Message from the Vice-Provost
Remarks by Carrie Smith at the launch of Changing the Story, Feb. 12, 2025.
Over the last few weeks, I have been reflecting on some of the words that appear in the title of the plan we are launching today. The first two words are community and story. Charlie Jane Anders the idea of community helps us to create a world that we might want to live in, we can build a better community by “telling better stories. Community is partly the story we tell ourselves. It is an act of will.” As an act of will, it requires intention. It requires us to tell stories of resilience and survival, of thriving and possibility. Of doing and being better.
Stories are powerful. They tell us what parts of our past should be remembered and who we are now, but they also show us how we might craft our future. Thomas King charges us in The Truth About Stories with this: “Want a different ethic? Tell a different story” (164–65). He uses a metaphor to encourage us to grow stories that are perennials, rather than annuals, that prepare us and can be drawn upon, even as they may be overwintering. It is our responsibility to strengthen and care for these stories. This, too, is an act of will.
The integrated action plan is the culmination of your stories of imagining a different ethic, a better community. Because stories are data. Starting in November 2023, the 40 members of the EDI Leads Network representing every unit, from faculties to facilities, began a unique consultation process that leveraged their relationships and contexts. These consultations took place in formal and informal settings, in committees and over cups of tea. Additional data points came from the steering committee’s engagement with university groups, including advisory councils, leadership tables, undergraduate and graduate student associations, faculty collectives, and governance bodies. In March, we held five open co-creation sessions to develop actions and outcomes in the interconnected areas of our learning and working environment, what the plan calls our institutional ecosystem. But our ecosystem is not static, and as 海角社区 members responded to events unfolding on and off our campuses in spring 2024, these data points, too, were gathered in individual conversations, group settings, and large town halls.
Changing the Story captures the energy and honesty of all of these interactions, representing more than 1,000 students, faculty, and staff. There emerges a sense that we must afford ourselves hope – hope that we can utilize this moment to catalyze a changed way forward that will take us to a space out beyond false binaries or zero-sum thinking, one that is informed by mutual flourishing and access, celebrates our vibrancy, and is rooted in our relations and interconnectedness.
Change is the third word I’ve been reflecting on. Change of the sort (and here I make a nod to organizers ) requires us to craft space for a plurality of beliefs and ideals, where there may be tensions, where there isn’t one answer or process, where we might stumble. Change of this sort means being expansive about how we invite people in and how we move through, together. And this requires practice. adrienne maree brown urges: “We need to pay attention to what we practice. Each practice of an organization is a small scale way to grow or shrink its own realization of its espoused mission and values” (Holding Change, 101). At the heart of this plan are seven values-based practices that include collective remembering, community building, and, yes, love. These practices will help us to build the stamina needed to take up the actions for change.
Change doesn’t only result from grandiose interventions. brown writes of the “relatively small interactions” that lead to complex systems of change (Emergent Strategy, 2). We’ve included an Individual Action Planning Workbook as part of the resources for the plan to help each of us to begin where we are. And because practices take, well, practice, we’ve also launched a learning module to support us in paying better attention.
However, that isn’t to suggest that all of this rests on you or doesn’t require accountability. Every senior leader, manager, supervisor, decision-making and governance body is accountable to fulfilling the actions in this plan. No matter where we find ourselves in the institutional ecosystem — from the grassroots to the grasstips — we are individually and collectively accountable. What kind of accountability am I talking about? Four principles to which the plan repeatedly returns are: mutuality, reciprocity, responsibility, and interdependence. These principles describe the kind of accountability that the 海角社区 community deserves.
I’ve now arrived at the final word: action. Hannah Arendt wrote about entering the world — zur Welt kommen — that is already inhabited by others as a process of beginning, and beginning as signaling our capability to act (Origins of Totalitarianism). The plan commits us to beginning all actions within two years. These are plotted along four trajectories: Supporting Uncomfortable Encounters, Enhancing Expansive Excellence, Ensuring Access to Academic and Community Life, and Nurturing Transformative Collaborations. The actions focus on structures, supports, and knowledge-sharing. They have been crafted to attend to each individual experience while leading toward improved opportunities for all. Each and all. By focusing on intersectional and holistic approaches to change but also recognizing that they have differential impacts, the plan strives to improve the well-being of every member of the 海角社区.
I am deeply grateful to the Changing the Story writing collective, to the members of the Integrated Action Plan Steering Committee, and to the members of the Leads Network past and present. To all who offered your thoughts, whether on committees, online, in gatherings, or hallway conversations: thank you. And to those who have not been involved till today: welcome.
As we take action under the renewed banner of Access, Community and Belonging, we continue to honour the efforts that have brought us to this point, while we invite new contributors, questions, and approaches. This will allow us to be tenacious and responsive in the face of some of the greatest challenges of our time. With an open hand, an open heart, and an open mind, we invite you to join us. Help us to change the story.
Photos of a zine-making activity at the launch:
Works cited:
Anders, Charlie Jane. “One More Vital Reason Community Gives Me Hope.” Happy Dancing, Sept. 3, 2024.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 1951.
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press, 2017.
—. Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. Chico: AK Press, 2017.
Hayes, Kelly and Mariame Kaba. “How Much Discomfort is the Whole World Worth?” Boston Review, Sept. 6, 2023.
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2008.
Solnit, Rebecca in conversation with Charlie Jane Anders, Anand Giridharadas, Bill McKibben, Liz Ogbu, and Akaya Windwood. “The Way We Get Through This is Together,” YouTube, uploaded by Rebecca Solnit, Jan. 20, 2025, .