The Power Shift: Decolonising Development

Community-centred approach to humanitarian work. Rachel Kiddell-Monroe interviewed.

• Kate Bird • Season 1 • Episode 43

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, founder of the SeeChange initiative, which seeks to take a stand in the humanitarian sector and centre communities in a decolonised approach.

Rachel tells us about taking a community-centred approach to humanitarian work which is built around connection, engagement, co-design, and reflection. They have developed practical, open-source frameworks to incorporate the needs of the communities they work with.

Rachel emphasises the importance of not only personal reflection, but also taking a stand and speaking up in spaces of privilege, acknowledging that there is a risk.

Rachel Kiddell-Monroe is an activist, lawyer, and humanitarian who has worked for many years in leading positions for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).She also founded the student-led group Universities Allied for Essential Medicines and is a Professor of Practice at McGill University in Montreal, Canada where she leads a course on Decoloniality and Humanitarian Action. 

In 2018, Rachel founded SeeChange, a Canada-based social purpose organization that works to impact humanitarian organizations to shift to a more community-centered approach, contributing to a decolonization of the sector. SeeChange and MSF cooperated on a successful 'CommunityFirst' pilot project in which MSF teams co-created health strategies with affected communities in several countries. 

SeeChange also uses this community-centered approach in its work with Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic region, where the organization supports TB and mental health initiatives that are co-created with the community. In recognition of her work in this field, Rachel was appointed an Ashoka Fellow in 2023.

If you’re interested to find out more about SeeChange, take a look here:

Recommended resources:

SeeChange’s CommunityFirst Tools

SeeChange’s Decoloniality Resources 

Kate:

Hello, I'm Professor Kate Bird, and this is the Power Shift Decolonising Development. Today, Dr. 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. 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. Listen on for more, and don't forget to like or share. To receive practical resources on Shifting Power, do sign up via our website, devhubuk. org. Scroll down on any page and sign up. Look forward to seeing you again. Bye for now. 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. I'm Professor Kate Bird, a socio economist and director of the Development Hub. Today's co host is Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Greetings, I'm Dr. Nompilo Ndovu. I'm a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa. I'm an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa. Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation. My PhD focused on mass violence, memory, and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe. Back to you, Kate.

Kate:

Thanks, Nompilo. 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. 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. 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. 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. For more on Rachel and her work, click on the show notes below this episode. And back to you, Nompilo, for our first question.

Nompilo:

Thank you. Okay. Rachel, can you tell us about your past work in the humanitarian sector? And what led you to establish SeeChange?

Rachel:

First of all, thanks very much for having me on your podcast. It's really thrilling to be here and to meet you both. I guess I'll start with what led me to establish SeeChange. In one word, I would say disillusion. 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. And so I never self identified as a humanitarian. We were a bunch of volunteers that were helping people who were facing emergencies. It wasn't considered a career. It wasn't a career path. There was no salaries. So I mean, that has its pros and its cons, but just to make it clear how different it was then than today. 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. 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. And even some of those today are engraved out, especially when we see what's happening in Palestine and so on. So nowadays I'm tending to call myself more recovering humanitarian. And it's really this questioning of the system today that led me to found SeeChange. So as you mentioned, you know, I work with MSF in various leadership positions, notably before and after and during the genocide in Rwanda. And I was head of mission, regional humanitarian affairs director in Latin America. And I also worked a lot on access to medicines issues. And then I left for a period of nine or so years, where I worked with a student organisation. I was raising three sons at the time, so it was better suited to my lifestyle that I needed. And then I came back to MSF in 2013 and really went at a much higher level on the international board of directors. So the overall steering and direction of the organisation. And I mentioned that time period because during that time, I've really witnessed the transformation of this humanitarian system. In some ways, I saw how the industry changed for the good. 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. So perpetuating that charitable model on communities are extremely sophisticated, just as an example. I mean, communities in Kenya cottoned on to telehealth way before any humanitarian organisations did. But we had this system that doesn't really allow that organic growth from the communities to translate. 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. 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. And then the Ebola epidemic, which broke out at that time. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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? And how do we together learn how to do this differently because what we're doing now doesn't work. It's clear what we're doing now does not work. We have to change. We have to change. We cannot carry on like this. 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. What we're actually doing is perpetuating those colonial structures by not being able to speak out as humanitarian organisations. Clearly, since the beginning about the genocide in Palestine, in Gaza, we have become unwitting accomplices to it. And it's really problematic. So humanitarian organisations, need to take this moment to reflect. So what I'm trying to do now with SeeChange is see how to do that. It's interesting because as I was thinking about, well, what could I do to, you know, where could I work? 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. And actually I just, I'm new in Canada. I'm not a Canadian by birth. 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. 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. I said, well, this is ridiculous. We can get rid of this. We can change this. So I started to work. 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. 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. And this was the result of Canadian colonialism, which is ongoing. 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. Everything is accessible only by plane. There is no roads at all. It's an incredibly, uh, we would call it very remote. The Inuit don't think it's remote. They think it's perfect, but from our Southern perspective, we see it as remote. 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. You could not look at these individually. 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. So that's what I've been doing. 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. So It's an initiative to try to demonstrate ways that you can work differently and what that requires to do that.

Nompilo:

Thank you, Rachel, for giving such, such detailed context. Yeah, it's such brave work that you're doing. Just a linkage to that. You work directly with communities and you strive to influence humanitarian organisations and policymakers. What is the connection between your work with Inuit communities in Canada and the broader humanitarian policy work?

Rachel:

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. 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. And I have been in a lot of environments, as you both have, where living conditions are pretty poor. 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. 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. Um, you know, they were forced into communities in the 1950s. 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. 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. So that was one thing. 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. The response to health crises is brought from the outside. There are no humanitarian organisations up there, it's just the government. And so the government makes the decisions about the policy and then it goes to implement those in the communities. 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. So you can imagine the impact that that's having. And the community's not engaged, so they're very passive. 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. Back to where they were before, actually. And so this for me really exemplified again, how this lack of community engagement is something that I've seen throughout the humanitarian industry. 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. It's actually not the case, which is the same in many other countries as well. You know, you get your global statistics about the country and everything looks fine. It's when you start to look in the fine print that you realise what kind of structural inequities are existing inside the countries. So that structural inequity has been a really coinciding factor.

Nompilo:

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? And why is it particularly important that you take a decolonised approach in this work?

Rachel:

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. It's probably the most expensive air miles in the world. Just to travel three hours North and three hours back by plane is around 5, 000 Canadian dollars. I mean, I could go to Zimbabwe and back a couple of times for that money. So nobody goes to the North. And the remoteness of the communities, etc, etc, makes it very complicated to work. One thing. Secondly, is I think the colonialism is ongoing in Nunavut. So people are under the yoke of colonialism. And so a lot of that colonialism becomes internalised as well. 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. A lot of their traditional ways of life have been completely destroyed. 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. 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. So in the 1970s the Canadian mountain police went in and killed all the Inuit dogs. All of them, they were slaughtered. And so people were left without dogs and instead they were given skidoos with some petrol. 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. 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. 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. Before then they were living as nomads. So their experience is only 50 years old. So it's very interesting and difficult to work, to find ways to collaborate. So that's very challenging. 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. And so that's been a big learning experience. The other side of the problem is really then the political side of the problem, the Canadian government side of the problem. There is no political will really to change. 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. They put all the indigenous children into residential schools, forcefully took them away from their homes, parents didn't know where their kids were. 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. 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. So those people went back extremely traumatised. 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. So billions of dollars are poured into the system in Nunavut. There's no lack of medicines, there's no lack of medical staff, but they're all medical staff from the South. 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. So to get a full education, they have to come to the South. 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. I mean, we recognise that from many environments. 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. It's really that I know better. 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. I know better than you. And up till recently, indigenous peoples were seen to be wards of the state. They were not even recognised to be able to vote or have those rights. So that's a status going on. The other part of it is the way that the system works in Canada is it's government to government work. So it's government of Canada working with the territory of Nunavut. And so there's a bias to working with a government, which is also based in a colonial approach. The government's a colonial embedded structure. It's not about individuals being bad. The individuals are all great. 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. 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.

Nompilo:

It sounds like quite a challenging environment. Yeah. Yeah, I don't even have anything else to add. Kate, over to you.

Kate:

Thank you so much. Rachel, you're talking with such articulacy and passion about the situation that you're confronting there. 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. 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. And I recognise the trends of complicity and silence. 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. And, I think we're complicit in letting run the system of structural racism and white supremacy, which underpins coloniality. And you're talking at the moment very fluently about current coloniality and race. But earlier in the conversation you talked about there being a shared understanding across the sector that change is needed. 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. I mean, I think there's actually a huge range of understandings and resistance to change. 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. Do you think that the kind of the statement that I've just made links to that difficulty? 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.

Rachel:

Yeah, thanks for bringing that clarification around that. Sometimes I think I move into rarefied circles because all the people I talk to are all into decolonisation. 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. 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. I think that no one can ignore it anymore. However, they can try. I think that it's a little bit like what we did with feminism. 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. That was enough. We just put the little words in there. I think the bit the same is happening with decolonisation. Everyone is sort of putting the words in and speaking the right language, but they're not walking the talk. And that's where this sort of between the why and the how. Why do we need to do it, and how we need to do it. I think the understandings of why we need to do it are different. 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. Then there's people who say, no, we need to do it because we fundamentally need to change the system. I think that's where the division comes. 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. Then, you know, we're going to be good. And that kind of makes sense from a financial perspective and an operational perspective as well. And that was what we always wanted to do. But this is just lip service and this is very cosmetic. 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. One of the lines that I heard so often was, if ain't broke, don't fix it. We are doing really well. Our results are really good. Our metrics are great. Why do we need to change? This is something that I heard ad nauseam, so I think there is that sort of conflict. I think we have to be very careful of people who say, well, this is just being politically correct. So if you want me to use those words, I will, but it doesn't actually go really deep down. So why is it very difficult for it to be taken seriously? I think exactly what you said. People do not like change. People like the status quo. They're good where they are. They're getting their salary. They're comfortable in their jobs in Geneva, in London, in Montreal, wherever it is, they're comfortable. They've got families who are dependent on their salary. It goes back to my very original comment that this industry has changed. It didn't used to be a profession or a career. Now it's a profession. I think the word humanitarian professional is an oxymoron. It doesn't go together. Humanitarians, we're all humanitarians. We all care about our neighbors. If my neighbor falls over, my elderly neighbors, I'll go and help them as a humanitarian act. We've completely lost ourselves in this dilution of really what we're doing here. And I think that is a big cause of, and a big reason why this decoloniality discussion is so critical. It's because we need to rethink the whole damn thing, because it's gone. It's got lost. It's got lost. And it is just reproducing and perpetuating everything that we don't want. 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. Saving lives, this is done with. This is not about saving lives. This is not about that I'm going to go somewhere and save, which is what we were thinking in the 90s. We were going there to bring technology, medicines that were going to help to save people's lives. We're in a different world now. So I think the white fragility is a big cause of this as well. 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. 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. 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. And I recognise that I've been able to do the things that I've done because of that. And it is very difficult and very confronting to say, I'm a racist, I've got privilege, all of these things. It's very, very hard to do. So I get it. I get that it's hard. It doesn't mean we don't do it. We have to do it. 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. 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. I think also, one of the things that I've learned from my personal experience is how bad I have been at listening. And when I talk about listening, I don't just mean hearing the words, but hearing what's behind those words. 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. What matters is what we think, what we say, and to break that and to learn to listen and truly listen. 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. If we want to work in communities, if we want to work in decoloniality, we have to listen. We have to take the time. That means that the results are slower. The results are not linear. The outcomes are not linear. We have to embrace different ways of thinking. 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. 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. And I think people find that very difficult to do. So decoloniality is no small feat. This is not a lip service, a set of word. 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. Especially in the emergency world. 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. But you're never going to work in an emergency, you realise that. And I'm like, the emergencies is probably where you need it the most. Because who are the first responders in an emergency? It's not you sitting in Geneva with your emergency crew. It's the communities on the ground that are picking up the pieces. They're the first responders. So, yes, you should go there and take the time and understand from them how they want to do it.

Kate:

Thank you. I really liked that response. 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. And I also really liked what you were saying about, taking a pause and being patient and learning to benefit from circular learning. So, learnings that come from other cultures. And I think historically, the minority world has been really poor at that. And I think we really could benefit not just from integrating Ubuntu leadership into our professional practices, but much, much else besides. So thank you for that. I hear from our previous conversation that SeeChange has produced and piloted a set of tools. Now, we do love a tool, and I'd like to hear more about your tools. 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. So can you tell us a little bit about your tools and how you came to develop them and how they work?

Rachel:

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. So we developed three tools. So the first tool that we developed was during COVID 19 and it was a pandemic response roadmap. And this was co created and co designed with one Inuit community that we were working with. And what happened was I was sitting here. They just announced the lockdown on March the 13th in Canada. Someone phoned me up from the community and said, Rachel, What do we do? We're terrified. We remember the influenza pandemic of 1919. Our grandparents, great grandparents died. What is going to happen to us? Are we all going to die? What do we do? 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. So we started to work together and I said, well, it's quite simple. There are three things you need to do. You need to organise, you need to prepare, and then if it comes, you need to respond. Simple as that. They're like, okay, this is great. And then I said, okay, so what would you do to organise? What would you do to prepare? What would you do to respond? So we started to build it. So we created a roadmap just for that community, which gave them all the things and it built on all their capacity. 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. They knew how to entertain the children. 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. And then they knew the houses where there were people who were couch surfing that they needed to deal with. They knew where the issues of drugs were a problem, or alcohol were a problem, or abuse, or all these things. They knew all of that so they could work out how to rearrange a little bit their community and come together. It was so successful that other communities heard about it. We put it on as an internet version. Other communities throughout Nunavut used it. Importantly, it was in Inuktitut, as well as in English. 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. And everyone had to fend for themselves. 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. They needed to understand what it was, and then they needed information on how to protect themselves and their communities. So with MSF, we translated it into French, into Swahili, into Spanish and started to use it all around the world. It was open source, anyone could access it. So that was one tool. And I do hold the hope that when the next pandemic arrives, that can be converted again to address whatever that next pandemic is. 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. 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? Thinking about a project cycle of an NGO in an emergency. Again, remember I'm on the emergency side of things. I'm really focused on that. So we built a four step framework, that then we piloted and tested with MSF over two years and then finalised last summer. So it's got four steps, basically. Connect. So how do you connect with the community? 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. And we found that in emergencies, we can do that in a very, very short time. It doesn't take six years to develop. 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. So if you come in and say, okay, what do you want to do? They're like, we want to do this, this, this, and this. And we, they know exactly what they need to do. So this was the first part. Then the second part is engaging. So really identifying the people who form what we call community activators. So that the idea is that the community is activating itself. 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. You know, all these kind of different people coming in. 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. And they were really talking, the ones in school receive menstrual pads, the one who weren't in school didn't receive them. So how do we help those girls who are the ones who are most at risk of sexual violence? And we would never have, I would never have known that. I mean, I just didn't think about the difficulties of buying menstrual pads and so on. So how that affected the programming. 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. 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. So we went and looked to all those incredible systems. 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. And so we use things like social mapping, solution trees, maps of the future. And these are things that we've done in Peru, in Sierra Leone, in Venezuela, and in Brazil. And then the final part of that framework is the Reflect stage. And for that Reflect stage, the idea of it is all of these steps are, is not really linear. We put it linear, it's a good way to explain it, but they're all interacting and coming in at different moments. The Reflection is really the participatory monitoring and evaluation and learning aspect, which is our third toolkit. And that is a toolkit on how do you look at how the communities are involved in the co design of those health strategies. How are those playing out? How do they need to be tweaked? 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. 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. It's a constant process and it's the communities evaluating, auto evaluating and also evaluating the role of the external support. So we integrate that monitoring and evaluation all through the community first framework. And all of those tools are open source. They're available on our website. Anyone can access them. We love to hear how people have used them and whether it's been useful or not. For the moment, the framework has been developed specifically for Médecins Sans Frontières, done in collaboration with them. And the idea is that it can be taken and developed and adapted to different organisations. And we really hope that this shows a way of how to actually make those changes inside the projects. 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. And the end of the day, the idea is to improve the outcomes, right? And that we still have to see. 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? How do people feel when they go to the health center? How do they feel? 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.

Kate:

Thanks, Rachel. I'm very excited about those tools. I'm certainly going to be downloading them myself. 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. So I'm definitely going to be looking at those myself. 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. And I'm rather stunned and horrified, actually, to hear that. I also have to

Nompilo:

say. Yeah, sorry Nompilo. 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. So I tend to echo what you're saying, Kate. Back to you.

Kate:

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. 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. 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. 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?

Rachel:

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. And our non white colleagues, if I can say, they deserve that. 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. 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. And I've seen my colleagues so drained, and looking so strong in a meeting and then afterwards just crumbling down. And it's just not fair. It's just not fair. We have to do this. 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. We need to be protesting. We need to be in those spaces. 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. 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. So I do not show up in panels that have predominantly white women in them. I'm talking about feminism, this I will not do. So I think these kind of acts are really important. The third thing I think is to get involved with actively anti racist decolonial movements. 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. And it was just the most wonderful space because first of all, I didn't speak, which was great. I just sat as part of the group, but very much in the background. The whole thing was led by indigenous peoples from 21 different countries in Latin America, bringing their culture. 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. And that altar was, you know, it was about 25 meters by five meters. It was large, very, very large. And we were just around the edge. So we were like diminutive around the edge of this altar that kept reminding us the whole time. And this for me was decolonial. 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. Who are you? Where are you from? Why are you here? What do you believe in? Giving people the space to talk? And after two days, we came up with a charter on decoloniality from that meeting. We would never be able to do that in a meeting done the western style. 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. No, it set the basis and the parameters for everything that we produced. And the next day we produced a document, co created, co designed, done and dusted. Hope everyone can go and have a look at that. So that going and supporting and encouraging those kinds of spaces rather than the old classic conferences and events that have been organised. But look for those new spaces where the communities are really the ones guiding and leading the way.

Kate:

Thank you, Rachel. 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. 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. 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. So I think that's kind of at the heart of the whole thing, isn't it? 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. So, thank you so much for coming. I know that I'm going to be taking a look at the tools that you recommended. 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. Thank you again, Rachel. I found this a very enriching conversation. I'll hand over to Nompilo now for the last farewell.

Nompilo:

Thank you, Rachel. Thank you for just sharing a little bit more about your context and for just enlightening us about the work that you're doing. 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. So, yeah, it's going to be interesting. I'm just trying to start implementing them around my development work as well. Thank you.

Rachel:

Great. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure to meet you both.