actual how of it, is not happening.
00:31:21.769 --> 00:31:22.951
So we developed three tools.
00:31:23.652 --> 00:31:29.834
So the first tool that we developed was during COVID 19 and it was a pandemic response roadmap.
00:31:30.260 --> 00:31:35.251
And this was co created and co designed with one Inuit community that we were working with.
00:31:35.834 --> 00:31:38.733
And what happened was I was sitting here.
00:31:38.760 --> 00:31:41.878
They just announced the lockdown on March the 13th in Canada.
00:31:42.361 --> 00:31:45.846
Someone phoned me up from the community and said, Rachel, What do we do?
00:31:45.875 --> 00:31:46.902
We're terrified.
00:31:46.920 --> 00:31:49.711
We remember the influenza pandemic of 1919.
00:31:49.711 --> 00:31:51.593
Our grandparents, great grandparents died.
00:31:51.920 --> 00:31:52.955
What is going to happen to us?
00:31:52.974 --> 00:31:54.065
Are we all going to die?
00:31:54.346 --> 00:31:55.238
What do we do?
00:31:55.720 --> 00:32:08.747
And then they received a big thick document from the government of how to respond to COVID, which was written in English, highly technical scientific language way, just was not a language that they could relate to.
00:32:09.438 --> 00:32:12.420
So we started to work together and I said, well, it's quite simple.
00:32:12.547 --> 00:32:13.602
There are three things you need to do.
00:32:13.602 --> 00:32:18.192
You need to organise, you need to prepare, and then if it comes, you need to respond.
00:32:18.510 --> 00:32:19.247
Simple as that.
00:32:19.464 --> 00:32:20.911
They're like, okay, this is great.
00:32:21.337 --> 00:32:23.701
And then I said, okay, so what would you do to organise?
00:32:23.720 --> 00:32:24.619
What would you do to prepare?
00:32:24.619 --> 00:32:25.446
What would you do to respond?
00:32:25.446 --> 00:32:26.655
So we started to build it.
00:32:26.664 --> 00:32:31.801
So we created a roadmap just for that community, which gave them all the things and it built on all their capacity.
00:32:32.269 --> 00:32:38.343
They knew where all their elders were and they could use the youth who were healthy to go and deliver food baskets to the elders.
00:32:38.596 --> 00:32:40.196
They knew how to entertain the children.
00:32:40.196 --> 00:32:46.352
They knew how to use local radio to keep the houses connected because you gotta remember this is March, it's like minus 50 up there in blizzards.
00:32:47.238 --> 00:32:52.655
And then they knew the houses where there were people who were couch surfing that they needed to deal with.
00:32:52.664 --> 00:32:57.683
They knew where the issues of drugs were a problem, or alcohol were a problem, or abuse, or all these things.
00:32:57.683 --> 00:33:02.438
They knew all of that so they could work out how to rearrange a little bit their community and come together.
00:33:03.201 --> 00:33:06.155
It was so successful that other communities heard about it.
00:33:06.174 --> 00:33:08.211
We put it on as an internet version.
00:33:08.438 --> 00:33:10.464
Other communities throughout Nunavut used it.
00:33:10.510 --> 00:33:13.955
Importantly, it was in Inuktitut, as well as in English.
00:33:14.375 --> 00:33:23.056
And then in Latin America, MSF got interested in it because of course, the humanitarian industry responding to crisis was stuck in place, could do absolutely nothing.
00:33:23.483 --> 00:33:25.547
And everyone had to fend for themselves.
00:33:25.547 --> 00:33:36.365
And it was a moment actually that I'm surprised that we didn't recognise it more, how powerful communities were in responding to COVID without any external support whatsoever, what they needed was information.
00:33:36.711 --> 00:33:41.402
They needed to understand what it was, and then they needed information on how to protect themselves and their communities.
00:33:41.865 --> 00:33:49.411
So with MSF, we translated it into French, into Swahili, into Spanish and started to use it all around the world.
00:33:49.438 --> 00:33:51.192
It was open source, anyone could access it.
00:33:51.201 --> 00:33:52.247
So that was one tool.
00:33:52.528 --> 00:33:59.102
And I do hold the hope that when the next pandemic arrives, that can be converted again to address whatever that next pandemic is.
00:33:59.111 --> 00:34:08.769
It's a really interesting resource base of tools and crowdsourced with communities putting in their own tools, uploading what they used, how they did it and all the different parts.
00:34:09.905 --> 00:34:22.224
The second tool that we created is called the Community First Framework, which really built off this idea of, well, how would a truly community centered process look like in the language of an international NGO?
00:34:22.788 --> 00:34:25.543
Thinking about a project cycle of an NGO in an emergency.
00:34:25.543 --> 00:34:27.788
Again, remember I'm on the emergency side of things.
00:34:27.788 --> 00:34:29.079
I'm really focused on that.
00:34:29.543 --> 00:34:37.710
So we built a four step framework, that then we piloted and tested with MSF over two years and then finalised last summer.
00:34:38.092 --> 00:34:39.956
So it's got four steps, basically.
00:34:39.983 --> 00:34:40.693
Connect.
00:34:40.811 --> 00:34:42.719
So how do you connect with the community?
00:34:42.719 --> 00:34:55.065
And for me, this is probably the most critical part, because it's really about building and nurturing a trusting relationship with that community, so that you can understand the community's own priorities, so they can feel, they can really tell you what they're thinking.
00:34:55.411 --> 00:34:58.538
And we found that in emergencies, we can do that in a very, very short time.
00:34:58.583 --> 00:35:00.083
It doesn't take six years to develop.
00:35:00.675 --> 00:35:08.028
It can really happen in a few hours, because communities are extremely intelligent people, and they know when they've got a crisis, and they know when they need to move fast.
00:35:08.505 --> 00:35:10.224
So if you come in and say, okay, what do you want to do?
00:35:10.224 --> 00:35:11.860
They're like, we want to do this, this, this, and this.
00:35:11.896 --> 00:35:13.369
And we, they know exactly what they need to do.
00:35:13.806 --> 00:35:15.760
So this was the first part.
00:35:16.114 --> 00:35:17.905
Then the second part is engaging.
00:35:17.905 --> 00:35:21.652
So really identifying the people who form what we call community activators.
00:35:21.679 --> 00:35:24.784
So that the idea is that the community is activating itself.
00:35:25.083 --> 00:35:34.856
And looking for the unusual suspects in those, not just the health committee of the community, but what about those adolescents who are not going to school, who should be involved, because they're the most vulnerable.
00:35:35.092 --> 00:35:37.202
You know, all these kind of different people coming in.
00:35:37.202 --> 00:35:46.019
So we did that in Sierra Leone, very successfully with the adolescent girls, who were setting up a drop in centre for adolescents to deal with sexual health.
00:35:46.378 --> 00:35:51.306
And they were really talking, the ones in school receive menstrual pads, the one who weren't in school didn't receive them.
00:35:51.715 --> 00:35:56.114
So how do we help those girls who are the ones who are most at risk of sexual violence?
00:35:56.387 --> 00:35:58.425
And we would never have, I would never have known that.
00:35:58.425 --> 00:36:02.425
I mean, I just didn't think about the difficulties of buying menstrual pads and so on.
00:36:02.443 --> 00:36:04.543
So how that affected the programming.
00:36:05.315 --> 00:36:15.242
The third part is activating where you actually get to co design those solutions that mobilise the community's strengths and their assets and address the challenges that the community has identified.
00:36:15.242 --> 00:36:33.652
And there we have dipped into the world of development where you have these incredible community based participatory methodologies developed by people like Paolo Freire, where we all know, and then in research, you're both researchers, you know, you have the community based participatory action research.
00:36:33.896 --> 00:36:36.460
So we went and looked to all those incredible systems.
00:36:36.460 --> 00:36:50.402
We looked at indigenous systems of participatory action, and we kind of honed it down to a few really key participatory methodologies that you could use very quickly and get very fast results with a community and engage them.
00:36:50.664 --> 00:36:54.565
And so we use things like social mapping, solution trees, maps of the future.
00:36:54.920 --> 00:36:59.210
And these are things that we've done in Peru, in Sierra Leone, in Venezuela, and in Brazil.
00:37:00.369 --> 00:37:03.996
And then the final part of that framework is the Reflect stage.
00:37:04.452 --> 00:37:09.715
And for that Reflect stage, the idea of it is all of these steps are, is not really linear.
00:37:09.778 --> 00:37:14.742
We put it linear, it's a good way to explain it, but they're all interacting and coming in at different moments.
00:37:15.061 --> 00:37:20.971
The Reflection is really the participatory monitoring and evaluation and learning aspect, which is our third toolkit.
00:37:21.052 --> 00:37:29.170
And that is a toolkit on how do you look at how the communities are involved in the co design of those health strategies.
00:37:29.371 --> 00:37:30.398
How are those playing out?
00:37:30.407 --> 00:37:31.771
How do they need to be tweaked?
00:37:31.971 --> 00:37:39.838
In which parts of the project cycle, so we use those local knowledge and experience to improve the services and programs as we're going along.
00:37:40.148 --> 00:37:45.476
So it's not just a monitoring evaluation that's done by an external evaluator after five years of programs where you could really done this, this.
00:37:45.666 --> 00:37:52.266
It's a constant process and it's the communities evaluating, auto evaluating and also evaluating the role of the external support.
00:37:52.858 --> 00:37:57.594
So we integrate that monitoring and evaluation all through the community first framework.
00:37:58.030 --> 00:37:59.557
And all of those tools are open source.
00:37:59.876 --> 00:38:01.467
They're available on our website.
00:38:01.721 --> 00:38:03.376
Anyone can access them.
00:38:03.476 --> 00:38:06.757
We love to hear how people have used them and whether it's been useful or not.
00:38:07.284 --> 00:38:14.112
For the moment, the framework has been developed specifically for Médecins Sans Frontières, done in collaboration with them.
00:38:14.112 --> 00:38:18.494
And the idea is that it can be taken and developed and adapted to different organisations.
00:38:18.958 --> 00:38:24.248
And we really hope that this shows a way of how to actually make those changes inside the projects.
00:38:24.820 --> 00:38:36.666
And we've seen really good results, teams on the ground, especially all the staff from the country are thrilled because they start to feel that there's spaces and places they can put their voice, their understanding, their historical and cultural knowledge.
00:38:38.307 --> 00:38:41.170
And the end of the day, the idea is to improve the outcomes, right?
00:38:41.170 --> 00:38:43.090
And that we still have to see.
00:38:43.590 --> 00:38:53.007
But just anecdotally, because it also requires different metrics, it's not just those lovely quantitative metrics that we love so much, but also those qualitative metrics of how does community feel?
00:38:53.016 --> 00:38:54.943
How do people feel when they go to the health center?
00:38:54.943 --> 00:38:55.807
How do they feel?
00:38:56.170 --> 00:39:04.289
And the anecdotal evidence coming back is that people feel heard and feel listened to and feel hopeful that this could actually help them to address their needs.
00:39:06.148 --> 00:39:06.630
Thanks, Rachel.
00:39:06.630 --> 00:39:09.021
I'm very excited about those tools.
00:39:09.021 --> 00:39:11.349
I'm certainly going to be downloading them myself.
00:39:11.349 --> 00:39:22.076
You know, I can absolutely see how useful they would be in the work that I do and working with civil society organisations in various different countries.
00:39:22.757 --> 00:39:25.594
So I'm definitely going to be looking at those myself.
00:39:26.121 --> 00:39:44.458
So, I've really enjoyed talking to you and hearing about your work and I'm fascinated to hear about the communities that you work with in Canada because I'm obviously very ignorant about Canadian communities because I honestly didn't realise the depths of the challenges that they were facing.
00:39:44.576 --> 00:39:49.911
And I'm rather stunned and horrified, actually, to hear that.
00:39:49.967 --> 00:39:50.820
I also have to
00:39:50.820 --> 00:39:51.239
say.
00:39:52.434 --> 00:39:53.661
Yeah, sorry Nompilo.
00:39:53.681 --> 00:40:07.717
Without interjecting you, I'm also like, just surprised, you know, because often I think of the southern lands, where I think developing Africa, therefore, so it's been intriguing and a learning moment for me to realise just even the work that's being done in places like Canada.
00:40:07.880 --> 00:40:10.067
So I tend to echo what you're saying, Kate.
00:40:10.349 --> 00:40:10.849
Back to you.
00:40:10.940 --> 00:40:44.380
Yeah, I mean I did know that health outcomes in the United States were worse for people of color, and particularly African Americans, but I hadn't realised that the Inuit communities in Canada were so poorly housed and actually the policies that were ongoing today are so deeply colonial in nature so that's quite an eye opener for me because it makes me realise how dynamic and long lasting and embedded these processes of white supremacy and coloniality are across the world.
00:40:44.461 --> 00:40:54.161
And I just think it means that people from the minority world white community have a lot of thinking, reflecting and change to engage in.
00:40:55.081 --> 00:41:08.302
And that brings me to our last question, Rachel, other than personal transformation and the inner work, which seem to be the two themes that are brought up over and over again by my guests when I ask this question.
00:41:08.793 --> 00:41:25.293
What do you think are the priority actions, or the first steps that our listeners and viewers could take to contribute positively to the process of decolonising anti racist action or shifting power?
00:41:25.293 --> 00:41:46.630
I think probably the most important thing that I've done apart from the personal transformation is to be the one to take a stand in meetings about these issues and to push it and to take what is, you know, it can't be denied, it's a personal risk when you stand up in a meeting and you start to call out these things, we have to do it and we have to take that courage to do it.
00:41:46.657 --> 00:41:51.012
And our non white colleagues, if I can say, they deserve that.
00:41:51.507 --> 00:42:01.590
They deserve that we stand up and I've seen the impacts of standing up and speaking up and how it's opened spaces for other voices then to come in and speak their truth in those environments as well.
00:42:01.590 --> 00:42:12.561
I am in such deep admiration and I have for people who are continually putting themselves in the line of fire based on their color or their background and their culture.
00:42:12.971 --> 00:42:19.061
And I've seen my colleagues so drained, and looking so strong in a meeting and then afterwards just crumbling down.
00:42:19.635 --> 00:42:20.961
And it's just not fair.
00:42:21.652 --> 00:42:22.916
It's just not fair.
00:42:23.135 --> 00:42:24.326
We have to do this.
00:42:24.771 --> 00:42:41.670
And I think, you know, one of the things that has been really shocking for me has been around Gaza, and the kind of lash back we got for speaking out on the genocide, and calling it a genocide and demanding that it was called a genocide by humanitarian organisations, which proves to me that we need to talk even louder.
00:42:42.126 --> 00:42:43.461
We need to be protesting.
00:42:43.471 --> 00:42:45.916
We need to be in those spaces.
00:42:46.061 --> 00:42:55.471
I think the second thing for me as well is refusing to show up on a panel or whatever if there isn't the meaningful diversity on that panel.
00:42:55.717 --> 00:43:05.581
Already for a long time I refused to show up on a panel that's got six men and me, but now it's not even enough to have a gender balance, you have to have a cultural racial balance in it as well.
00:43:06.025 --> 00:43:10.543
So I do not show up in panels that have predominantly white women in them.
00:43:11.070 --> 00:43:13.362
I'm talking about feminism, this I will not do.
00:43:14.143 --> 00:43:16.489
So I think these kind of acts are really important.
00:43:17.061 --> 00:43:25.708
The third thing I think is to get involved with actively anti racist decolonial movements.
00:43:26.126 --> 00:43:36.998
So I just came back from Peru 10 days ago where we had the initial meeting of a Permanent Forum on Decolonisation for Latin America.
00:43:37.820 --> 00:43:44.139
And it was just the most wonderful space because first of all, I didn't speak, which was great.
00:43:44.202 --> 00:43:47.193
I just sat as part of the group, but very much in the background.
00:43:47.485 --> 00:43:53.458
The whole thing was led by indigenous peoples from 21 different countries in Latin America, bringing their culture.
00:43:53.458 --> 00:44:05.702
The center of the meeting was a massive altar that was created to Mother Earth, bringing fruit and vegetables and flowers and plants, all the symbols of what the earth gives us and the connection between humans, plants and animals.
00:44:06.221 --> 00:44:11.048
And that altar was, you know, it was about 25 meters by five meters.
00:44:11.048 --> 00:44:12.902
It was large, very, very large.
00:44:13.148 --> 00:44:14.539
And we were just around the edge.
00:44:14.539 --> 00:44:19.003
So we were like diminutive around the edge of this altar that kept reminding us the whole time.
00:44:19.039 --> 00:44:20.385
And this for me was decolonial.
00:44:20.630 --> 00:44:30.820
The whole way the meeting was run, there was no, there was a very loose agenda, but introductions, took half of the two days, was just getting to know each other.
00:44:30.831 --> 00:44:31.512
Who are you?
00:44:31.548 --> 00:44:32.402
Where are you from?
00:44:32.530 --> 00:44:33.302
Why are you here?
00:44:33.302 --> 00:44:34.021
What do you believe in?
00:44:34.030 --> 00:44:35.885
Giving people the space to talk?
00:44:36.385 --> 00:44:41.862
And after two days, we came up with a charter on decoloniality from that meeting.
00:44:42.090 --> 00:44:45.452
We would never be able to do that in a meeting done the western style.
00:44:45.735 --> 00:44:52.190
And everyone would say, well, it's such a waste of time spending half a day just doing introductions and then the other half kind of doing cultural things.
00:44:52.481 --> 00:44:57.353
No, it set the basis and the parameters for everything that we produced.
00:44:57.353 --> 00:45:02.570
And the next day we produced a document, co created, co designed, done and dusted.
00:45:02.626 --> 00:45:04.161
Hope everyone can go and have a look at that.
00:45:04.726 --> 00:45:15.326
So that going and supporting and encouraging those kinds of spaces rather than the old classic conferences and events that have been organised.
00:45:15.344 --> 00:45:19.380
But look for those new spaces where the communities are really the ones guiding and leading the way.
00:45:19.380 --> 00:45:20.099
Thank you, Rachel.
00:45:20.099 --> 00:45:33.025
And as you said, take a moment to sit in the audience rather than dominating the space as we are trained and kind of professionally positioned to do so often as kind of elite white women.
00:45:33.717 --> 00:45:45.693
So, I'm very conscious of the need to create space for others and to kind of sit back in silence and it goes to so badly against the grain, that it's definitely something that I have to learn to do and to practice.
00:45:45.775 --> 00:46:15.561
And I think where you finished in the conversation there is a really lovely place to finish because, again, you were talking about respecting the cultures of the world and creating space for circular learning and not imposing Western norms and Western culture on a way a meeting should be run, but allowing space for other ways of being, and then seeing how incredibly productive that other way of being is.
00:46:16.152 --> 00:46:18.844
So I think that's kind of at the heart of the whole thing, isn't it?
00:46:18.971 --> 00:46:27.608
It's actually stepping off the top of the pyramid and stepping back from the center stage as part of that process as white women.
00:46:28.376 --> 00:46:30.548
So, thank you so much for coming.
00:46:30.612 --> 00:46:34.467
I know that I'm going to be taking a look at the tools that you recommended.
00:46:34.503 --> 00:46:51.648
I would strongly recommend all our listeners and viewers to click on the show notes below this episode, find out more about Rachel's work, the tools that she's discussed, and we will be peppering the show notes with lots of links to her work and the comments that she's been making during our conversation today.
00:46:52.030 --> 00:46:52.902
Thank you again, Rachel.
00:46:52.902 --> 00:46:54.958
I found this a very enriching conversation.
00:46:54.958 --> 00:46:57.775
I'll hand over to Nompilo now for the last farewell.
00:46:59.661 --> 00:47:00.407
Thank you, Rachel.
00:47:00.416 --> 00:47:07.335
Thank you for just sharing a little bit more about your context and for just enlightening us about the work that you're doing.
00:47:07.353 --> 00:47:16.534
And like Kate, I'm so excited just about the practical tools and steps that you shared because I'm constantly finding a lot of these debates to be theoretical with no real practical steps.
00:47:16.534 --> 00:47:18.425
So, yeah, it's going to be interesting.
00:47:18.552 --> 00:47:21.934
I'm just trying to start implementing them around my development work as well.
00:47:22.371 --> 00:47:22.817
Thank you.
00:47:23.643 --> 00:47:24.099
Great.
00:47:24.152 --> 00:47:25.271
Thank you so much for having me.
00:47:25.271 --> 00:47:26.775
It's been a real pleasure to meet you both.
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.500
Hello, I'm Professor Kate Bird, and this is the Power Shift Decolonising Development.
00:00:05.150 --> 00:00:06.040
Today, Dr.
00:00:06.040 --> 00:00:23.850
Nompilo Ndlovu and I are speaking to Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, an activist, lawyer, humanitarian, and founder of SeeChange, an organisation which seeks to impact humanitarian organisations to shift to a more community centred approach and decolonise the sector.
00:00:23.850 --> 00:00:49.969
We talk with Rachel about her Community First pilot project, implemented with MSF, which co created health strategies with affected communities in several countries and its community centered approach and its work with Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic region, where they have created an open source framework and co create TB and mental health initiatives with the local communities.
00:00:49.969 --> 00:00:53.420
Listen on for more, and don't forget to like or share.
00:00:53.469 --> 00:01:01.990
To receive practical resources on Shifting Power, do sign up via our website, devhubuk.
00:01:01.990 --> 00:01:02.509
org.
00:01:02.619 --> 00:01:05.019
Scroll down on any page and sign up.
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Look forward to seeing you again.
00:01:08.644 --> 00:01:09.305
Bye for now.
00:01:09.305 --> 00:01:19.831
Welcome to the Power Shift, Decolonising Development, the podcast series seeking to bring together thinkers, practitioners, and activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools for practical action.
00:01:20.368 --> 00:01:23.623
I'm Professor Kate Bird, a socio economist and director of the Development Hub.
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Today's co host is Dr.
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Nompilo Ndlovu.
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Over to you, Nompilo.
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Greetings, I'm Dr.
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Nompilo Ndovu.
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I'm a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa.
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I'm an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa.
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Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation.
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My PhD focused on mass violence, memory, and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe.
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Back to you, Kate.
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Thanks, Nompilo.
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Today we're very excited to be talking to Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, an activist, lawyer, and humanitarian who's been working for many years leading positions for Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders.
00:02:09.741 --> 00:02:19.650
Rachel founded SeeChange in 2018 and works to impact humanitarian organisations to shift to a more community centered approach, contributing to decolonisation in the sector.
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SeeChange and MSF cooperated on a successful community first pilot project in which MSF teams with co created health strategies with affected communities in several countries.
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SeaChange also uses this community centered approach in its work with Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic region, where they support TB and mental health initiatives that are co created with the community.
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For more on Rachel and her work, click on the show notes below this episode.
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And back to you, Nompilo, for our first question.
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Thank you.
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Okay.
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Rachel, can you tell us about your past work in the humanitarian sector?
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And what led you to establish SeeChange?
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First of all, thanks very much for having me on your podcast.
00:03:03.996 --> 00:03:06.195
It's really thrilling to be here and to meet you both.
00:03:06.677 --> 00:03:09.805
I guess I'll start with what led me to establish SeeChange.
00:03:09.813 --> 00:03:11.596
In one word, I would say disillusion.
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So to kind of reel that back a little bit, when I started in this work in the early 1990s, there was no such thing as a humanitarian sector.
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And so I never self identified as a humanitarian.
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We were a bunch of volunteers that were helping people who were facing emergencies.
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It wasn't considered a career.
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It wasn't a career path.
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There was no salaries.
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So I mean, that has its pros and its cons, but just to make it clear how different it was then than today.
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Today, now, of course, it is a career, it's a profession, it's an industry, and with that we've brought together lots of structures and hierarchies and policies.
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And really, when I look back on those 30 odd years, the only thing that I see that's the same is really the principles, the same principles that we had at the beginning, those humanitarian principles.
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And even some of those today are engraved out, especially when we see what's happening in Palestine and so on.
00:04:05.405 --> 00:04:09.014
So nowadays I'm tending to call myself more recovering humanitarian.
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And it's really this questioning of the system today that led me to found SeeChange.
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So as you mentioned, you know, I work with MSF in various leadership positions, notably before and after and during the genocide in Rwanda.
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And I was head of mission, regional humanitarian affairs director in Latin America.
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And I also worked a lot on access to medicines issues.
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And then I left for a period of nine or so years, where I worked with a student organisation.
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I was raising three sons at the time, so it was better suited to my lifestyle that I needed.
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And then I came back to MSF in 2013 and really went at a much higher level on the international board of directors.
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So the overall steering and direction of the organisation.
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And I mentioned that time period because during that time, I've really witnessed the transformation of this humanitarian system.
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In some ways, I saw how the industry changed for the good.
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I mean, there were a lot of important things that have been done, but I've also seen how it's become increasingly disconnected from the reality of people and communities on the ground and how it's been perpetuating this sort of charitable model, um, really, which is at the heart of this problem of coloniality.
00:05:18.978 --> 00:05:24.341
So perpetuating that charitable model on communities are extremely sophisticated, just as an example.
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I mean, communities in Kenya cottoned on to telehealth way before any humanitarian organisations did.
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But we had this system that doesn't really allow that organic growth from the communities to translate.
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It's very much this top down approach run by more and more bureaucrats and supervisors that are sitting at a distance more frequently now to the communities.
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And so after spending these six years on the international board, there was a lot of things going on in the world in terms of the migration crisis, in terms of the attacks on health system in Afghanistan and Syria.
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And then the Ebola epidemic, which broke out at that time.
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I really got to see how difficult it was for an organisation the size of MSF to really make the changes and the moves it needed fast enough.
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Because when we look at the world today, we see these cascading humanitarian crises, we see what we're facing in terms of the climate emergency, which is accelerating, the increase of number of people on the move, forced to leave their homes because of environment, war, conflict, and plus our global situation in terms of conflict today, which is in a terrible state with the Sudan, with Syria, with Palestine, all of these issues going on.
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So I decided that if I really wanted to look at the how of making the change, because I think a lot of people understood, yes, it's a colonial system, it's anchored in a colonial structure and mindset, there is racism, there's social injustice, people were talking as if they knew why it needed to change.
00:06:54.704 --> 00:07:02.478
But then they would say, but it's okay, we'll just make some little tweaks around the edges, and then we'll all understand that, and then we'll just get on, and it was just business as usual.
00:07:02.869 --> 00:07:13.040
And for me, it was in this how that we really needed to change, and that was why I founded the SeeChange initiative, was to look at how do we actually implement decolonial practices?
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How do we truly centre communities in a way that honours, respects and builds on their capacities, their strengths, their historical knowledge, their cultural knowledge?
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And how do we together learn how to do this differently because what we're doing now doesn't work.
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It's clear what we're doing now does not work.
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We have to change.
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We have to change.
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We cannot carry on like this.
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We are not able to face what's going on and in fact what we're doing and I think that Palestine for me is such a red line.
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What we're actually doing is perpetuating those colonial structures by not being able to speak out as humanitarian organisations.
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Clearly, since the beginning about the genocide in Palestine, in Gaza, we have become unwitting accomplices to it.
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And it's really problematic.
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So humanitarian organisations, need to take this moment to reflect.
00:08:05.995 --> 00:08:09.577
So what I'm trying to do now with SeeChange is see how to do that.
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It's interesting because as I was thinking about, well, what could I do to, you know, where could I work?
00:08:14.814 --> 00:08:22.232
And, you know, your mind always goes to the Global South and that's our traditional stomping ground, if I can put it that way.
00:08:22.641 --> 00:08:25.295
And actually I just, I'm new in Canada.
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I'm not a Canadian by birth.
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But I moved here about 20 years ago, and I'd never heard about this crisis that's going on inside Canada, which is this epidemic of tuberculosis amongst the indigenous peoples, especially the Inuit in the North of Canada.
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And when I heard that there are 300 now, it's actually since COVID, 600 times more likely to contract tuberculosis than any non indigenous Canadian born person.
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I said, well, this is ridiculous.
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We can get rid of this.
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We can change this.
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So I started to work.
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It was Stephen Lewis who was the former Special Representative on HIV AIDS and who became a very big activist as well around tuberculosis in more recent years.
00:09:03.231 --> 00:09:18.691
He'd come back from the North talking about the cultural genocide that was happening in Nunavut, which is the province in the North, and saying, you know, that these issues were not just simply medical issues of tuberculosis, but actually structural issues of embedded racism, embedded colonialism.
00:09:18.691 --> 00:09:22.019
And this was the result of Canadian colonialism, which is ongoing.
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And so as I started to work with different communities, you know, just to give an idea, it's 25 communities of around 35,000 people in total over a 2 million square kilometer area.
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Everything is accessible only by plane.
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There is no roads at all.
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It's an incredibly, uh, we would call it very remote.
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The Inuit don't think it's remote.
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They think it's perfect, but from our Southern perspective, we see it as remote.
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And so the working with these communities really brought home how these issues that they're facing, whether it's health, we're working on tuberculosis and mental health.
00:09:58.691 --> 00:10:00.610
You could not look at these individually.
00:10:00.610 --> 00:10:22.159
You had to see them in the context of the historical trauma, the impacts of colonialism, the impacts of racism and the ongoing colonialism, which is the case with countries like Canada, Australia, Aotearoa or New Zealand, these other countries where the indigenous peoples are still ongoing active colonialism in the very sort of traditional sense.
00:10:22.813 --> 00:10:24.149
So that's what I've been doing.
00:10:24.149 --> 00:10:46.032
And, you know, the idea was not to start an organisation because I'm anti growth in organisations because I think now, you know, we've also as organisations become victim to the capitalist structure of just continually growing, bigger is better, bigger is beautiful, and I'm much more, small is beautiful, keep small and humble and limited and keep the growth on the ground with the communities.
00:10:46.041 --> 00:10:53.287
So It's an initiative to try to demonstrate ways that you can work differently and what that requires to do that.
00:10:53.287 --> 00:10:56.331
Thank you, Rachel, for giving such, such detailed context.
00:10:56.378 --> 00:10:58.640
Yeah, it's such brave work that you're doing.
00:11:00.049 --> 00:11:01.222
Just a linkage to that.
00:11:01.250 --> 00:11:07.032
You work directly with communities and you strive to influence humanitarian organisations and policymakers.
00:11:07.541 --> 00:11:13.881
What is the connection between your work with Inuit communities in Canada and the broader humanitarian policy work?
00:11:15.955 --> 00:11:17.537
Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
00:11:17.619 --> 00:11:26.210
Aside from the fact that the first time I went to Nunavut, the conditions that I saw people living in were probably some of the worst conditions I'd seen anybody live in.
00:11:26.736 --> 00:11:31.381
And I have been in a lot of environments, as you both have, where living conditions are pretty poor.
00:11:31.682 --> 00:11:40.455
So if you take a context like a community up there in the North, it's minus 40 degrees, minus 50 degrees, minus 60 degrees.
00:11:40.745 --> 00:11:51.472
Very, very poor housing, poor heating, people living in poverty, not having enough money to pay for everything they need, living 17 to 18 people in a house, and there's nothing there.
00:11:51.932 --> 00:11:55.813
Um, you know, they were forced into communities in the 1950s.
00:11:55.813 --> 00:12:04.831
Originally, they were nomadic people who traveled the land in very small groups, and now they've been sort of forced into these larger communities, which goes against their cultural ways of living.
00:12:05.032 --> 00:12:23.236
So the environment, so that was the first sort of, direct connection is how that kind of neglect and structurally created poverty was the same here in Canada, in the North, as it is in other countries that I've been in, whether in DRC, whether in Kenya, whether in Djibouti.
00:12:23.464 --> 00:12:24.282
So that was one thing.
00:12:25.110 --> 00:12:35.077
The other part of it for me was really the fact that communities in the North are not directly involved in their own response to their health crises.
00:12:35.495 --> 00:12:38.114
The response to health crises is brought from the outside.
00:12:38.532 --> 00:12:41.605
There are no humanitarian organisations up there, it's just the government.
00:12:41.841 --> 00:12:47.222
And so the government makes the decisions about the policy and then it goes to implement those in the communities.
00:12:47.523 --> 00:13:01.759
So for instance, a TB response is 25 people from southern Canada landing in a community, not speaking Inuktitut, not knowing the culture, coming to deal just with TB, and taking over the whole community, which is usually between 500 and 1, 000 people.
00:13:02.023 --> 00:13:04.296
So you can imagine the impact that that's having.
00:13:04.614 --> 00:13:06.796
And the community's not engaged, so they're very passive.
00:13:06.804 --> 00:13:13.386
So they sit, they wait, the intervention's done, they half listen, then the intervention's finished, the people all leave and they go back to normal.
00:13:13.446 --> 00:13:15.381
Back to where they were before, actually.
00:13:15.818 --> 00:13:24.600
And so this for me really exemplified again, how this lack of community engagement is something that I've seen throughout the humanitarian industry.
00:13:24.946 --> 00:13:33.327
And that is a very direct mirror of the two, which is kind of shocking when you're in a country like Canada, when you think super rich country, everyone's sort of active, engaged citizens.
00:13:33.327 --> 00:13:37.019
It's actually not the case, which is the same in many other countries as well.
00:13:37.309 --> 00:13:41.464
You know, you get your global statistics about the country and everything looks fine.
00:13:41.464 --> 00:13:48.091
It's when you start to look in the fine print that you realise what kind of structural inequities are existing inside the countries.
00:13:48.327 --> 00:13:52.554
So that structural inequity has been a really coinciding factor.
00:13:53.236 --> 00:14:19.182
I know you've already started to speak of some of the issues or just challenges that you faced, including working with people that have remote access and using internationally developed hybrid solutions where there's room for just local developed initiatives as well as structural injustice, but can you describe to our listeners any additional challenges you have faced working on community centered approaches to health crisis in Canada?
00:14:19.981 --> 00:14:24.346
And why is it particularly important that you take a decolonised approach in this work?
00:14:24.346 --> 00:14:34.123
Some of the challenges faced in Canada, I mean, there's on two sides, I think on the one side, on a very practical side, as I was mentioning, working in the North is incredibly difficult and it's incredibly expensive.
00:14:34.150 --> 00:14:36.614
It's probably the most expensive air miles in the world.
00:14:36.831 --> 00:14:42.004
Just to travel three hours North and three hours back by plane is around 5, 000 Canadian dollars.
00:14:42.296 --> 00:14:45.331
I mean, I could go to Zimbabwe and back a couple of times for that money.
00:14:46.032 --> 00:14:47.441
So nobody goes to the North.
00:14:47.932 --> 00:14:53.278
And the remoteness of the communities, etc, etc, makes it very complicated to work.
00:14:53.860 --> 00:14:54.413
One thing.
00:14:54.532 --> 00:15:01.418
Secondly, is I think the colonialism is ongoing in Nunavut.
00:15:02.182 --> 00:15:05.081
So people are under the yoke of colonialism.
00:15:05.346 --> 00:15:08.509
And so a lot of that colonialism becomes internalised as well.
00:15:08.791 --> 00:15:19.019
They're in a system which gives out money for everything and keeps everyone at a certain level, but it's not a system that encourages social entrepreneurship and development and all this kind of thing.
00:15:19.019 --> 00:15:22.619
A lot of their traditional ways of life have been completely destroyed.
00:15:23.028 --> 00:15:33.240
For instance, Inuit traditionally hunt over vast areas of land and they use Inuit dogs that pull the sleighs and they go off with their hunter and they go off for days and come back.
00:15:33.705 --> 00:15:40.159
Those dogs were essential because they understand the ice, they know where the ice is thin, they know where the animals are and they lead the hunters to where they need to go.
00:15:40.677 --> 00:15:46.423
So in the 1970s the Canadian mountain police went in and killed all the Inuit dogs.
00:15:46.995 --> 00:15:48.341
All of them, they were slaughtered.
00:15:49.259 --> 00:15:54.360
And so people were left without dogs and instead they were given skidoos with some petrol.
00:15:54.941 --> 00:16:04.322
Well, skidoos go wrong, mechanical problems, no garage, no spare parts, takes you at least a month, two months to get your spare parts, petrol runs out and you need money for petrol.
00:16:04.551 --> 00:16:12.532
Whereas the dogs, you fed them from the hunt and these are wild animals, so you understand how that has completely disrupted their way of living.
00:16:12.532 --> 00:16:20.731
So these people have had those traditional ways taken away, but very, very recently this colonialism, they only came off the land in the 60s and 70s.
00:16:20.750 --> 00:16:22.469
Before then they were living as nomads.
00:16:22.486 --> 00:16:25.950
So their experience is only 50 years old.
00:16:26.250 --> 00:16:31.059
So it's very interesting and difficult to work, to find ways to collaborate.
00:16:31.068 --> 00:16:32.441
So that's very challenging.
00:16:32.850 --> 00:16:40.441
But we've learned so much from it because they have very clear ways of working and they create those spaces that then they demand that you walk into.
00:16:40.441 --> 00:16:42.240
And so that's been a big learning experience.
00:16:42.240 --> 00:16:48.822
The other side of the problem is really then the political side of the problem, the Canadian government side of the problem.
00:16:48.841 --> 00:16:51.313
There is no political will really to change.
00:16:52.004 --> 00:16:59.441
If you go back into the 1950s, 1940s, there was clear statements from the Canadian government that they wanted to beat the Indian out of the Indian.
00:16:59.787 --> 00:17:06.555
They put all the indigenous children into residential schools, forcefully took them away from their homes, parents didn't know where their kids were.
00:17:06.582 --> 00:17:13.528
When they got to the school, hair was cut off, were not allowed to speak their local language, they had to eat the food they were given, Western food.
00:17:14.046 --> 00:17:57.941
The same thing happened around tuberculosis, people were forcibly taken from their homes if they were positive for TB, children were taken away from their mothers, young children two years old taken away from their families, brought to the south of Canada, put into TB sanatoriums, where again, they were denied the right to speak Inuktitut, they were not allowed to play, many of them report that they were chained onto beds for two years, awful, awful stories and a lot of these children and young people who went to these sanatoriums, either they died there and their parents never found them and never knew what happened to them, or the ones that did go back were seen to be white, seemed to have taken on all the airs and graces of the settlers, of the colonials, and so they were not accepted easily back into their communities.
00:17:58.222 --> 00:18:00.386
So those people went back extremely traumatised.
00:18:00.722 --> 00:18:11.278
All of this to give you a picture of this intergenerational trauma that is going on and how the government has really not done anything about that but just continued to act.
00:18:11.950 --> 00:18:15.778
So billions of dollars are poured into the system in Nunavut.
00:18:15.849 --> 00:18:20.259
There's no lack of medicines, there's no lack of medical staff, but they're all medical staff from the South.
00:18:20.805 --> 00:18:27.632
Inuit themselves have not got to the level where they can even get into university because the education system is so poor in their communities.
00:18:28.109 --> 00:18:30.537
So to get a full education, they have to come to the South.
00:18:30.546 --> 00:18:39.599
They have to leave their families and Inuit communities are extremely family oriented, the bond is so strong that when you take a young person out, they become lost.
00:18:39.609 --> 00:18:41.809
I mean, we recognise that from many environments.
00:18:42.299 --> 00:18:57.082
So that is really one of the challenges around that here has been that lack of political will in Canada, the historical bias against the communities themselves and that people don't believe that the communities can actually do it.
00:18:57.400 --> 00:18:59.009
It's really that I know better.
00:18:59.046 --> 00:19:04.099
You know, I've got my science, I've got my hospital training, I'm a medical doctor, I'm a this, I'm a that.
00:19:04.382 --> 00:19:05.528
I know better than you.
00:19:06.118 --> 00:19:10.586
And up till recently, indigenous peoples were seen to be wards of the state.
00:19:10.632 --> 00:19:14.314
They were not even recognised to be able to vote or have those rights.
00:19:14.323 --> 00:19:17.186
So that's a status going on.
00:19:17.404 --> 00:19:22.077
The other part of it is the way that the system works in Canada is it's government to government work.
00:19:22.077 --> 00:19:25.400
So it's government of Canada working with the territory of Nunavut.
00:19:25.746 --> 00:19:29.700
And so there's a bias to working with a government, which is also based in a colonial approach.
00:19:29.700 --> 00:19:31.808
The government's a colonial embedded structure.
00:19:31.818 --> 00:19:33.191
It's not about individuals being bad.
00:19:33.191 --> 00:19:34.519
The individuals are all great.
00:19:34.799 --> 00:19:44.436
It's just the system is coded to work in a certain way, which is not to work with the communities, but to work for the communities, on the communities, above the communities.
00:19:45.290 --> 00:19:52.400
So that, you know, I guess in the end of the day, it's this power imbalance and this structural inequity, which is really creating the difficulty.
00:19:52.400 --> 00:19:55.382
It sounds like quite a challenging environment.
00:19:56.090 --> 00:19:56.346
Yeah.
00:19:58.064 --> 00:19:59.909
Yeah, I don't even have anything else to add.
00:19:59.963 --> 00:20:01.055
Kate, over to you.
00:20:01.909 --> 00:20:02.772
Thank you so much.
00:20:03.246 --> 00:20:11.900
Rachel, you're talking with such articulacy and passion about the situation that you're confronting there.
00:20:11.900 --> 00:20:20.272
I mean, what I'm hearing from what you're saying, earlier on in the conversation, you were talking about people being compromised and complicit in genocide in Gaza.
00:20:20.746 --> 00:20:29.981
And I absolutely recognise what you're saying, not just within the humanitarian sector, but within my own part of the ecosystem, which is global development.
00:20:30.573 --> 00:20:33.827
And I recognise the trends of complicity and silence.
00:20:34.355 --> 00:20:49.228
And I've come to think of the global development sector as being a distorted market in which power, positionality and fear of loss of status and livelihood make all of us complicit, particularly white people from the minority world.
00:20:49.299 --> 00:20:59.090
And, I think we're complicit in letting run the system of structural racism and white supremacy, which underpins coloniality.
00:20:59.573 --> 00:21:04.064
And you're talking at the moment very fluently about current coloniality and race.
00:21:04.090 --> 00:21:10.945
But earlier in the conversation you talked about there being a shared understanding across the sector that change is needed.
00:21:11.231 --> 00:21:33.432
And I might have misunderstood that or be overemphasising your apparent feeling that there's a consensus, but I come across many people who don't ascribe to the need to have a kind of root and branch change and to transform the global development and humanitarian sectors.
00:21:33.549 --> 00:21:38.105
I mean, I think there's actually a huge range of understandings and resistance to change.
00:21:38.713 --> 00:21:52.596
And I'd like to hear your comments on that, but I'm going to link to my next question, which is that in a previous conversation, you told me that getting people to take decolonisation seriously and to raise funds for decolonised action is really difficult.
00:21:53.478 --> 00:21:58.005
Do you think that the kind of the statement that I've just made links to that difficulty?
00:21:58.040 --> 00:22:09.391
And I wonder if you can unpick that a bit from your own experience of trying to raise funds, but also trying to create change both within the Canadian setting, but also more widely in your work.
00:22:09.391 --> 00:22:12.090
Yeah, thanks for bringing that clarification around that.
00:22:12.090 --> 00:22:16.855
Sometimes I think I move into rarefied circles because all the people I talk to are all into decolonisation.
00:22:16.873 --> 00:22:24.573
And so we're speaking the same language, but I agree with you that it's not even across the industry, whether it's the emergency side, which is what I'm involved in, or the broader global development side.
00:22:24.573 --> 00:22:40.055
Um but what I do think is that there is the trend towards talking about decoloniality is much more accepted than it was, and there's an acknowledgement that there's something, that there's something that needs to be addressed.
00:22:40.055 --> 00:22:42.228
I think that no one can ignore it anymore.
00:22:42.237 --> 00:22:43.873
However, they can try.
00:22:44.382 --> 00:22:49.046
I think that it's a little bit like what we did with feminism.
00:22:50.608 --> 00:22:58.108
As long as you put in your grant one little line about, yes, we will adopt the feminist principles and we will make sure that women are involved and there's gender equity.
00:22:58.472 --> 00:22:59.555
That was enough.
00:22:59.746 --> 00:23:01.263
We just put the little words in there.
00:23:01.590 --> 00:23:04.145
I think the bit the same is happening with decolonisation.
00:23:04.163 --> 00:23:08.582
Everyone is sort of putting the words in and speaking the right language, but they're not walking the talk.
00:23:09.000 --> 00:23:11.608
And that's where this sort of between the why and the how.
00:23:12.159 --> 00:23:14.250
Why do we need to do it, and how we need to do it.
00:23:14.487 --> 00:23:17.040
I think the understandings of why we need to do it are different.
00:23:17.040 --> 00:23:22.269
I think there's some people who just say, well, we'll need to do it because everyone's talking about it and we have to show goodwill.
00:23:22.540 --> 00:23:26.823
Then there's people who say, no, we need to do it because we fundamentally need to change the system.
00:23:26.823 --> 00:23:28.450
I think that's where the division comes.
00:23:28.778 --> 00:23:39.173
I think there's a lot of people who believe we can just make some little tweaks, put a bit more DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, have a few more black faces on the boards, have a few more regional offices.
00:23:39.454 --> 00:23:40.981
Then, you know, we're going to be good.
00:23:41.191 --> 00:23:45.154
And that kind of makes sense from a financial perspective and an operational perspective as well.
00:23:45.382 --> 00:23:46.818
And that was what we always wanted to do.
00:23:47.219 --> 00:23:50.400
But this is just lip service and this is very cosmetic.
00:23:50.654 --> 00:24:03.836
I absolutely agree with you Kate is that the fundamental understanding of how this system needs to work to change and pivot totally, this is not accepted by many people.
00:24:04.108 --> 00:24:08.663
One of the lines that I heard so often was, if ain't broke, don't fix it.
00:24:08.691 --> 00:24:09.781
We are doing really well.
00:24:09.781 --> 00:24:11.009
Our results are really good.
00:24:11.009 --> 00:24:11.909
Our metrics are great.
00:24:11.909 --> 00:24:13.055
Why do we need to change?
00:24:13.055 --> 00:24:18.719
This is something that I heard ad nauseam, so I think there is that sort of conflict.
00:24:18.719 --> 00:24:23.972
I think we have to be very careful of people who say, well, this is just being politically correct.
00:24:23.972 --> 00:24:27.950
So if you want me to use those words, I will, but it doesn't actually go really deep down.
00:24:28.923 --> 00:24:32.395
So why is it very difficult for it to be taken seriously?
00:24:32.432 --> 00:24:33.686
I think exactly what you said.
00:24:33.704 --> 00:24:35.377
People do not like change.
00:24:35.568 --> 00:24:36.932
People like the status quo.
00:24:37.340 --> 00:24:38.404
They're good where they are.
00:24:38.404 --> 00:24:39.459
They're getting their salary.
00:24:39.459 --> 00:24:44.614
They're comfortable in their jobs in Geneva, in London, in Montreal, wherever it is, they're comfortable.
00:24:44.814 --> 00:24:46.650
They've got families who are dependent on their salary.
00:24:46.650 --> 00:24:50.505
It goes back to my very original comment that this industry has changed.
00:24:50.832 --> 00:24:52.987
It didn't used to be a profession or a career.
00:24:52.987 --> 00:24:54.114
Now it's a profession.
00:24:54.132 --> 00:24:57.678
I think the word humanitarian professional is an oxymoron.
00:24:57.950 --> 00:24:59.231
It doesn't go together.
00:24:59.558 --> 00:25:01.413
Humanitarians, we're all humanitarians.
00:25:01.755 --> 00:25:02.963
We all care about our neighbors.
00:25:02.963 --> 00:25:07.364
If my neighbor falls over, my elderly neighbors, I'll go and help them as a humanitarian act.
00:25:07.537 --> 00:25:11.663
We've completely lost ourselves in this dilution of really what we're doing here.
00:25:12.145 --> 00:25:18.682
And I think that is a big cause of, and a big reason why this decoloniality discussion is so critical.
00:25:18.990 --> 00:25:22.919
It's because we need to rethink the whole damn thing, because it's gone.
00:25:22.936 --> 00:25:24.000
It's got lost.
00:25:24.163 --> 00:25:25.046
It's got lost.
00:25:25.428 --> 00:25:30.490
And it is just reproducing and perpetuating everything that we don't want.
00:25:30.709 --> 00:25:47.686
And everything that when we started in our more idealistic years of saying, I want to do this because I really want people to be able to take care of themselves and be able to survive and get through this idea of saving lives that is so kind in my corner of the complex industry.
00:25:47.858 --> 00:25:50.086
Saving lives, this is done with.
00:25:50.704 --> 00:25:52.478
This is not about saving lives.
00:25:52.478 --> 00:25:57.586
This is not about that I'm going to go somewhere and save, which is what we were thinking in the 90s.
00:25:57.641 --> 00:26:03.031
We were going there to bring technology, medicines that were going to help to save people's lives.
00:26:03.314 --> 00:26:04.568
We're in a different world now.
00:26:05.614 --> 00:26:08.614
So I think the white fragility is a big cause of this as well.
00:26:08.623 --> 00:26:23.404
Many people that I've spoken with feel I've dedicated my life to working in Africa, I'm not racist, I've done everything that I can do, I've lived with people, I've lived in the community, I've got down and dirty, don't call me a racist.
00:26:23.432 --> 00:26:29.632
So there's this very much this fragility that as white people we have and I know because I've had to deal with that.
00:26:29.868 --> 00:26:37.222
I'm a white woman with massive privilege and I was able to do all the things I did because of the color of my skin and because of the background that I'm from.
00:26:37.478 --> 00:26:41.913
And I recognise that I've been able to do the things that I've done because of that.
00:26:42.231 --> 00:26:49.441
And it is very difficult and very confronting to say, I'm a racist, I've got privilege, all of these things.
00:26:49.441 --> 00:26:50.558
It's very, very hard to do.
00:26:50.558 --> 00:26:51.105
So I get it.
00:26:51.195 --> 00:26:52.096
I get that it's hard.
00:26:52.096 --> 00:26:53.368
It doesn't mean we don't do it.
00:26:53.413 --> 00:26:54.259
We have to do it.
00:26:54.840 --> 00:27:05.769
And it really challenges this privilege that many of us have, many people looking like me have, in our industry where we are the ones living in Europe, where the headquarters are and where the power is.
00:27:06.186 --> 00:27:30.763
And so to do, to really enact or to work on decoloniality, we're basically putting ourselves out of a job, which is what it should be, but no one wants to put themselves out of a job because as I said, the children are now dependent on the income and the house and the mortgage and got the big, you know, 35 million dollar office in the middle of Barcelona or middle of Geneva or whatever it is, you know, there is a whole infrastructure around this.
00:27:31.519 --> 00:27:39.428
I think also, one of the things that I've learned from my personal experience is how bad I have been at listening.
00:27:40.209 --> 00:27:44.818
And when I talk about listening, I don't just mean hearing the words, but hearing what's behind those words.
00:27:45.346 --> 00:27:54.391
We are not educated like that, as part of the settler communities, the colonial history to really care or worry about what other people say.
00:27:54.391 --> 00:28:00.472
What matters is what we think, what we say, and to break that and to learn to listen and truly listen.
00:28:00.472 --> 00:28:10.118
So listen to what you're saying without thinking, right, what am I going to say next, but rather really listen and take the time to take that in, we're not willing to take that time to listen.
00:28:10.118 --> 00:28:15.308
If we want to work in communities, if we want to work in decoloniality, we have to listen.
00:28:15.873 --> 00:28:17.327
We have to take the time.
00:28:17.709 --> 00:28:19.673
That means that the results are slower.
00:28:20.064 --> 00:28:21.737
The results are not linear.
00:28:21.827 --> 00:28:23.064
The outcomes are not linear.
00:28:23.346 --> 00:28:25.599
We have to embrace different ways of thinking.
00:28:25.855 --> 00:28:39.472
We have to embrace more circular, more the idea we have amongst some First Nations here in Canada of the seven generations back and the seven generations forward that every act you take is affecting seven generations back and will affect the next seven generations.
00:28:39.781 --> 00:28:49.808
These kind of thinkings, principles like Ubuntu from South Africa, you know, these ways of being, we have to start to absorb them and start to be able to take them on.
00:28:49.808 --> 00:28:52.228
And I think people find that very difficult to do.
00:28:52.564 --> 00:28:55.537
So decoloniality is no small feat.
00:28:55.799 --> 00:28:57.719
This is not a lip service, a set of word.
00:28:57.719 --> 00:29:26.564
It challenges the entire way that I think as a human being, as a white woman, that my organisation thinks and as a bigger organisation, whether it's MSF or care, whether it's a university or whether it's an UN institution, it is going right down to the core, challenges completely the way we think and people that's a lot of work and that's where people's patience runs out.
00:29:26.882 --> 00:29:28.428
Especially in the emergency world.
00:29:28.827 --> 00:29:35.700
Because I hear a lot from people, I love what you're doing, it's great, it's so good for all that kind of like, development, chronic, all that kind of work.
00:29:35.990 --> 00:29:38.246
But you're never going to work in an emergency, you realise that.
00:29:38.618 --> 00:29:40.691
And I'm like, the emergencies is probably where you need it the most.
00:29:41.555 --> 00:29:44.000
Because who are the first responders in an emergency?
00:29:44.200 --> 00:29:47.127
It's not you sitting in Geneva with your emergency crew.
00:29:47.263 --> 00:29:49.855
It's the communities on the ground that are picking up the pieces.
00:29:49.864 --> 00:29:51.055
They're the first responders.
00:29:51.299 --> 00:29:55.663
So, yes, you should go there and take the time and understand from them how they want to do it.
00:29:56.191 --> 00:29:56.481
Thank you.
00:29:56.481 --> 00:29:57.919
I really liked that response.
00:29:57.972 --> 00:30:07.627
And I think your point about learning to listen properly rather than listening as we often do as white people for a cue to speak, is a really important point.
00:30:07.636 --> 00:30:15.712
And I also really liked what you were saying about, taking a pause and being patient and learning to benefit from circular learning.
00:30:15.712 --> 00:30:18.115
So, learnings that come from other cultures.
00:30:18.688 --> 00:30:22.260
And I think historically, the minority world has been really poor at that.
00:30:22.269 --> 00:30:31.233
And I think we really could benefit not just from integrating Ubuntu leadership into our professional practices, but much, much else besides.
00:30:31.369 --> 00:30:32.196
So thank you for that.
00:30:32.760 --> 00:30:38.025
I hear from our previous conversation that SeeChange has produced and piloted a set of tools.
00:30:38.470 --> 00:30:42.060
Now, we do love a tool, and I'd like to hear more about your tools.
00:30:42.405 --> 00:30:57.420
Because I think things that are practical, that help us to do stuff, I find very encouraging, because sometimes when we're stuck, knowing that somebody's piloted an approach and they've found it to work can be very encouraging.
00:30:57.655 --> 00:31:02.001
So can you tell us a little bit about your tools and how you came to develop them and how they work?
00:31:03.884 --> 00:31:21.515
Yes, I like a good tool as well and I realise that you know you can't go anywhere without some tools because people need something very physical and concrete to grab onto to say okay because as we were saying before a lot of people are talking about community centered work you'll see patient centered approaches but the actual how of it, is not happening.
00:31:21.769 --> 00:31:22.951
So we developed three tools.
00:31:23.652 --> 00:31:29.834
So the first tool that we developed was during COVID 19 and it was a pandemic response roadmap.
00:31:30.260 --> 00:31:35.251
And this was co created and co designed with one Inuit community that we were working with.
00:31:35.834 --> 00:31:38.733
And what happened was I was sitting here.
00:31:38.760 --> 00:31:41.878
They just announced the lockdown on March the 13th in Canada.
00:31:42.361 --> 00:31:45.846
Someone phoned me up from the community and said, Rachel, What do we do?
00:31:45.875 --> 00:31:46.902
We're terrified.
00:31:46.920 --> 00:31:49.711
We remember the influenza pandemic of 1919.
00:31:49.711 --> 00:31:51.593
Our grandparents, great grandparents died.
00:31:51.920 --> 00:31:52.955
What is going to happen to us?
00:31:52.974 --> 00:31:54.065
Are we all going to die?
00:31:54.346 --> 00:31:55.238
What do we do?
00:31:55.720 --> 00:32:08.747
And then they received a big thick document from the government of how to respond to COVID, which was written in English, highly technical scientific language way, just was not a language that they could relate to.
00:32:09.438 --> 00:32:12.420
So we started to work together and I said, well, it's quite simple.
00:32:12.547 --> 00:32:13.602
There are three things you need to do.
00:32:13.602 --> 00:32:18.192
You need to organise, you need to prepare, and then if it comes, you need to respond.
00:32:18.510 --> 00:32:19.247
Simple as that.
00:32:19.464 --> 00:32:20.911
They're like, okay, this is great.
00:32:21.337 --> 00:32:23.701
And then I said, okay, so what would you do to organise?
00:32:23.720 --> 00:32:24.619
What would you do to prepare?
00:32:24.619 --> 00:32:25.446
What would you do to respond?
00:32:25.446 --> 00:32:26.655
So we started to build it.
00:32:26.664 --> 00:32:31.801
So we created a roadmap just for that community, which gave them all the things and it built on all their capacity.
00:32:32.269 --> 00:32:38.343
They knew where all their elders were and they could use the youth who were healthy to go and deliver food baskets to the elders.
00:32:38.596 --> 00:32:40.196
They knew how to entertain the children.
00:32:40.196 --> 00:32:46.352
They knew how to use local radio to keep the houses connected because you gotta remember this is March, it's like minus 50 up there in blizzards.
00:32:47.238 --> 00:32:52.655
And then they knew the houses where there were people who were couch surfing that they needed to deal with.
00:32:52.664 --> 00:32:57.683
They knew where the issues of drugs were a problem, or alcohol were a problem, or abuse, or all these things.
00:32:57.683 --> 00:33:02.438
They knew all of that so they could work out how to rearrange a little bit their community and come together.
00:33:03.201 --> 00:33:06.155
It was so successful that other communities heard about it.
00:33:06.174 --> 00:33:08.211
We put it on as an internet version.
00:33:08.438 --> 00:33:10.464
Other communities throughout Nunavut used it.
00:33:10.510 --> 00:33:13.955
Importantly, it was in Inuktitut, as well as in English.
00:33:14.375 --> 00:33:23.056
And then in Latin America, MSF got interested in it because of course, the humanitarian industry responding to crisis was stuck in place, could do absolutely nothing.
00:33:23.483 --> 00:33:25.547
And everyone had to fend for themselves.
00:33:25.547 --> 00:33:36.365
And it was a moment actually that I'm surprised that we didn't recognise it more, how powerful communities were in responding to COVID without any external support whatsoever, what they needed was information.
00:33:36.711 --> 00:33:41.402
They needed to understand what it was, and then they needed information on how to protect themselves and their communities.
00:33:41.865 --> 00:33:49.411
So with MSF, we translated it into French, into Swahili, into Spanish and started to use it all around the world.
00:33:49.438 --> 00:33:51.192
It was open source, anyone could access it.
00:33:51.201 --> 00:33:52.247
So that was one tool.
00:33:52.528 --> 00:33:59.102
And I do hold the hope that when the next pandemic arrives, that can be converted again to address whatever that next pandemic is.
00:33:59.111 --> 00:34:08.769
It's a really interesting resource base of tools and crowdsourced with communities putting in their own tools, uploading what they used, how they did it and all the different parts.
00:34:09.905 --> 00:34:22.224
The second tool that we created is called the Community First Framework, which really built off this idea of, well, how would a truly community centered process look like in the language of an international NGO?
00:34:22.788 --> 00:34:25.543
Thinking about a project cycle of an NGO in an emergency.
00:34:25.543 --> 00:34:27.788
Again, remember I'm on the emergency side of things.
00:34:27.788 --> 00:34:29.079
I'm really focused on that.
00:34:29.543 --> 00:34:37.710
So we built a four step framework, that then we piloted and tested with MSF over two years and then finalised last summer.
00:34:38.092 --> 00:34:39.956
So it's got four steps, basically.
00:34:39.983 --> 00:34:40.693
Connect.
00:34:40.811 --> 00:34:42.719
So how do you connect with the community?
00:34:42.719 --> 00:34:55.065
And for me, this is probably the most critical part, because it's really about building and nurturing a trusting relationship with that community, so that you can understand the community's own priorities, so they can feel, they can really tell you what they're thinking.
00:34:55.411 --> 00:34:58.538
And we found that in emergencies, we can do that in a very, very short time.
00:34:58.583 --> 00:35:00.083
It doesn't take six years to develop.
00:35:00.675 --> 00:35:08.028
It can really happen in a few hours, because communities are extremely intelligent people, and they know when they've got a crisis, and they know when they need to move fast.
00:35:08.505 --> 00:35:10.224
So if you come in and say, okay, what do you want to do?
00:35:10.224 --> 00:35:11.860
They're like, we want to do this, this, this, and this.
00:35:11.896 --> 00:35:13.369
And we, they know exactly what they need to do.
00:35:13.806 --> 00:35:15.760
So this was the first part.
00:35:16.114 --> 00:35:17.905
Then the second part is engaging.
00:35:17.905 --> 00:35:21.652
So really identifying the people who form what we call community activators.
00:35:21.679 --> 00:35:24.784
So that the idea is that the community is activating itself.
00:35:25.083 --> 00:35:34.856
And looking for the unusual suspects in those, not just the health committee of the community, but what about those adolescents who are not going to school, who should be involved, because they're the most vulnerable.
00:35:35.092 --> 00:35:37.202
You know, all these kind of different people coming in.
00:35:37.202 --> 00:35:46.019
So we did that in Sierra Leone, very successfully with the adolescent girls, who were setting up a drop in centre for adolescents to deal with sexual health.
00:35:46.378 --> 00:35:51.306
And they were really talking, the ones in school receive menstrual pads, the one who weren't in school didn't receive them.
00:35:51.715 --> 00:35:56.114
So how do we help those girls who are the ones who are most at risk of sexual violence?
00:35:56.387 --> 00:35:58.425
And we would never have, I would never have known that.
00:35:58.425 --> 00:36:02.425
I mean, I just didn't think about the difficulties of buying menstrual pads and so on.
00:36:02.443 --> 00:36:04.543
So how that affected the programming.
00:36:05.315 --> 00:36:15.242
The third part is activating where you actually get to co design those solutions that mobilise the community's strengths and their assets and address the challenges that the community has identified.
00:36:15.242 --> 00:36:33.652
And there we have dipped into the world of development where you have these incredible community based participatory methodologies developed by people like Paolo Freire, where we all know, and then in research, you're both researchers, you know, you have the community based participatory action research.
00:36:33.896 --> 00:36:36.460
So we went and looked to all those incredible systems.
00:36:36.460 --> 00:36:50.402
We looked at indigenous systems of participatory action, and we kind of honed it down to a few really key participatory methodologies that you could use very quickly and get very fast results with a community and engage them.
00:36:50.664 --> 00:36:54.565
And so we use things like social mapping, solution trees, maps of the future.
00:36:54.920 --> 00:36:59.210
And these are things that we've done in Peru, in Sierra Leone, in Venezuela, and in Brazil.
00:37:00.369 --> 00:37:03.996
And then the final part of that framework is the Reflect stage.
00:37:04.452 --> 00:37:09.715
And for that Reflect stage, the idea of it is all of these steps are, is not really linear.
00:37:09.778 --> 00:37:14.742
We put it linear, it's a good way to explain it, but they're all interacting and coming in at different moments.
00:37:15.061 --> 00:37:20.971
The Reflection is really the participatory monitoring and evaluation and learning aspect, which is our third toolkit.
00:37:21.052 --> 00:37:29.170
And that is a toolkit on how do you look at how the communities are involved in the co design of those health strategies.
00:37:29.371 --> 00:37:30.398
How are those playing out?
00:37:30.407 --> 00:37:31.771
How do they need to be tweaked?
00:37:31.971 --> 00:37:39.838
In which parts of the project cycle, so we use those local knowledge and experience to improve the services and programs as we're going along.
00:37:40.148 --> 00:37:45.476
So it's not just a monitoring evaluation that's done by an external evaluator after five years of programs where you could really done this, this.
00:37:45.666 --> 00:37:52.266
It's a constant process and it's the communities evaluating, auto evaluating and also evaluating the role of the external support.
00:37:52.858 --> 00:37:57.594
So we integrate that monitoring and evaluation all through the community first framework.
00:37:58.030 --> 00:37:59.557
And all of those tools are open source.
00:37:59.876 --> 00:38:01.467
They're available on our website.
00:38:01.721 --> 00:38:03.376
Anyone can access them.
00:38:03.476 --> 00:38:06.757
We love to hear how people have used them and whether it's been useful or not.
00:38:07.284 --> 00:38:14.112
For the moment, the framework has been developed specifically for Médecins Sans Frontières, done in collaboration with them.
00:38:14.112 --> 00:38:18.494
And the idea is that it can be taken and developed and adapted to different organisations.
00:38:18.958 --> 00:38:24.248
And we really hope that this shows a way of how to actually make those changes inside the projects.
00:38:24.820 --> 00:38:36.666
And we've seen really good results, teams on the ground, especially all the staff from the country are thrilled because they start to feel that there's spaces and places they can put their voice, their understanding, their historical and cultural knowledge.
00:38:38.307 --> 00:38:41.170
And the end of the day, the idea is to improve the outcomes, right?
00:38:41.170 --> 00:38:43.090
And that we still have to see.
00:38:43.590 --> 00:38:53.007
But just anecdotally, because it also requires different metrics, it's not just those lovely quantitative metrics that we love so much, but also those qualitative metrics of how does community feel?
00:38:53.016 --> 00:38:54.943
How do people feel when they go to the health center?
00:38:54.943 --> 00:38:55.807
How do they feel?
00:38:56.170 --> 00:39:04.289
And the anecdotal evidence coming back is that people feel heard and feel listened to and feel hopeful that this could actually help them to address their needs.
00:39:06.148 --> 00:39:06.630
Thanks, Rachel.
00:39:06.630 --> 00:39:09.021
I'm very excited about those tools.
00:39:09.021 --> 00:39:11.349
I'm certainly going to be downloading them myself.
00:39:11.349 --> 00:39:22.076
You know, I can absolutely see how useful they would be in the work that I do and working with civil society organisations in various different countries.
00:39:22.757 --> 00:39:25.594
So I'm definitely going to be looking at those myself.
00:39:26.121 --> 00:39:44.458
So, I've really enjoyed talking to you and hearing about your work and I'm fascinated to hear about the communities that you work with in Canada because I'm obviously very ignorant about Canadian communities because I honestly didn't realise the depths of the challenges that they were facing.
00:39:44.576 --> 00:39:49.911
And I'm rather stunned and horrified, actually, to hear that.
00:39:49.967 --> 00:39:50.820
I also have to
00:39:50.820 --> 00:39:51.239
say.
00:39:52.434 --> 00:39:53.661
Yeah, sorry Nompilo.
00:39:53.681 --> 00:40:07.717
Without interjecting you, I'm also like, just surprised, you know, because often I think of the southern lands, where I think developing Africa, therefore, so it's been intriguing and a learning moment for me to realise just even the work that's being done in places like Canada.
00:40:07.880 --> 00:40:10.067
So I tend to echo what you're saying, Kate.
00:40:10.349 --> 00:40:10.849
Back to you.
00:40:10.940 --> 00:40:44.380
Yeah, I mean I did know that health outcomes in the United States were worse for people of color, and particularly African Americans, but I hadn't realised that the Inuit communities in Canada were so poorly housed and actually the policies that were ongoing today are so deeply colonial in nature so that's quite an eye opener for me because it makes me realise how dynamic and long lasting and embedded these processes of white supremacy and coloniality are across the world.
00:40:44.461 --> 00:40:54.161
And I just think it means that people from the minority world white community have a lot of thinking, reflecting and change to engage in.
00:40:55.081 --> 00:41:08.302
And that brings me to our last question, Rachel, other than personal transformation and the inner work, which seem to be the two themes that are brought up over and over again by my guests when I ask this question.
00:41:08.793 --> 00:41:25.293
What do you think are the priority actions, or the first steps that our listeners and viewers could take to contribute positively to the process of decolonising anti racist action or shifting power?
00:41:25.293 --> 00:41:46.630
I think probably the most important thing that I've done apart from the personal transformation is to be the one to take a stand in meetings about these issues and to push it and to take what is, you know, it can't be denied, it's a personal risk when you stand up in a meeting and you start to call out these things, we have to do it and we have to take that courage to do it.
00:41:46.657 --> 00:41:51.012
And our non white colleagues, if I can say, they deserve that.
00:41:51.507 --> 00:42:01.590
They deserve that we stand up and I've seen the impacts of standing up and speaking up and how it's opened spaces for other voices then to come in and speak their truth in those environments as well.
00:42:01.590 --> 00:42:12.561
I am in such deep admiration and I have for people who are continually putting themselves in the line of fire based on their color or their background and their culture.
00:42:12.971 --> 00:42:19.061
And I've seen my colleagues so drained, and looking so strong in a meeting and then afterwards just crumbling down.
00:42:19.635 --> 00:42:20.961
And it's just not fair.
00:42:21.652 --> 00:42:22.916
It's just not fair.
00:42:23.135 --> 00:42:24.326
We have to do this.
00:42:24.771 --> 00:42:41.670
And I think, you know, one of the things that has been really shocking for me has been around Gaza, and the kind of lash back we got for speaking out on the genocide, and calling it a genocide and demanding that it was called a genocide by humanitarian organisations, which proves to me that we need to talk even louder.
00:42:42.126 --> 00:42:43.461
We need to be protesting.
00:42:43.471 --> 00:42:45.916
We need to be in those spaces.
00:42:46.061 --> 00:42:55.471
I think the second thing for me as well is refusing to show up on a panel or whatever if there isn't the meaningful diversity on that panel.
00:42:55.717 --> 00:43:05.581
Already for a long time I refused to show up on a panel that's got six men and me, but now it's not even enough to have a gender balance, you have to have a cultural racial balance in it as well.
00:43:06.025 --> 00:43:10.543
So I do not show up in panels that have predominantly white women in them.
00:43:11.070 --> 00:43:13.362
I'm talking about feminism, this I will not do.
00:43:14.143 --> 00:43:16.489
So I think these kind of acts are really important.
00:43:17.061 --> 00:43:25.708
The third thing I think is to get involved with actively anti racist decolonial movements.
00:43:26.126 --> 00:43:36.998
So I just came back from Peru 10 days ago where we had the initial meeting of a Permanent Forum on Decolonisation for Latin America.
00:43:37.820 --> 00:43:44.139
And it was just the most wonderful space because first of all, I didn't speak, which was great.
00:43:44.202 --> 00:43:47.193
I just sat as part of the group, but very much in the background.
00:43:47.485 --> 00:43:53.458
The whole thing was led by indigenous peoples from 21 different countries in Latin America, bringing their culture.
00:43:53.458 --> 00:44:05.702
The center of the meeting was a massive altar that was created to Mother Earth, bringing fruit and vegetables and flowers and plants, all the symbols of what the earth gives us and the connection between humans, plants and animals.
00:44:06.221 --> 00:44:11.048
And that altar was, you know, it was about 25 meters by five meters.
00:44:11.048 --> 00:44:12.902
It was large, very, very large.
00:44:13.148 --> 00:44:14.539
And we were just around the edge.
00:44:14.539 --> 00:44:19.003
So we were like diminutive around the edge of this altar that kept reminding us the whole time.
00:44:19.039 --> 00:44:20.385
And this for me was decolonial.
00:44:20.630 --> 00:44:30.820
The whole way the meeting was run, there was no, there was a very loose agenda, but introductions, took half of the two days, was just getting to know each other.
00:44:30.831 --> 00:44:31.512
Who are you?
00:44:31.548 --> 00:44:32.402
Where are you from?
00:44:32.530 --> 00:44:33.302
Why are you here?
00:44:33.302 --> 00:44:34.021
What do you believe in?
00:44:34.030 --> 00:44:35.885
Giving people the space to talk?
00:44:36.385 --> 00:44:41.862
And after two days, we came up with a charter on decoloniality from that meeting.
00:44:42.090 --> 00:44:45.452
We would never be able to do that in a meeting done the western style.
00:44:45.735 --> 00:44:52.190
And everyone would say, well, it's such a waste of time spending half a day just doing introductions and then the other half kind of doing cultural things.
00:44:52.481 --> 00:44:57.353
No, it set the basis and the parameters for everything that we produced.
00:44:57.353 --> 00:45:02.570
And the next day we produced a document, co created, co designed, done and dusted.
00:45:02.626 --> 00:45:04.161
Hope everyone can go and have a look at that.
00:45:04.726 --> 00:45:15.326
So that going and supporting and encouraging those kinds of spaces rather than the old classic conferences and events that have been organised.
00:45:15.344 --> 00:45:19.380
But look for those new spaces where the communities are really the ones guiding and leading the way.
00:45:19.380 --> 00:45:20.099
Thank you, Rachel.
00:45:20.099 --> 00:45:33.025
And as you said, take a moment to sit in the audience rather than dominating the space as we are trained and kind of professionally positioned to do so often as kind of elite white women.
00:45:33.717 --> 00:45:45.693
So, I'm very conscious of the need to create space for others and to kind of sit back in silence and it goes to so badly against the grain, that it's definitely something that I have to learn to do and to practice.
00:45:45.775 --> 00:46:15.561
And I think where you finished in the conversation there is a really lovely place to finish because, again, you were talking about respecting the cultures of the world and creating space for circular learning and not imposing Western norms and Western culture on a way a meeting should be run, but allowing space for other ways of being, and then seeing how incredibly productive that other way of being is.
00:46:16.152 --> 00:46:18.844
So I think that's kind of at the heart of the whole thing, isn't it?
00:46:18.971 --> 00:46:27.608
It's actually stepping off the top of the pyramid and stepping back from the center stage as part of that process as white women.
00:46:28.376 --> 00:46:30.548
So, thank you so much for coming.
00:46:30.612 --> 00:46:34.467
I know that I'm going to be taking a look at the tools that you recommended.
00:46:34.503 --> 00:46:51.648
I would strongly recommend all our listeners and viewers to click on the show notes below this episode, find out more about Rachel's work, the tools that she's discussed, and we will be peppering the show notes with lots of links to her work and the comments that she's been making during our conversation today.
00:46:52.030 --> 00:46:52.902
Thank you again, Rachel.
00:46:52.902 --> 00:46:54.958
I found this a very enriching conversation.
00:46:54.958 --> 00:46:57.775
I'll hand over to Nompilo now for the last farewell.
00:46:59.661 --> 00:47:00.407
Thank you, Rachel.
00:47:00.416 --> 00:47:07.335
Thank you for just sharing a little bit more about your context and for just enlightening us about the work that you're doing.
00:47:07.353 --> 00:47:16.534
And like Kate, I'm so excited just about the practical tools and steps that you shared because I'm constantly finding a lot of these debates to be theoretical with no real practical steps.
00:47:16.534 --> 00:47:18.425
So, yeah, it's going to be interesting.
00:47:18.552 --> 00:47:21.934
I'm just trying to start implementing them around my development work as well.
00:47:22.371 --> 00:47:22.817
Thank you.
00:47:23.643 --> 00:47:24.099
Great.
00:47:24.152 --> 00:47:25.271
Thank you so much for having me.
00:47:25.271 --> 00:47:26.775
It's been a real pleasure to meet you both.
