Andrea Clarke is a social sector consultant and executive coach. Over the past decade, she has held a number of senior leadership roles, including as CEO of the Lucie and André Chagnon Foundation, the Senior Director of Community Engagement and Social Impact at Concordia University, and the Executive Director of À Deux Mains/Head & Hands. Andrea is a board member of the Fondation du Grand Montréal and sits on a number of other coordination, advisory, and evaluative committees. She holds a B.Sc. in Biology, an M.Sc. in Biochemistry, and an MBA from Concordia University, and is currently considering further graduate studies.
What can academia learn from SHIFT?
by Andrea Clarke
Over 2020-21, the McConnell Foundation convened close to 30 university presidents to delineate the role of Canadian universities in society. Together they developed 14 intersecting change agent roles that could help to "build a resilient, equitable and low-carbon world for present and future generations, in partnership with, and benefiting, our students and our collective communities"; a laudable objective that reflects the responsibility of universities as spaces committed to the development and transmission of knowledge.
Despite the important role that universities have and continue to play in Canadian society, we are also faced with the fact that institutions, including the academy, no longer benefit from the same degree of trust that they once did. A fact acknowledged as recently as this year by Ana Mari Cauce, PhD, President at the University of Washington, who reflected on the reality that potential future scholars as well as the broader community are calling into question the relevance of higher education.
President Cauce highlighted the importance of developing “approaches that are neither solely top down nor bottom up,” naming a tension with which many organisations must contend. The case for working top down is almost always one of expedience, however while that approach is faster to implement at the onset, it tends to fail in developing a shared commitment to follow through. Bottom up approaches are by nature emergent, and generate greater buy-in, but are often under-resourced as successive strata of hierarchy are traversed.
Rather than seeking to strike a balance in the directionality of one’s approach, it is possible to completely reorient the paradigm. If in lieu of a question of verticality and of power, we reflect rather on horizontality and connection, we can understand the question of top down or bottom up as one of the quality and proximity of relationships. The top down approach can then be likened to an interaction where relationships are weak or non-existent, and so it is at best difficult to move forward initiatives without the implicated parties feeling that their needs and perspectives are not being taken into account; decisions are being made from afar. Conversely, with greater proximity comes a stronger understanding of the realities that can and should influence decisions and processes, and a desire to be accountable to acting based on that understanding.
Learning from SHIFT’s model
From its inception, SHIFT has sought to integrate feedback from a multitude of actors in the design and deployment of the unit. Over time, this commitment to being open to its communities within and outside of the University led to the development and refinement of ways of being and working which sought to develop trust and to be accountable and transparent. Despite operating within an hierarchical institution, the SHIFT Centre has been able to develop governance practices that prioritise shared leadership and diverse voices within the SHIFT ecosystem as a way to be deliberately accountable to said ecosystem.
An element of that accountability is an openness to criticism and feedback, whether it is received from close collaborators, or from groups who are just beginning their journey towards (or away from) partnership. Such feedback is not easy to receive, and can feel strategically imprudent for an institutional actor to acknowledge or respond to, and yet without an openness to it, there is no incentive for others to share their expertise or to become full participants, as it has been clearly demonstrated that their perspectives are not valued. As representatives, be it formal or informal, of an institution, power is a factor in the work of the university’s staff, faculty, and students with the broader community, regardless of whether it is seen through the lens of verticality or horizontality. Relationships are developed and strengthened, or weakened and lost in part by how partners experience power dynamics and how power is wielded, whether intentionally or not.
A frequent example of these dynamics is the way in which the learnings and successes of partners are often positioned as being those of the institution. It is deceptively easy to frame the provision of resources (e.g., funding, research support, access to space, etc) as the driving force behind an accomplishment, when it was actually a facilitating or legitimizing (vis à vis other institutions) factor to the labour and transformational work of others without whom the accomplishment would never have been imagined let alone realized.
Thus, it is important to develop one’s self-awareness and self-criticality as institutional actors. It is insufficient to declare that we are well-intentioned as a way of hand-having criticisms that come one’s way, nor does describing a situation as complex or complicated offer absolution from the responsibility to thoroughly examine it. What is at the root of that complexity? Is it complicated or complacency? More importantly, who is being harmed by these unaddressed concerns?
SHIFT has had the privilege of being able to learn and grow with its community who have been generous with their time, energy, and critical lens on the work being done within and outside of its walls. As something of a microcosm of the university itself, SHIFT has had to and continues to contend with what it means to strive for social transformation while being part of a Canadian university with all of the frictions, tensions, and power dynamics that comes with it. Ultimately, the shared belief in the importance of leveraging the resources, whether material, financial, or reputational, of the University to build an equitable, just, and sustainable society is only made manifest through an honest commitment to relationship building, power sharing, and accountability.
