Sue Wilkinson came to the community in 1993 and stayed until 2011. Sue was first hired by the Cambodian Association and then as a Team Leader for the Jane/Finch Centre. From there, she became the Centres Program Manager, Assistant Executive Director and lastly, the Executive Director. As of June 2018, Sue is the CEO of 211 Toronto.
Can you please tell me what brought you to the Jane Finch community?
The interest in the community came from a presentation from a Social Work student who had done a placement in Jane and Finch for their Social Work program. I was doing my BSW at Western and we brought in previous students. The teacher had arranged for previous placement students come in and talk about and share their experience doing different types of work. Somebody came in and had done a placement in Jane and Finch and I thought, “that’s where I want to be – I’d love to work there”.
So that was the first inkling around possibly working in the Jane Finch community but also at the same time, I was doing a student placement in London at a place called the London Cross Cultural Learning Centre and we did partnerships with the Cambodian Association in Toronto. So, I had been to Jane and Finch several times, to their office, having meetings, talking about partnerships. When I graduated and as a Social Worker, you do a lot of counselling and I wanted to make sure I didn’t want to be a counsellor so I did a stint at CAS in Parry Sound, north of Toronto and when I realized I really didn’t care about counselling, I contacted the Cambodian Association because I had had a relationship with them and asked them to keep an eye on any jobs for me – if they saw anything that they thought would fit. They asked me to go down to talk with them and they made a job for me. My first job in JF was created or made by the Cambodian Association as a Program Manager. But I worked first for them as a student placement for the Cambodian community for years before working with the Cambodian Association in Toronto, but I continued to do work for them up until very recently. They have lost a lot of their funding so slowly over time, I think a lot of their funding was focused on the fact that they were newcomers and as time went on, they no longer fit the criteria and their funding dried up.
In that role, it was mostly partnerships and bringing in new revenue so lots of new partnerships and new resourcing. A lot of the work I did focused on building relationships between the Cambodian Association, the Laotian community and the Vietnamese community. We got funding for several youth related initiatives that brought the three communities together because there were inter-racial tensions between them and there was a lot to learn amongst the different communities because they had evolved in very different ways. That was a big part of it.
Women’s health, in the partnership with you (Wanda at Jane/Finch Centre) and with Margarita (Jane/Finch Centre) was another example of partnerships and international work. A lot of new resourcing to do international development work in Cambodia, in collaboration with Cambodian residents here, was really interesting. I was part of the group called the Cambodia Canadian Development program, funded by the federal government and met every month or every two months in Montreal with partners from around the world, around international development in Cambodia.
Around youth, we did partnership programs that focused on leadership, that brought the three communities together – conferences, capacity building and skills development, multiple different initiatives.
I then became the Team Leader for Getting In Touch (GIT) at the Jane/Finch Centre. GIT was actually a very interesting program. It was the only social recreational type of program in the whole north western part of Toronto around mental health at the time. It largely dealt with people who had dual diagnoses and most of the participants in that program ended up having serious mental health issues but also having some for of developmental issues or physical challenges as well. It was a pretty chronic group of people that were very difficult to help in some ways. This was a bit of their life-line so for a lot of the participants it really was their community and their family. Its what kept them motivated and interested in life, really. For a lot of people, it was their only connection to other people.
When you started working in the community, what were the issues facing the community, city, or province?
Poverty was probably and all the connecting factors around poverty was definitely number one. So, housing – poor quality housing, community safety was a big issue back then as well, in fact probably worse when I started than in subsequent years. It progressively seemed to improve over time. As an example, when I started with the Cambodian Association, they actually could not go to Tobermory. People were not allowed to go into Tobermory who worked professionally. They had relationships with Children’s Aid for example, but CAS workers were not allowed to go into the building without police escort because of safety concerns so in particular, Tobermory and there were a lot of Cambodians who lived in Tobermory at the time, so it was a bit of a challenge.
Another large piece, and maybe it was because of the population I was working with was issues with academic achievement. They were huge – youth being kicked out of school for certain behaviors or not succeeding in school, absenteeism was a huge problem so youth as young as twelve dropping out of school – a really big issue. Another big issue at that time was glue sniffing, believe it or not. We started some programs related to glue sniffing awareness as well, largely in the Cambodian community at the time. It was a big problem with kids as young as seven and eight. This is one of the programs funded. Can’t remember who funded it, a glue-sniffing awareness initiative but it was a partnership in Toronto so there were others in the city, other regions that had similar issues. But, it was even just raising awareness. So, gas stations, for example would find bottles of glue products and not really understand why, so talking to businesses about the signs that they have problems they have on their land was interesting, just as an example.
You were involved with many initiatives over the years. Can you please describe some of those initiative where you felt there was an impact and some that were interesting, with maybe less of an impact?
That was in partnership with you and Margarita and Veena (Veena Dutta at Elspeth Heyworth Centre for Women). I just remember the four of us in particular – the conversations around how to do something around health promotion and awareness, holistically for newcomer women, in particular. If I remember correctly, it was a federal grant and it was something that was unusual that hadn’t happened in the past. If I remember it correctly, it was more of an evolution that this opportunity exists, what could we do that would actually make a difference. At the time, I was working at the Cambodian Association so was very well aware of the health challenges at the association so was able to bring that to the table and the focus was to be on five communities. The Laotian community was part of that and maybe the Vietnamese community.
I don’t know why but I think the Women’s Health Project raised awareness around this but another community issue that was really prominent when I first started was violence against women. I remember one of the more interesting things that I was involved in was with a partnership with the Elspeth Heyworth Centre where we pulled together leaders – three leaders from the South Asian community, all three different religions and we did a film of them speaking to violence against women that ended up being translated into each of the main languages and distributed and broadcast actually. That was kind of an interesting one but violence against women was a really big issue and racial tensions as well. So that was one that would be forgotten was actually pretty interesting and kind of unique to have leaders from community speak to how their religious teachings actually did not allow for violence against women at all and that there was a misinterpretation of religion that makes people think that’s actually acceptable – really fascinating.
International Women’s Day (IWD) was another interesting one which was a fascinating evolution of a small community event into something that grew to be way too big and way too difficult to manage. It was one of the worse days I ever remember – it was horrifying! I don’t know if that event still happens but the point of it was to bring different communities together was really the big piece but also to allow for an opportunity for women to be pampered, thanked and treated really well. It kind of evolved into an interesting iteration of IWD where we had people come in a do self-care, workshops, massages, henna treatment and all kinds of interesting things, it had food and it got way too big. So, the last one I was really involved in and remember, I passed it off after that because I think I suffered some trauma where there were about 1,200 people at Driftwood Community Centre and I remember going up to the office of Lester Green, we stood in his office and we just looked out over people and it was like so dangerous. There were so many people that you could barely move and then a fight broke out because there were people in line for food and somebody said they stepped on their kid – there was actually a physical altercation and the police had to intervene! It was kind of horrifying and I think the event changed after that because it was too successful and there were too many people. The venue just wasn’t big enough.
What were the challenges?
I think for me, the biggest challenge was building an Eco system so when you do system work, trying to get multiple different players working together on a common shared agenda was really difficult. So that’s what strikes me the most about Jane Finch and certainly the piece that has been my biggest learning that helps me in my work since is really that the networked Eco system type of approach where you have multiple different players that care about issues in finding meaningful ways in bringing them together, so they can make change happen without getting buried in the dislike amongst each other or the tensions between their different agenda’s. Really difficult work. I find this work to be difficult in general, not just in Jane Finch. I’m not sure it was more difficult there, even the world I’m in now is really difficult for that. I’m not sure it was more difficult but there were a lot of players and there was a lot of interest and building community is very, very hard.
I remember very clearly, an aha moment, when Garland Yates was brought to the community. Garland Yates was a community builder from the US who was part of many big systems around educating around building community and he was connected to the United Way. He came, and we brought together somewhere between 40 and 60 community groups and he talked about a shared agenda. And he talked about the fact that you actually don’t need to appreciate or value or care about the mandate of each others’ organizations and you don’t even have to like each other. You just have to agree on a couple of things that you are going to do together and where you put all of the other aside and you work together in a common way. That was amazing. For me, that was a bit of a breakthrough because a lot of the work that we put into the community had been on trying to get groups to work together in a good way and to like each other, partnering, but its not always possible. That was really transformative for me and I hope it was for others in the community as well. I can’t remember how it was organized or where it came from – might have been from one of the community networks, I think would have put that together. It was actually transformative for me and led to some other interesting pieces of work.
I remember very clearly one of the last things I did in Jane Finch before I left was holding the Community Forum on community safety at Oakdale Community Centre. Through a partnership with the Toronto Police Services, there had been many conversations with them and I just remember sitting at a table one day with the Superintendent, myself and Morris Beckford. I don’t remember anyone else at the table, but I remember the three of us sitting at the table and brainstorming how to get to the root of the problem - problem-solving together as a community without there being protests. There was a lot of protests happening around the Toronto Police Services when I was in the community and it wasn’t necessarily helpful at all – it didn’t give us the outcomes we wanted. But it did motivate the police to sit down and ask what they could do to open up a dialogue.
The decision was made to host a Community Forum and to design a forum that would give everybody a voice but would be done in a fair and equitable type of way. A forum was held, and the forum had 80 community groups or community leaders and it had Bill Blair, the Chief of Police and his leads from across Toronto police services were in attendance. Basically, it was designed under the same kind of principle of Garland Yates work. So, I was voluntold – told that I had to moderate so every three minutes, everybody in the audience had three minutes to say anything they wanted to the police – they could say anything that came to mind – anything they wanted to say in three minutes to give a message. Basically, we went one by one, everyone in the crowd gave their message and collectively, we spent the rest of the day designing based upon common themes and solutions for how to move forward on key issues. The gym was full of people all day long and it had to be very carefully orchestrated so that everybody had three minutes, said whatever they wanted and then said a solution or something that they wanted as a recommendation. Everybody came prepared and everybody was vetted so we knew exactly who was going to be in the room. It wasn’t selective, everybody was invited to be there. I had conversations with everybody who attended to talk about what they were able to do during those three minutes and it was fascinating. This was one of the last things I did in the community so maybe 2011. This was so close to my leaving that I’m not sure if I have the trail of what happened after the forum.
What were the factors that led up to the development of The Spot (A Place Where YOU/th Wanna Be)?
When I starting to work in Jane Finch and doing work in the Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese communities, the issue with youth was a really, really big factor. I had the opportunity when I was at the Cambodian Association and while I was also doing my masters at York University to do a participatory action research project and wanted to focus on mental health and women but as I started talking to the community, I realized that nothing trumped the issue of youth.
The biggest issue women were facing was how do you raise a teenager. People did not know how to do that in the context of this intergenerational and cross-cultural tensions. You have youth who have only known Canada and then you have parents who come from very traditional backgrounds and don’t understand Canada. They don’t understand our education system leading to an incredible amount of stress and tension for everyone involved for parents and their youth. So that project morphed into a youth project. The number one recommendation out of that research was for a youth drop-in program so the Cambodian community recommended a youth drop-in program and I can’t remember exactly when my master’s finished and when that work was done but I was at the Jane/Finch Centre at the time. I was probably at Centre for years because I was doing my masters part-time, so it took a very long time and we were able to get a small amount of funding from the City of Toronto from Access and Equity to actually open a Cambodian youth drop-in program which was really great. The evidence was there, the research was behind it and the funding was there.
Before that I had to do a lot of advocacy to get the Centre to actually do youth work. So, before that point, it was a family centre. Youth was considered part of the family but there were no actual designated programs for youth. So, the focus was on the family and it took a lot of advocacy because what I really didn’t understand was that there was a fear, or this is what was explained to me that starting programs for youth was like opening a can of worms and that without the proper resources and the right amount of support, we could cause more harm than good. That was a challenging message for me to hear but respectively I sat with that for years and did youth work in different ways. I did it through partnerships with the Cambodian Association and by working as a consultant for the Youth Clinical Services where I helped them develop funding and new programs for youth. So, I was doing youth work but not through Jane/Finch Centre but through other community partners. But when given the mandate and perhaps because of the evidence that youth work was really needed, I was able to go after funding for these programs. So, we did that with the Cambodian Association but spearheading that work proved that this work can be done, and it can be manageable. My job description expanded to be a Program Manager so not just mental health, but all programs and youth became part of that mandate.
The actual development of The Spot grew from multiple attempts to create safe spaces for youth. It was really quite challenging to be honest. We tried Driftwood and we tried to use the offices at the Centre. The youth space started there so they had a dedicated space in one of the offices to be used after hours. We used the basement at 4400 Jane for a long time, but nothing was theirs. It always felt like borrowed space, so you would come and the art on the walls would be GIT art, or its community centre, it’s the basement - it was never a youth space, it was never their space. Nothing was really for them, it was something that they were borrowing – someone else’s space, always. So, there was a need to explore that a little bit around what would change if they were validated and respected in the way they deserved to be and be given a space of their own was part of the driving force. The other big piece was the challenges youth were having in Jane Finch so summer of the gun, just as an example. I think things just came to a head and for those of us who were around and went though the Mike Harris years – I think it was very clear from the beginning that we were going to have a big problem when these young people who were denied services and denied support through those years, grew up. They were going to be really angry with the kind of existence that they were forced to live with as kids. And sure enough, I don’t know if there was a direct correlation, I suspect there is and don’t know if its actually been researched but the summer of the gun was 2005, an explosion of death and gun violence in Jane Finch came to a head at that point.
I think the timing was right just to do something about it and to create a respectful space for Jane Finch youth, not just for Cambodian youth. That might have been the group we played with and who we started programs for but that expanded to other groups like the program at Tobermory and different programs around the community but having a really respectful gift for youth in the community, something that was theirs and theirs alone seemed really important.
The other driving force for that is that a lot of the groups that had been created were created as ethno-cultural groups or they were groups based on where you lived, your actual building or your residence and a lot of challenges youth were facing were because of that territorial turf kind of stuff. Having the opportunity to shatter that and to have youth from different buildings, different ethnicities coming together in one space seemed incredibly important. That was kind of the driving force and having a program like The Spot was really important.
Consultation was done with all of those youth groups and any other youth we could get our hands on to kind of ask what that could or should look like and then based on those recommendations, it evolved into something that actually happened which was a labour of love for many of us - it was a huge piece of work. There was no funding and I guess that was the thing that was most challenging about this. We were able to secure funding from Trillium to do the build and to get programs off the ground for a short period of time. The renovation itself cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to renovate the space so to furnish and renovate the space, we were able to get a capital grant from Trillium and a small amount of start-up money but basically, there was no core funding at all and I remember even after The Spot was built, was having our United Way panel interview. They came and sat at the table and we talked about The Spot and we talked about the fact that it had no funding and that is when we got our first increase from the United Way and that was dedicated for youth work.
Byron Gray was not the first Manager at The Spot, believe it or not. We hired an award-winning youth, someone who had won lots of youth leadership awards and had a very senior role at a youth shelter. He was like the co-Executive Director or something – a very senior role. Very excited about this opportunity. And then what happened was a week before The Spot was to open, he disappeared – literally disappeared. In finally finding him and finally sitting down with him and ending his employment contract, he said that he was terrified because he didn’t know what The Spot was. He didn’t get it, he didn’t know what it was. I thought he had gotten it all along, but he clearly didn’t get it which made me terrified because you had a whole team of people hired through small projects who didn’t get it either. I remember going over to the space when it was being set up and standing there, having a conversation with the whole team and saying to them that that’s the point. The point was that we don’t know what it is. So, when someone walks in the door and says what is this place to flip it back to them and say, “what do you want it to be”. It was that simple but that had not been properly communicated from this person who was hired. So, Byron got the job of Manager at that point and stayed in that role (until July 2018). Byron was already working at the centre in another job.
There was no pot of money to fill that place with programs, however if we could talk to youth about the kinds of programs they wanted, we would go out and partner with others to be able to provide those programs in the space. It was really a hard thing for people to wrap their head around. It really was a hub so the point of it was to create a community hub and the mental model around it was exactly that. That became the strategy of how to operate the space which I think in many ways is a better model to be completely honest because its not owned by one organization and it builds incredible partnerships to be able to do that. I’m not sure if it still operates that way.
I think I martyred myself with The Spot more than any other thing. It was an enormous amount of work and there was not an enormous amount of support around it to make it happen and it truly became a labour of love and a gift like for those of us who were involved in it, we really thought of it as a gift to the youth of the community and a validation of the fact that they mattered and that we were tired of them not mattering.
In your role as Executive Director, what do you feel you accomplished and what did you find challenging in that role?
Becoming the Executive Director came naturally. I transitioned from the Program Manager into an Assistant Executive Director, a new role that was created that was taking multiple responsibilities of the Executive Director and having it shared with somebody that provides that kind of support behind the scenes, so I think human resources and financial management and things like that were already things that I was doing as well as partnerships. At that point, it was labour relations because staff had unionized so there was a lot of human resources work to do. If I were to say anything about that role, that was probably the most important thing.
I would hope that it was a cultural shift because I had left Jane/Finch Centre and went back because things were not good. I went to the Four Villages and then came back because of you - you and I shook hands at an Annual General Meeting that we would go back, and I don’t know what we were thinking! When Margarita left, I came back. But this was the interesting thing. I was doing the job on an interim basis and when Margarita gave formal notification that she wasn’t coming back (from her sabbatical), I was actually in Vietnam for 3 weeks and when I was there, the Board brought in a Human Resources consultant and asked how they could convince me to stay. If I remember this story correctly, this is what I was told because they knew I wouldn’t apply and I wouldn’t compete, and they knew me well enough that I would have so many reservations around being a white woman from a middle-class background actually running the organization versus doing it behind the scenes – playing a leadership role behind the scene. So, they knew it was going to be a problem. It was Cheryl actually that led a strategy in how to convince me to keep doing the job. But I vowed that it would be for a limited period of time. The maximum was five years and I stayed six months short of that, if I remember correctly.
In coming back, I think the focus had to be around stability for the organization. My career there had always been externally focused, and partnership focused but for whatever the reason at that moment in time, what really was required was rebuilding the organizational culture. The unionization created an us versus them mentality and there was a war declared like staff actually declared a war so there really was a feeling of inequity and improper treatment amongst staff – right or wrong was not the point but changing the culture so that people felt they had power to make change happen within the organization and it was a long painful process to be honest. It took a really, really long time to switch that stuff around and I don’t think it was perfect at all but I think that’s probably what I invested most of my time into – even hiring a Human Resources person who worked full-time basically for close to a year instead of having an Assistant Executive Director and who focused on principles around how you manage in an environment like that and really doing leadership training in support for the management team to really listen to staff, to validate and care about the concerns that were being raised. The work was really tough, and I think that in any organization when you are doing really difficult work, its not always completely rewarding because you don’t see the benefits of it – its not obvious, that change is happening. Its really hard and its hard on moral. So how to keep an organization healthy to some degree in that kind of environment, was really challenging and it was also not my favourite part of work either.
What were you really proud of by the time you left the Centre?
I think the growth. The Centre grew a lot while I was there, and I think that within the time that I was in that role, it doubled in size. It grew significantly and its not the money, its more the programs like what that money was able to do and the type of new programs we were able to implement which I think was really important. A lot of things tried to get at the root cause of the challenges that were happening in the community is key like Action for Neighbourhood Change, just for example. There were a lot of initiatives that were new and important like Women Moving Forward was incredibly important, like the Green Change initiative, the list goes on – its impossible to even speak to all of them. They were all incredible initiatives being championed by amazing people. The one thing connected to The Spot and connected to the story around the police services piece, I think was a unique thing I might have brought to the table. I think a lot of those initiatives could have happened with or without me, but I think I took a really strong role around the community safety stuff - creating the first community contract basically how we work together around community safety in collaboration with the police, Toronto Housing and all of the other service providers in the community. That kind of work was painful, and it took a lot of time and a lot of energy to get people to that place.
Thank goodness it happened elsewhere in the community – there was another example and we were able to pull on that experience, whoever put that together – can’t remember who that was now. There was another community safety strategy that had been created by the City, but we were able to leverage that one example that was in existence and I think that all made a really big difference. We dealt with community safety and the aftermath of community crisis in a really different way after doing that work because we were much more conscious of the impact and consequences of community safety issues. Some incredibly things grew out of that. And, maybe people are not in a safer environment, but it creates more opportunity for resilience to be in a better place to cope. That was kind of the key piece and that reminds me of anther big important initiative.
The ACT project that was in collaboration with York University which was all focused-on youth and was focused on resilience and the importance of building resiliency. You can actually be in a terrible environment, you can live in poverty, you can survive, and you can be strong and resilient with the right kind of supports. Those supports might look different for everybody but if you have enough of those supports in place, you can thrive, and you can still come out of it in a very positive way. Myself and Uzo Anuche, a professor at York, partnered and were co-chairs for a national grant that brought lots of new money and resources to the community to do youth engagement and research in the schools and to build community relationships with the University in a new way and to bring young people to York who might not have had the opportunity to go to University. It was a five-year project, but it continued as there were off-shoots that continue today like NOISE which is really a bridging program for youth into academia and the provincial youth rec’s which is youth researching the impact of youth services, particularly For Youth, By Youth Services.
What did Jane Finch teach you or what did you learn from working in the community?
I think the resilience piece is what I would say is what I leaned the most. People are incredible at surviving and people love the community. I love that community so its amazing that in spite of external perceptions that the community is unsafe, the housing is terrible, the education – all sorts of problems with the schools and youth being kicked out of school – the list goes on. That’s an external perception of what its like to be in the community but I was always struck by how it is actually being in the community – I never felt that. I never felt that working in the community and in speaking with people, very rarely did I come across anybody that their goal was to get out of Jane Finch, that they were there because they were trapped, they were stuck and couldn’t move somewhere else. I almost never came across that.
I think that what I learned is that, that’s because of all the other great things. Yes, there were issues about community safety, yes, more youth were being shot and killed in Jane Finch than elsewhere – you can’t escape the evidence especially with something like the summer of the gun – you can’t escape that. But there were amazing things that were happening in that community. People felt like they were part of something – something bigger than them. There was support from neighbours in a way that doesn’t seem to happen elsewhere. People had mentors. So, when we did this research in high schools, it was credible in that the majority of youth actually felt like they had formal mentors. They felt like they had neighbours that they said hi to everyday when they came and went. They felt connected to their community. That kind of resilience, if you build enough positive factors around peoples lives you can cope with some pretty incredible things but are hard for somebody outside to imagine.