Season 7 Episode 9: When Systems Fracture Identity: A Métis Perspective on Belonging and Accountability

Systems don’t just “break” on their own. They do what they were designed to do, and too often that means extracting money, labor, and dignity while claiming to keep us safe. 

In this episode, David and Ruth sit down with Trisha McOrmond, a Red River Métis systems thinker, to explore what it means to navigate belonging when it’s been fractured by family separation, colonisation, and institutions. They talk about the tension of feeling responsible to advocate, serve, and tell the truth without speaking for an entire community. They dig into why speaking from “I” and lived experience isn’t selfish, it’s accountable, and how the “royal we” can obscure harm in leadership, training, and professional spaces.

Trisha shares what decolonising thinking means to her: shifting from a scarcity worldview—where you “arrive here wanting” and must prove your worth—to a relational one, where you “arrive here wanted,” and community organises around care, children, elders, and basic needs. That shift reshapes how we understand capitalism, business as service, and the subtle ways institutions protect capital, property, and liability over people.

They also connect these ideas to domestic violence and child welfare systems. David, Ruth, and Trisha explore how deficit-based frameworks get weaponised against victims and targeted communities, how DARVO shows up at scale, and why asking “what will make this better?” can sometimes open doors that “what will make you safer?” closes.

If you care about systems change, targeted communities, First Nations perspectives, institutional trust, and building safety through relationships, this conversation is for you.

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Transcript

Welcome And Weather Perspective

David Mandel 0:16

And we're back. And we're back. Hi.

Ruth Reymundo 0:18

Hello there.

David Mandel 0:19

How are you?

Ruth Reymundo 0:20

I'm good. How are you?

David Mandel 0:22

Good. It's sunny today. It is. Cold. Sunny and bright. It's all perspective, right? But this is a show that's gonna be a lot about perspective and point of view. And it is. And and and the perspective here, we say it's cold.

Ruth Reymundo 0:37

We're gonna talk to us probably like you all are a bunch of babies.

David Mandel 0:41

It's zero Fahrenheit here.

Ruth Reymundo 0:43

Yeah.

David Mandel 0:44

Which terrifies some people when we say that.

Ruth Reymundo 0:46

And other people are like, oh you guys are babies, that's nothing. Celsius conversion on that.

David Mandel 0:52

Oh, I don't know. We'll find out maybe from our guests. But I think it's it's definitely minus something. But anyway, so we're we're parted with a survivor. And you are David Mandel.

Ruth Reymundo 1:02

Okay, just making sure you have Reymundo Mandel.

David Mandel 1:06

And and we are joining, or you're joining us, or we're joining you from Tunxis, Masako Land.

Ruth Reymundo 1:12

Yes.

David Mandel 1:12

Which is buried under about a meter of snow, and which is not what we've seen recently. The other places where we're you're hearing us from are under more snow. And it's beautiful, it's gorgeous, it's sunny today, your blood thickens, so it doesn't feel that cold. And we just want to acknowledge any Indigenous elders, past President Emerging, who might be joining us remotely in space and time.

Ruth Reymundo 1:41

Yes. And and with that, I want to launch into introducing our guest, and we're gonna have a really interesting, robust conversation about fracturing belonging and systems and how we can advocate from that space. And and I've really enjoyed getting to know Trisha McGormond and her systems thinking, which is informed by her cultural position there in Canada. So that's why we reveal that we're the big babies around here with the cold. And we're

Meeting Trisha And Métis Roots

Ruth Reymundo 2:20

very, very honored to have you on. We're really, really excited about having this conversation and exploring the depths of how to do systems change, work in these systems, particularly if you are a person who has had your cultural relationship shattered, and you have to then work within the systems that perpetrated that, that facilitated that. So, Trisha, thank you so much for joining us.

Trisha McOrmand 2:48

And we're really glad to have you on. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. I love the work that you guys are doing. So I'm Tricia McCormand, and I just want to thank creator Kisi Manito for having this space and time to talk with you and to say thank you to the land that allows us to work toward creating something that's more sustainable. I live in a Misquichi-Waskayakin, colonially known as Edmonton, which is Treaty Six territory in Alberta, Canada. And my family are Red River Métis, and we're descended both on the French side and the the we're Cree Métis, which means that we have both colonial and like settler. They weren't colonial then, they were settlers, which is a little bit complicated, and or explorers, and uh First Nations women were usually the wives that were taken by the voyagers that were exploring into the Western territories. So that's the sort of beginning of my nation. Where we were called half-breeds for a long time. I think that there are people of mixed ancestry that exist everywhere, and there are people of missed mixed ancestry that have traditions that are a combination of both ancestries. And so that's in Canada that we were fortunate and blessed enough to actually have a group of Metis people who advocated for us to actually be recognized as a distinct nation. So it was wonderful.

Ruth Reymundo 4:19

Well, welcome. And and we are we are gonna have a pretty broad-ranging yet personal sort of look at what it means to advocate for community, especially your own, especially when your connections have been fragmented and broken, and maybe there's a lot of pain and trauma there. And there's a lot of question in people's minds about identity and who gets to speak for community. And I think we should really dive down into how do we hold the wide breadth of perspectives and realities that exist because of the actions that were chosen, not by ourselves. All of us carry inside of us different realities, some of which we're not aware of, different family members, different ancestries, many of which are unnamed and we will never know, especially if we came from histories where we were of people who

Advocacy From Fragmented Belonging

Ruth Reymundo 5:25

were targeted by that colonization or by those explorers. And I think about how Nepantla is a similar designation or Masito is a similar designation. But also as a person who's reconnecting, I'm deeply concerned about the way that some perspectives within our communities have been used and manipulated to try to contain the advocacy, the connection to lands, to our responsibilities to each other. And I really want to say very deeply that I, as a person, come from a complex history where there are people in my family with no birth certificates, no immigration paperwork. And living in that reality while claiming my community where I was raised in an institution has been one of the most challenging and difficult things for me because I don't want to ever speak for everyone because I cannot. That would be absolutely dishonest and dishonorable. But I do have a responsibility to advocate and to name my perspective as a person who has been family and culturally separated, and to share that and to share the desire for all of those communities to be able to be seen, acknowledged, and to have truth and reconciliation and compensation and for us to all heal. That feels very, very, very important. So that's one of the motivations I had where I was attracted to your work and your words. And I really wanted to come on and have a conversation about advocacy from that space, from that fragmented space, because we can't avoid it. We cannot avoid the reality of the fragmentation. We have to acknowledge it. And we all have to kind of find a common way to speak about that experience that is inclusive of the people who were fragmented, who may not still have those ties, who may not have the authority or the cultural understanding to speak for community, but who are speaking for themselves as fragmented people. So I don't know if you want to springboard from there, Trisha, if you have thoughts on that.

Tricia Ormond 8:01

I do. I think I really love how you say that we can only speak for ourselves. One of the things that as I have become more comfortable in decolonizing my own thinking and creating sort of more of a stronger connection to my sovereignty, one of the things I am increasingly aware of is none of us can speak for anybody else. All we can do is create the space for other stories to be heard. And I find one of the challenges I find is going into leadership conversations now where presenters speak in the royal we, yeah, or in the pointed you. And I I struggle because there are a number of assumptions that those speakers make when they come in speaking from that royal we or the pointed you,

Speaking From I For Accountability

Tricia Ormond 8:52

that somehow them as a speaker or a trainer is removed from the situation, which is a deeply colonial perspective, right? They they're if they think they're removed, they don't have to acknowledge harm. If they think they're speaking for a royal we or a pointed you, they don't have to acknowledge their own accountability in the system that has put them in a position of being able to do that kind of training or leadership. And increasingly, I find that the speaking in I retains my my my personhood. When we speak from the I, we acknowledge that we exist in a system. When we speak in a royal we or we speak in the you, there is no agent. There's no, there's no understanding of, I think, who it is like who's speaking. Is it are you talking about actions that you as the speaker would take? Am I speaking about actions that I have taken or would take? And so there's a lack of clarity and accountability, I think, in a lot of conversations. And it's something I'm wrestling with when we talk about systems, because systems exist both with people, but they also have an energy that exists outside of people because of the momentum that we have allowed them to develop over time, where humans have not acknowledged their own agency and the place that they're in in the institution.

Ruth Reymundo 10:24

You know, I I when I hear you say those, you know, just lay that all out. What I really feel is that in professional spaces in particular, speaking from the eye is not only devalued, but it is seen as suspect, it is seen as narcissistic. And so we push people to speak for other people based off of their systems training, which is really institutional training. We institutionalize their mind to the point where they feel that the institutional perspective is more valid than individual human experience. And I I understand how that happens because humans, you know, have a short lifespan, and we want some of these practices to maintain over time, right? So there's that, there is that institutional perspective. Yeah, go on it. I see you.

Trisha McOrmand 11:24

But it's the growth. We have because we collectively as a culture hold institutions as somehow, well, they're institutions. They don't, they're they're they're not unchanging over time, right? We have forgotten that as we as people evolve, so we can use Maslow's hierarchy of needs, once we've satisfied our basic needs for safety and and food and water, and then we have companionship, and and then there begins to be the needs for higher order, like esteem, spiritual growth. And eventually he spoke about self-transcendence. Just as an FYI, Maslow lived with the Sixica for six weeks, and his pyramid is based on a Sixica worldview, which is circular. And we can talk a little bit more about that, but both of them come to the same point that we cannot exist without each other. Maslow just came to that very, very late in life. And we have to understand that if we as humans are going to evolve, our institutions also have to evolve. Yeah. So if our institutions make money off of providing food and providing housing, if we do not allow our economy to evolve, so food and housing become givens, then we the institutions can't evolve because they're constantly trying to find ways to make money by providing a basic need that humans, most humans now in North America at least, well, up until recently, had enough money to meet their basic needs. And what we've seen with this system, because people don't recognize their own agency in a system, they see these systems as institutional. They the the fact that the food the cost of their food keeps going up is driven by the need for these larger institutions to keep making meeting making money, which is a base need. It's not about growth, it's about staying still.

Ruth Reymundo 13:21

Right, right. So I want to dive into the emotional, relational, and political layers of trying to create systems change for a community that you've been cut off from, that you've been hurt by, or that you don't technically have any authority to set the direction of. Can we kind of just dive into that piece? Yeah.

Trisha McOrmand 13:46

So when I think about creating systems change, I think this goes back to the idea that all of us live within a system. So we are impacted by the community that we live in. All of us also impact the community. When I think about how best I can change a system, the first thing I have to

Capitalism And Institutions That Cannot Evolve

Speaker 1 14:10

understand is what is it in me that reflects that system? So for a long time, when I started working for myself, my focus was constantly on how am I going to make enough money? How do I make money? How do I make money? How do I make money? And because of course we all need to make money because that's how we pay our rent nowadays and buy our food. What I realized though is the more I focused on how do I make money, the more I was leaning into the master's tools. I was defining my value on how much money I could make and how quickly I could make it and what I could charge for something and how I fit into the market. And I worked with some coaches who talked about, you know, the whole purpose of business is to make money. And for me, when I looked back, when I started learning about my Metis heritage, as a Metis, businesses were there to serve. They were there to provide a service. They were to fit that to fill a hole. And if after fixing that hole, people were able to get more prosperity from that, more abundance, then that was acceptable. But that the abundance wasn't about stripping it out of community. It was about providing a service to community to enrich it that allowed everybody else to have some prosperity. And so I've had to shift my thinking from business is about selling and making money to business is about service. So that's my internal change. The system change now that I'm figuring out is how do I work with people like yourselves who are focused on creating healthy systems? And the money is a byproduct of that. So I won't partner with people whose primary concern is money. I partner with people whose primary focus is the outcomes that they create. So that the system that we're generating, even if it's only between the two of us, is something that's based on service. And the more we as individuals begin to understand if my value is community, then I support things that are in my community. That's how we impact systems. We have to identify our locus of control, what our area of influence is, and then how that impacts our areas of concern or our areas of concern. I can't change a law by myself. Right. But if I'm concerned about our economy, I can shop locally and only support local entrepreneurs or local businesses.

R 16:46

I love that definition that as a business that's within community, concern for community, that it's not stripping resources from that community and sucking them up into a singular space, but it's about providing a service and being a responsible community member. And that's very, very, very lacking, I think, in our institutional awareness. And I want to actually make a really concrete example. And then I want to go back to how you advocate as a person who's been cut off from community, doesn't have those ties, and may have that identity, but doesn't technically have the authority to speak for community. And I think that's so important. But I I think about the way that we've we've dealt with, for example, here in the United States, law enforcement budgets. And that there's this serve and protect label on law enforcement. And yet what we see economically is that a tremendous amount of resources, a disproportionate amount of resources is going into law enforcement budgets, into militarization, and those law

Service Over Extraction In Systems

R 17:55

enforcement agencies are not actually providing a service to the community. They are not keeping people safe. They are on the streets, sometimes actually causing more problems, causing more conflict. And we see that here in the United States, where it's evolved to that place. That's what happens when you have an extractive institution that is not actually deeply concerned about solving a problem. And then after that problem has been solved, stepping back and allowing the community itself to self-govern, self-regulate, and all those things. So we see that happening here. But I'm really, really concerned. I want to circle back around to people with specific identities because I think there's a real misunderstanding in lived experience spaces. And sometimes it gets deeply manipulated by people who have a singular agenda that they say, I'm of this culture and therefore I'm and I'm lived experienced and therefore I can tell you what to do. And if you don't do it, you're a bad person and I'm gonna beat you about the head. And that that has caused a lot of aversion in some systems to engaging with lived experienced people, to engaging with culturally experienced people. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create a dividing line between what real community advocacy looks like that is respectful, that is culturally grounded, what real lived experience from that place looks like, to try to mitigate that harm of singular voices rising to the top and that top-down way of advocating, impacting communities really poorly. So I'm just gonna let you go off, rip off that.

Speaker 1 19:40

So I think, okay, so this is so fascinating for me because it's something that comes up, I think, in not this is in every community. The people who are the best at talking about how smart they are are often the least effective at affecting change. So I

Policing Budgets And Lived Experience Misuse

Speaker 1 20:00

think there's a lot of people who work in spaces around wanting to create change within their communities who, like me, cannot do marketing to save their lives. We cannot figure out how to, you know, do the business aspect of it. And I know, Ruth, you do operations and honestly, like goddess skill as far as I'm concerned, because like I'm happy if I can remember to buy groceries once a week sometimes. So the fact that you can keep that organized, and that is a skill that is is really, really valuable. And we sort of it's been it's been prioritized, and that's important. But I I do see in a lot of spaces because people who are excellent at talking and selling, the the content is usually assumed to be good. And people who are bad at selling, their content is seemed to be suspect. And I think one of the challenges that we have in in terms of learning how to work in community is figuring out how to partner with people whose gifts support and magnify ours rather than thinking we have to do it all ourselves. I think can you so there's a quote that I want to read. Um, and I think you and I have talked about this a couple of times, but there's a gentleman by the name of John Trudell, he was the co-founder of the American Indian Movement, and he has a quote When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed, they feel powerless. And we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people. When you talk about the fact that enforcement right now is not advocating for the people, enforcement, most police organizations. Everywhere were never meant to advocate or be protecting of the people. They were always there in service of the interests of property or capital.

Speaker 3 22:08

Right.

Speaker 1 22:09

And

Powerlessness And Refusing Harmful Labor

Speaker 1 22:10

so much on Turtle Island, North America, our decision-making apparatus is geared towards capital, extractive capital, and protecting the property of the people who make those decisions. And when I think about that John Trudell quote, I see of people who feel powerless or who the psychological genocide. I think of people in the government right now, both in the United States, but also like here in Alberta, there's a number of things that are happening in our governing house, governing bodies that are really disruptive to the well-being of Albertans. And I think of all of the civil servants there who are in decision-making positions, just like in the United States, who have the power to say, no, I'm not doing this anymore. I will no longer contribute to decisions that intentionally harm children or vulnerable people. And yeah, sure, they can fill that position with somebody else. But if we create a population who believe they have the right to say, you cannot use my labor in the furtherance of harm against vulnerable people, and I'm going to figure out how to do it on my own. Like if I'm going to find another job, or but if we have more, the more people stand up and say that, the more we begin to affect systems change because this goes back to the systems create that power of their own. And there's a number of companies that when you move into the executive level, you're required to sign contracts that say you will put the company's needs above all other needs. So community impacts are not to be considered. It's company bottom line that is the primary concern. In a number of governments, the decision making that happens at the executive level is often very misaligned with what the frontlines are seeing, which is why we see more kids in care over time instead of less. Somebody is making those decisions. And there is a person who's behind that. And as we begin to live more in community, we can hold those people accountable. It has to be one-on-one, though. And the idea, this idea of how in a community that we have been excommunicated from or we have been harmed by, how do we begin to affect change? The only way to do it is to believe that we have that we are wanted on this earth. So for me, and in my worldview, and all of us who arrive here from all our relations, what Kodoin, from the smallest bug to the largest elephant to every human, all the creatures, the rocks, everything here is wanted and needed because we're here for a purpose. When we believe that, there's something larger that we can rest back on, or that there's a value that we can rest back on that gives us the empowerment to know that we have the right to speak up for ourselves. And I really see that missing in so many workers thinking that they all they're worth is money.

David Mandel 25:20

So I'm wondering, Tristan, you said something early on that feels very connected to what you're saying now, which is you said something about decolonizing your own thinking. And it seems critical, and it may be useful for the audience to hear a little more about that process that you went through, what instigated it, you know, what does that mean, even? You know, people may not be familiar with the term, you know, and and because it seems central to what you're saying, like where you are today in your analysis today.

Speaker 1 25:53

Okay, so decolon decolonization, it's a it's a word that I think is becoming more and more common. And I agree that a lot of people don't know what it means. There's times that I'm not 100% sure I know what it means. For me, there's two worldviews. There's the worldview

Decolonizing Thinking And Being Wanted

Speaker 1 26:10

that capitalism or colonialism teaches, which is that you arrive here wanting, that you have to then prove your value in order to be able to receive the benefit of housing, education, love. Once you've proven your value, you then are allowed to collect as much stuff as you want as an outward display of success. And the more you hold close, the more successful you are. In my worldview, we all arrive here wanted. Everybody is wanted. Because we are wanted, our community actually makes sure that everybody is fed, everybody is housed, that we care for our elders, that our children who are our future are protected and nourished, educated, nurtured and loved. So in the in the Cree community, in the Cree tradition, all pregnant women are actually protected from harsh words and from yelling. So the idea is every life is sacred. And our children are the most important thing. Colonization across the world, the number one thing that happens in colonization is the bond is broken between the child and the parent. And they did it to themselves first. The Brits started putting their kids in boarding school long before they got anywhere else. Maria Campbell says that one of the greatest lies that colonization has sold indigenous people is that it happened to us because we were awful. But the truth is it was done by somebody, by a population that had been doing it all over the world.

Speaker 3 27:58

Yeah.

Speaker 1 27:59

And so understanding that this idea that sorry, this is very complicated. I apologize. Understanding the idea that I am here, I am wanted, means I don't have to prove my worth. But if I don't have to buy anything to be valuable, I don't have it have to own big fancy clothes to have to be smart. But colonization teaches us that in order to be important, we have to have stuff. So people sacrifice time with their kids. I'm a single mom, and so I had to make a choice. Do I want to have money to look successful? Or do I want to have a relationship with my kids and work less hours?

Speaker 3 28:38

Yeah.

Speaker 1 28:38

And that was the beginning of the process of decolonization for me is recognizing that the children, my relationship with my children mattered more to me than money.

David Mandel 28:48

And it sounds like you know what? Thank you for describing that, and thank you for explaining that. When I listen to it, I also hear, at least for me, and I don't know if this is true for you, overlap. You're talking about capitalism, talking about colonization, and also religion. Religion, religion, religion and culture. But religion, religion, you know, and and Western colonization were very tied together.

Speaker 2 29:13

Yeah.

David Mandel 29:14

And many religions, and I'm not an expert on every religion or any religion, probably, you know, you know, but this idea that you need to be saved, or you need you come in with original sin.

R 29:25

Or you were abandoned from the start. God abandons you from the start.

David Mandel 29:32

Yeah. Vis-a-vis.

Speaker 1 29:33

The Abrahamic faith, yeah.

David Mandel 29:34

Vis-a-vis a creator or vis-a-vis the hierarchy of the religion. But you know, so I think it's so it's so interesting to me. This sort of I really appreciate this sort of sense of of there's something wrong with you, and you need to work hard to fix it. And you know, maybe in in things, but it's a deprivation scarcity mentality.

Speaker 1 29:55

Exactly.

David Mandel 29:56

And you're suggesting from your perspective, you you know, your you know, your view and your understanding of of Cree culture and and tradition is sort of I I don't have any lack, I don't have any original sin, I don't have a wanted, I'm connected by nature.

Speaker 2 30:14

Yeah.

David Mandel 30:14

And I and I do think it's it's what I'll do to make the link for our listeners, because we we spend so much time talking about domestic abuse and the show, and and it's it's one of our areas of focus, that that it that lack mentality, that deficit mentality, also aligns with the mental health framework, the deficit framework, the sort of there must be something wrong with you as a domestic violence victim. If you're a victim, there must be something wrong with you. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, I would just want to make the analogy between the the the the the framing of colonization, the justification, and the self-blame, the blame of others, the blame of victim in colonization is not that different. Power works in very predictable, what I say, boring ways. You know, so that victims are told there's something wrong with them. And the and the and it's your trauma, now it's your trauma history you're told. And the mental health framework or the mental health diagnosis psychology framework, which I was trained in, gets used as a tool, is weaponized against victims to say, well, you this has happened to you now because of what happened to you before. Maybe you didn't cause any of it, but there's something now in you that's bringing you into these circumstances and leading you to make poor choices when the person who's being responsible actually is 100% responsible. So I don't know if those analogies kind of resonate for you and you know

Domestic Violence Parallels And DARVO

David Mandel 31:40

so much. Yeah.

Speaker 1 31:41

I don't I don't know if I'm sure you guys saw it, but one of the things that I noticed the other day is the movement of Darvo, deny, attack, uh reverse victim offender. Yeah, people are now speaking about it in American media about how your system, yeah, the governance system is actually using the psychological tool that for years in the mental health space, people have talked about individuals using it against each other.

Speaker 3 32:11

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 32:12

So this is how the individual approaches are mirrored in our systems, and our systems mirror how we treat each other individually. Yeah.

R 32:21

So yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Well, you know, I I'm, you know, landing this for for our listeners, and I'm sure there's listeners who are like, where are we going with this? What is happening? This is very circular. Hello, my friends. I'm gonna ask you to pause and take a breath and trust us because this is this is called exploration. It's nonlinear, it is a cultural skill that you gain over time when you practice and you breathe into it. But one of the one of the things that's so important to hear is that if you start from a place where you have a child, and now you believe that that child is basically unworthy because they came in flawed, and that they have to do certain actions in order for them to receive basic needs like food, safety, stability, love, nurturance, connection, then you are going to fundamentally damage that child from the start. If that's the attitude that you're carrying around in you, and I and I feel like we all kind of have that in us, right? That we have to recognize and identify in those places where we have agreed to this way of being and and and ask ourselves what it means to reset that, not only from the personal state place, but also from the institutional place. And so I want to shift this back to institutions because what a lot of the institutions that we're speaking about are institutions that claim the claim is that they keep us safer, that they keep us more stable, and that they provide some service. Now, this is where we all have to be a little bit critical and self-reflective. And I feel like we're at a point in history where we're seeing how institutions are stripping resources from populations that they are taking and they are not contributing back necessarily, and they're not necessarily providing what their marketing and taglines and popular media say that that they're supposed to provide. So so really doubling down on where you've internalized this message that people must earn basic needs like care, love, connection, familial bonds, food, shelter is a really important way for us to be able to talk about how systems take, uptake that way of being and thinking, and then use it to extract from people, to separate families, to take resources, to hoard those resources and to dole them out only if you are compliant in the ways that they think that you should be. And that is very cultural. That can be that can vary from culture to culture, that sense of what you have to do in order to receive those, but that we really do have to look at that way of being and that way of thinking and ask if it truly is benefiting us, our communities, our countries, our financial stability. Are we really getting back more than we're putting in financially? Is that really happening? So this is where I really wanted to have this conversation. And and and we started from a lived experience place, but we're we're focusing so on systems really heavily, and I think that's appropriate. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Basic needs, you know.

David Mandel 36:09

I I I think that when we're looking at systems, I think it's it's interesting because there's, you know, Trisha, I really appreciate what you said about people making choices and having worked with systems for a lot of amount of time that you know my experience is that's both true and not true, that people have individual responsibility, they have a choice to participate, and their choices are often very shaped and dictated by forms and expectations and you know structures that they have no control over. You know, and so I I think of the average child protection worker, frontline worker,

Child Welfare Reality And Partnership Ethics

David Mandel 36:45

that they're often perceived as having a lot of power, and they do on one hand with families, but they're often very beholden to their forms, their systems, their tick boxes, yeah, their supervisors, their team leaders, their managers, political mandates, statutes, and missions that are maybe at one level, like you know, protect and serve. You know, you have still talking about safety, permanent, and well-being of kids, which is not those words aren't bad words. But there's often having to unpack them and say safety as determined by whom, right? Permanency as as you know, to defined by what? Defined by what to like what's what's permanent situation. And often they're not a place to unpack those things. You know, I can't tell you how many really well-meaning people who child protection workers came to me in distress and said, I I don't know what to do because I'm being told to remove a child from from this family, this domestic violence survivor. And I didn't get, and multiple times usually they they have had to do that. And I've been told to do that. I didn't get into this work to take kids from domestic violence victims. So the you know, that goes back to your sort of bureaucrat who's who leaves. Yeah, but you're not gonna be able to do that you know, there's a but but you but you have kids to support, you're a human being, you've got a job, you can't make the leap, you've got a pension, you've got health insurance, you know. So I I think when I think about these systems questions, I hold that that like how do we hold that reality and complexity that that we have individual responsibility, and there's also these forces that are very powerful.

Speaker 1 38:31

I think the the first thing, the most important thing is actually what you have identified, that the system does not work in the interests of the people over whom it has power, right? Until we begin, until we enlarge this conversation about where the systems are breaking, then we can't actually begin to fix it. And for a long time, the assumption was the frontline workers were always in line with executive decisions because that was how the government or child protection would present itself. Increasingly, though, as the system is crumbling because it has not met the needs for decades and decades, and it perpetuates violence. The people at the front line who went in believing that the system was going to be the agent of change, and they have grown up in communities that actually increasingly our children are taught that they have the right to speak up. More and more young people are saying, I'm not okay with the things that you're expecting me to give up. And they're coming into our organizations. And our organizations are not ready for that because our organizations still believe they have the right to operate like it's 1950. So many organizations create this element of coercive control. In order to be promoted, you have to do what the organization wants. But if you come into the front line as a person who wants to actually affect change, that often means you're going to be at odds with the system.

David Mandel 40:14

Yeah, I I I'm sorry, go ahead. Finish what you thought is because I I want to I want to share something that I think is relevant to for out of our experience, but go ahead.

Speaker 1 40:22

And so the power now, the power for a long time was always about looking up. How do I please my leaders to get promoted? The change we are experiencing now is staff at the at the entry level, at the professional level, before they moved into executive, they're the largest group of people right now. They have the power to look sideways and say, how do we support each other to create a workplace that builds the outcomes we want?

Speaker 3 40:50

Yeah.

Speaker 1 40:51

Rather than always looking up for promotion, they begin to look sideways for support. And they workers' unions, but it doesn't have to be a formal organization. It can be ways of supporting each other to create space to challenge leadership.

David Mandel 41:07

Yeah, you know, it's fascinating. I really appreciate what you're saying about mutual support. These are really hard jobs. People need to look to each other. I I I the way I think about this, and part of the way we at the Institute have approached some of these issues is to look to how do you embed the value of partnering into the ethics and mission of an institution like child welfare? I've done it even with high-risk domestic abuse teams, where you ask the question, so it's a very different question to say, what did you do to make somebody safe, right? Because oftentimes that question is very woven up with the liability of the organization institution to did we, did somebody get hurt on our watch, right? Kids, adults. And again, I I've I've I've deep compassion for that, by the way. I really do. I mean, that's why I try to hold all these pieces. And at the same time, that's a very different question about safety is defined by us, by a bureaucracy or an organization, you know, the personal liability held by the workers that feel like they're going to get blamed, the personal guilt and responsibility, trauma, trauma, versus saying, how did you, how are we going to partner with this other person with the built-in, built-in sort of sense of sovereignty, respect, dignity, human rights, you know, of that. And I think so. For me, I I hear and appreciate this sort of frontline workers' band together. I I think about that we need to change the entire ethic of the organization top to bottom, which is really, and again, we you've used jargon, strength-based, family-centered. And I think those words actually obfuscate the reality of what we should be trying to do, which is literally say our job is to be in partnership, which really requires a deep respect, a deep listening, a deep collaborative approach, not a denial of sometimes government is going to be the last resort, protection for kids. You know, I'm not ready to give that up yet. Like somebody's, you know, human beings are flawed, you know. Parents hurt kids, communities hurt kids, you know, kids are trafficked out of their families. You know, so anyway, I just I really think this ethic of partnership is issues.

R 43:25

But the problem is that the ethn the ethic of partnership and partnering comes up against a system that believes that number one, it it has the best perspective. It has the most moral perspective or culturally that's not partnering, though. But but see, we're that's the system. The system believes that it has the best perspective. The system and even the workers within that system often believe that they are benefiting people, even despite the evidence and the agitation of those people because they've been taught that those people are in. Inferior and what they want is bad, and that we need to reset that. And that's a very deeply cultural thing. And that was done intentionally. I just want to say this is not accidental. But but in a in a context of the system coming from that place where it prioritizes itself, it assumes its benefit. And it doesn't need to prove its ROI. That's the key. It doesn't need to be transparent. It doesn't need to talk about how much money is spent. It doesn't actually need to longitudinally prove that it's supporting children. It's solely concerned about this very immediate danger that children may be in, not their full life well-being and their access to resources or their family. That is the place where the metal hits the road. And we ask how we can get these systems to truly partner with and listen to and cease to die deep to prioritize their continuing existence, protect themselves against liability when they're not actually having an impact that is deemed positive in individuals, and to stop believing with no evidence that they are being net beneficial to society. And this is where I think a lot of people are questioning, especially here in the United States, especially here in the United States right now. Are these institutions really benefiting us? How much money is this costing us? Are they taking our resources away from us and impoverishing us to benefit the few or to benefit themselves? And resoundingly, I think the answer comes back in a lot of regions at this point as yes. The institutions are not actually primarily concerned with civil liberties, with human rights, with retaining the rights of workers, with protecting children from being removed from their families.

Speaker 1 46:02

Oh, oh, oh, oh. See, I actually think that the current system is concerned with that. For the people it has decided fit that are worth it. Yeah. Right? So the system that we have right now is working very well for people who are wealthy and and don't don't actually want to be able to hang out with, you know, friends and family instead of work 24 hours a day. And that is the colonial system. It's a system that's based on extraction. It's based on this idea that what exists on paper is more real than what exists in the in the in the reality that they're living on the ground. So if an organization says they're helping children and 80% of the kids who came into care went out of care at 18 and they weren't dead, then on paper it actually is meeting the needs of the group of people who are looking at that paper. That system is working for the group of people who need the paper. That is a different system than the system of the people who are living on the ground. And I think that that's the critical piece is the systems aren't working for the people on the ground because they were never designed to work for the people on the ground. The people on the ground were supposed to work for the system. Right. The people on the ground were the ones that were supposed to come in and make a lot of money to be extracted because the people who worked there didn't think they were valuable.

Speaker 3 47:38

Right.

David Mandel 47:39

I mean, I think for for me, the the most basic, you know, I remember hearing somebody say this and it's it resonated with me, you know. Again, you know, having spent 40 years in the domestic violence field, having 40 years watching systems respond and and and set up systems, you know, often, you know, that that often serve the needs of the systems, not necessarily the needs of the clients, or at least kind of prioritize liability and management of workflows and triaging case amounts. And these again, you know, if you look at systems from from the logic of the systems, they're like, yeah, you know, if we if we don't have control of the amount of cases coming in and the workloads too bad. I mean, I remember there there was a place where I forgot it was Canada or the United States, but the workers stuffed like 6,000 case files in the ceiling. It was like they came in, they they they were investigations that came in. I can't remember what state it was. But but like I don't, I'm not justifying that. And it was a response to the fact that they weren't like you could blame the workers, or you could blame the governor who had just cut the govern who had cut the staffing, right? I mean, this is really really understanding systems and having a thoughtful look at it. So I think I'm watching these systems and watching where their pain points are and and looking at who's blamed and who's held responsible, and you know, and and you know, you have to watch the actions, not just the words, like you're saying. But I love that that

Institutional Trust And Systems Built For Paper

David Mandel 49:10

somebody said, you know, that they'd asked, they asked survivors, not what will make you safer, because safer is a very complex and often defined by the by the authorities or the government's sort of perspective professionals, but just to say what will make this situation better as you see it. It it opens the, you know, it's not a perfect question, but to me, it's this question that that I'm interested in hearing your definition of better. Because better may be, because if I'm saying safer, I may be like safer means you leave, right? Saver often means like I've if I'm a professional, and like savor, I've got an idea coming in the door, what I think safety looks like, what will get you there, that's how our systems will are supposed to work, and they often don't work that way. But if I can come in with this respectful, what will make things better, and I really care that your answer is about I can I can practice my religion the way I want to, I can raise my kids in a cultural way, you know, that my husband gets help for his drinking, that yeah, I'd rather him not call me names, but but I like I need these five other things to stop tomorrow, and we'll deal with the name calling. You know, we'll deal like, or I want the name calling to stop. You know what the fact is, the physical violence isn't so bad. And I and I'm not excusing this, but we know that's what survivors will say. You know, he calls me these horrible names from the kids. I feel humiliated, put down. I want that to stop. You know, the fact that every once in a while he stands too close to me. Yeah, I'd like that to stop too. But if you're asking me which I'm gonna prioritize, I want to look, I want a system that listens to that person and tries to understand what their definition of better is.

Speaker 3 50:50

Yeah, yeah.

David Mandel 50:51

Not not telling her what good good behavior, what a good victim is, what a what a good safety should look like from our point of view as professionals. That doesn't, that's not what I want.

Speaker 1 51:00

Right. You're talking about a system that is regulated, though, like a like you're talking about what is essentially an emotionally regulated system, a system that trusts its the people it works with enough to let them make their own decisions so that the system doesn't have liability, right?

David Mandel 51:18

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I I I I I would say even more, I would I love that definition, you know, the mostly regulated system, mostly responsible system. I love that. I've never heard that. I think that's mostly like, you know, self-aware and and not reactive, and not because they're scared that they act out and lash out at their the more vulnerable client. Like I think that's that's perfect analogy to course of control. And what I would add to it is that they're they are truly in deep relationship.

Speaker 2 51:47

Yep.

David Mandel 51:48

That that that comes along with that, that there's a deep my my and that they bring their that the system brings their their real resources, their real assets in service. Going back to Ruth to your point. Right. In service. Because the truth is there's there there are things that the system or the professionals have access to that that person might not, and that's real.

unknown 52:12

Right.

R 52:13

Yeah. You know, I I know that we've we've kind of ranged far and we got to move to wrapping up. So I'd love to hear, Trish, your view of how systems and institutions can move from extraction into more emotional or relational accountability and regulation, especially in regard to targeted communities.

Speaker 1 52:37

Okay. So there's a couple things. I think that organizations and and institutions are there's going to be a clash as more people do their own healing work. They are going to bring a healed person. Less people are saying, I survived it, so can you. More people are saying, I survived it. I really don't want you to have to go through that.

Speaker 3 53:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1 53:02

I know that that's my motivation. I know that probably you and a lot of your listeners have similar feelings. So systems are going to start to change,

Small Steps Toward Regulated Institutions

Speaker 1 53:10

and there's going to be a clash. That is inevitable, right? Growth requires a little bit of creative destruction. Conflict, yeah. I think the most important thing in terms of systems regulating themselves is allow is the is that each person has to understand that expertise is about holding the space, not about holding the knowledge when you're within a system. And you can you can you can bring that expertise into the space, but it has to be a collaborative space. And we do that by understanding that we're worth being listened to, but we are also worth listening to others. We are worth taking the time to understand if somebody else has a different perspective. And I I always want to boil the ocean. I when I first started working for myself, I'm like, right, I'm I have all the answers because I've done all these things. And so I'm gonna go out and show how to people to change everything all at once. But the fact of the matter is we change things one person at a time. I can only speak for myself. I can only change how I relate to the person beside me and the business that I purchase from. But if each of us understand that we are worth taking the time to create a life where we feel valued and that we work in, we in interact with systems that we feel safe in as much as we are able. And I recognize all of the constraints that exist for that. But if, okay, so for example, for people who work in a in a industry that they really, really dislike, if they have the financial abilities or they have the location abilities, they can shop in stores where they know the person rather than going to a big anonymous store. So if you work in an anonymous company, shop in small shops so that you begin to feel part of a community. We can we can learn how to take those small steps where we can regulate our system and we bring our regulated system into a larger organization.

R 55:28

So I love that. I love that personal view of of healing. I love that the that the generations that are coming forward and are going to be working in our institutions, and there's a lot of people that complain about this because they just want people to do what they're told, are coming into those organizations and saying, This is what I need, and I need these accommodations, because that primes those institutional systems to be more respectful to individual needs rather than to overlaying practices and policies, which often cause a lot of drift and a lot of turnover because they're not respectful, and then impede that institution's ability to truly be trusted. And I really want to frame this in a framework of institutional trust. Globally, we're seeing that erode because we're not getting the returns, because we're feeling extracted from, because we're feeling surveilled, because we're feeling controlled, and we're feeling abused by these institutions. And so regaining institutional trust does start with the people that are in the institutions, but even more so, the changing attitude of partnering with people. How we partner with workers, how we partner with the people that we are serving, who we are providing services to, and we don't take a stance that we know exactly what is right for them, and that they are at a deficit. So that's that's what I'm taking away from this conversation. I don't know if you have any additional words to give to that.

Speaker 1 57:18

For me, one of the the piece that's coming for me through this conversation is the cracks are where the light gets in. So as more and more of us who grew up in these systems and recognize they don't work begin to challenge the idea, I survived it, so can everybody else. As we begin to find ways of actually challenging that idea to heal ourselves and create safety for ourselves, that is where the safety for others comes from. And earlier you were talking about how do I what is my vision for systems change? And my vision for systems change is that how I envision it is something that I have a purpose or I have a I have a goal, a life goal

Vision For Children And Closing

Speaker 1 58:10

that cannot be accomplished in my lifetime. So I need to start building systems that can help my goal be achieved. And my goal is every child knows that they are loved and wanted, and every child is fed and housed. That is not going to happen in my lifetime. But if I can start to work with people and systems that also want to achieve that goal, I might be a small part of creating something that outlasts all of us, that eventually ends with all children safe, housed, and fed and loved. And the more of us who begin to think of it that way, the faster we can make that begin to happen.

R 58:47

Yeah. Organize around our values, not around our trauma.

David Mandel 58:52

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's lovely. I think I'm with you on wanting to create that world.

Speaker 3 58:56

Yeah.

David Mandel 58:57

And want our kids to be raised in that world and have kids that they raised in that world. So uh really appreciate this, Tricia. So thank you for being on the show.

Speaker 3 59:06

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

David Mandel 59:07

I really appreciate your perspective. Yeah. You've been listening to Partner with a Survivor, and I'm still David Mandel.

R 59:15

Still Ruth Raimundo Mandel.

David Mandel 59:16

And if you like the show, please follow it, share it on your favorite platforms. If you're interested in our work around partnering and domestic abuse informed systems, check out Safetogether Institute.com.

Speaker 2 59:28

Yeah.

David Mandel 59:28

Check out our virtual academy at SafetyTogether Institute.com. Attend one of our conferences. Get my book, which we haven't talked about in a while. But anyway.

R 59:36

And be part of the change.

David Mandel 59:38

The change you want to see in the world, as they say.

R 59:40

So thank you so much, Tricia. Take care.

David Mandel 59:42

Thank you. Bye-bye.

R 59:43

Bye-bye.